May 24, 2005

I don't want to agitate you, adulate you, or masticate you.

Donovan gives his side of his run-in with Bob Dylan, depicted in the documentary "Don't Look Back" :
Viewers divide into those who see Dylan as a genius dismissing a young pretender, or a sniggering bully surrounded by sycophants. ...

Does he ever think Dylan was a bit of a bastard? His brow wrinkles. "For years, people thought that Dylan was putting me down. He may have been a bit edgy, but those New Yorkers were into amphetamine. Their jawlines were about 12 inches wide. I put it down to a lot of agitation, a lot of adulation and a lot of stress that Bob was under. The misunderstanding was hard for me because I was only 18. I wasn't copying him, but we were stuck together because I was going to do what he did. I was going to be the poet folk singer who invaded the charts."

5 comments:

EMC said...

Ann... you're not going to mention that today is Bob's birthday? Or is this post a subtle way of acknowledging it?

Ann Althouse said...

EMC: I can honestly say I can't remember any celebrity's birthday. Unless you count Jesus.

Joseph Angier said...

Surprisingly, in that whole interview, Donovan doesn't take credit for (or the writer leaves out)the second half of his 60s drug odyssey. A couple years after becoming the first rock star arrested for pot possession, Donovan was the first rock star (in my memory) to come out publically against drugs ... and I don't think it was to placate a parole officer.

In the liner notes for "A Gift From a Flower to a Garden" (ugghh ... I know), he delivered a broadside against the hippies' reliance on marijuana and LSD - a position that got him ridiculed and marginalized at the time, but would surely look prescient now. I remember a Fugs concert at Tompkins Square Park where either Tuli Kupferberg or Ed Sanders mockingly dedicated a song to Dononvan: "the man with a thousand abandoned roach clips dangling from his mouth."

Or maybe Donovan later slipped back into drug use, and doesn't want to mention this era.

Ann Althouse said...

Joseph: I'd forgotten that. For the record, I love "A Gift from a Flower to a Garden," despite the idiotic-sounding title. "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" -- sounds ridiculous, but it's great!

Joseph Angier said...

Agreed ... my "ugghh" was over the title.