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Fame & Fortune: Donovan, the
Hurdy-Gurdy man
Record money comes and goes but songs
live on forever |
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Donovan: I
was a solo so I couldn't break up. A solo songwriter doesn't break
up -- only inside, if you're not careful. I didn't break up so much
as broke down, I guess, a little bit. And withdrew. Because what
else was there to do? Because repetition was death to me. Was The
Beatles' breakup over money or just, my goodness that's enough?
(sings from "Watching the Wheels") "No longer riding
on the merry-go-round ... I just had to let it go." It was
a sense of a mission complete. The Beatles, personalitywise ...
how a band keeps together, who knows? Arguments, battles. Was it
over money? That one wanted more than another? I doubt it. But we
were all pretty broke at the end of the '60s compared to how it
was, and we had to patch all that together.
Bankrate: You walked away
from the merry-go-round on principle as well, right? Especially
because of England's onerous tax system at the time?
Donovan: Money was never
the reason, but it was helpful to create all the works. In the end,
it was a huge decision to not want to pay tax -- not so I could
make the most money that any singer-songwriter had done in history,
I would think, but not wanting the tax. It was 98-percent tax. That's
why George (Harrison) wrote "Taxman." It was, now where
is that money going? Into the military-industrial complex, pollution,
things that aren't right? It was partly that and partly that I just
wanted to leave. I was a gypsy again.
Bankrate: Your music made you financially
independent when you left the limelight at the ripe age of 24. How
did you do it when so many others crashed and burned?
Donovan: I was very, very happy to
say that, at one point in 1966 when everybody was signing away their
(publishing rights) without knowing, my accountant said to me, "This
paper you will not sign." So my publishing remained Donovan
Music Ltd., within that big company Southern Music, which is now
called Peermusic. The center of this business is songwriting. If
you make popular songs, songs that are loved and pass through generations
appealing to many others and you've held on to some of it and it
hasn't been stolen from under you, you can be supported. So publishing
has supported me. Record money and live money can come and disappear,
but publishing goes on forever if you have a set of songs that are
much loved or important. Nobody knows how long songs are going to
be popular, but in the last five years, my publisher has entered
a new phase of using my songs in films and sometimes in commercials.
Of course, my own generation will always have a bond with the songs;
it's part of the soundtrack of their lives. But yes, the new generation
that discovers these songs by listening to their parent's records
or finding them on the Internet, it will appeal and they don't know
any history of them at all. Which I think is amazing; I think that's
so cool.
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