Donovan: Flower-Power Icon of Change
The nearness of summer’s end can inspire bittersweet moods, introspection, even melancholy. Beyond the South Fork lies a world lurching through multiple, mounting crises, while a presidential election campaign seems hellbent on surpassing all predecessors in the fear-and-loathing quotient.
But take heart: With the approaching change of seasons, a bohemian manifesto of change will be sung and spoken on Tuesday evening when Donovan Leitch, musician, poet, and icon of pop music’s golden age, takes the stage at Guild Hall in East Hampton.
For the composer of enduring flower-power hits including “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” Tuesday’s concert is the first of a 21-date tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “Sunshine Superman” album. From East Hampton, the musician, better known simply as Donovan, will travel to Los Angeles, where he will be honored at City Hall on Friday, Sept. 2. The following day is officially “Donovan Day” in the city, marking the 50-year anniversary of the “Sunshine Superman” single’s reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
The concert at Guild Hall will benefit the David Lynch Foundation, which promotes the teaching of Transcendental Meditation worldwide in an effort to alleviate suffering and create a better world. (Mr. Lynch, the film director, has practiced the technique for more than 40 years.) A percentage of proceeds from the tour will benefit the Donovan Children’s Fund, a division of the foundation that brings Transcendental Meditation to at-risk youth.
Donovan, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame two years later, is himself a longtime practitioner of TM, an inner journey that proponents say brings happiness, peace of mind, and a range of health benefits while alleviating stress and anxiety.
A 50-year career in music was hardly in mind when the Glasgow-born musician, then barely out of his teens, released “Sunshine Superman” into the universe. “In those days, we didn’t even think about what was going to happen next Tuesday,” he said earlier this month. “Tuesday was like an endless future. I come from a bohemian background, and the books we read all spoke about ‘be here now.’ Living for the now was the way.”
As a teenage troubadour, he and his contemporaries would deliberate in jazz clubs, he recalled. “We said, ‘Is the human race the most advanced species on the planet?’ Two wars, a nuclear bomb, the systematic destruction of the ecosystem from the Industrial Revolution onward — does that sound like the most advanced species on the planet? No. We headed to bohemian communities because we started to pass around books on yoga, meditation, mushrooms, the American beat poets, the shamans.”
By that time, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, an Indian spiritual leader also known as Guru Dev, was several years into a mission to introduce meditation to the Western world. “We didn’t know there was a guy, Maharishi, who’d already come down from the mountain and headed to the West with a very powerful lineage,” Donovan said.
“We were interested in knowing what was going on. Jung and Freud said the modern mind-set of man is psychosis, trauma, and it’s getting out of hand and pointing to major destruction. All problems arise within, and all solutions are within. This was all adding up in my mind: a journey inside. How do you get in? For the nearest and quickest way, it was marijuana and synthetic LSD. Crashing into the inner world, you realized a unity of all things just below the surface.”
As with his contemporaries in the Beatles, the buzz of fame, wealth, and drugs proved fleeting and prompted a search for deeper fulfillment. “The Beatles and I,” he said, “were wondering, what can we do to discover a natural, ancient way. We needed a true teacher.” With others, including Mike Love of the Beach Boys, the actor Mia Farrow and her sister, Prudence, Donovan studied TM at Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, in 1968. There, he too was a teacher, bestowing on his fellow seekers a guitar finger-picking technique that John Lennon would quickly incorporate into some of his best-loved compositions.
Apart from a period of retirement from the music business, Donovan has remained active through this half-century since “Sunshine Superman.” His album “Sutras” was released in 1996, followed by “Pied Piper” in 2002. “Beat Cafe,” from 2004, is a magnificent, inspired, modernist take on the amalgam of folk, psychedelia, jazz, and mysticism that defines his oeuvre.
At Guild Hall, “I’m coming to thank all the fans,” Donovan said, promising “all the cult songs, the hits, a couple of new songs — a wander through this body of work. I decided I would return to basic, troubadour style, sitting cross-legged on a lambskin rug, solo acoustic guitar.” The music, he said, “has become so touching and personal to so many people, but also to me. I’m looking forward to that. Then it’s off to California.”
Looking at his life’s work, the artist observed, “how it has reflected an extraordinary amount of social change, ecological commentary, the whole ’60s ethos. I knew what I wanted to do: bring the bohemian manifesto of change to a world in dire straits, trying to make it go as far as possible before this human ‘race’ to destroy the planet in its ignorance. I’m coming to reaffirm all this.”
Available tickets for Donovan, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall, are $69.50 to $149.50 and can be purchased by calling the box office at 631-324-4050, at guildhall.org, and at ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1161199.