I'm Just Mad About Donovan
October 14, 2008

“The Sixties, like Atlantis, is a kind of state of mind. Atlantis is a mystical land and the mystical land of the 60s continues to reverberate. What’s missing today is what they mystical lands are all about—a sense of discover, a sense of the mysterious and mystical, and a sense of re-discovery.”

Taking a clue from the headline, who else would say something so steeped in psychedelic optimism but legendary folk rocker Donovan, who took a half-hour to sit down with me in his suite at New York’s

Now 62 years old, the singer/songwriter of such classics as “Mellow Yellow,” “Atlantis,” “Season of the Witch,” “Jennifer Juniper,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and, of course, “Sunshine Superman,” still considers himself to be “a very reserved British boy” who never much liked the tag of “hippie” that was plastered on him in the late Sixties.

“‘Hippie’ was used in a derogatory way to describe lazy youth who sat around preaching platitudes,” Donovan told me. “I much prefer the term “flower power.”

Donovan’s Sixties experiences and beyond are detailed richly in the three-hour-long Sunshine Superman, which was directed by Hannes Rossacher, an Austrian-born filmmaker specializing in music docs. The biggest decision Rossacher and Donovan had to make before embarking on the production (which took five years to complete) was whether the film should contains a slew of talking head testimonials or just focus on what the title subject has to say. Not surprisingly, they opted for the latter.

“Yes, there are always to ways to approach this—either having others talk about me, or just doing the talking myself. And we decided that my offering my own history was the way to proceed,” Donovan told me with a grin, before picking up his guitar and strumming a few chords from “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” Who knows it better than me, after all?

Okay, now here's a clip of my very favorite commercial use of my very favorite Donovan song:

Posted by Laurence Lerman on October 14, 2008 | Comments (2)