***In The Time Of Mellow Yellow-Sunshine Superman: The Journey Of Donovan

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sunshine Superman: The Journey of Donovan, starring Donovan (and the generation of ’68), 2008

On more than one occasion back in the day (and strangely more recently as well) I have had to do battle with the idea that back in the 1960s, back in the time of the now greying ( I am being kind), AARP-worthy generation of ’68 music was the revolution. By that those who defended that position meant that if we could wire enough of the youth (after all it was mainly youth who were spouting the concept-the parents, mostly rightly, were the “enemy”) into Woodstock/Isle of Wright/Monterrey/ music festivals and communes the society would be transformed from within without the messy necessary of taking on the power structure. A structure that just then was gearing up for blowback. Well forty plus years of cultural wars have put paid to the notion that we could have won that way, or any way short of a serious frontal assault on the old order. Now I do not know if the subject of this review, the folk rock troubadour Donovan, in the documentary of his musical life Sunshine Superman; The Journey of Donovan subscribed to that idea (some statements in the film made by him would lead me to believe that he at least partially believed that) but he certainly was a lightning rod for the countercultural musical currents of the time.          

During this three hour film journey of his life Donovan, still performing in the 2000s the time of this film’s creation, carefully explains his take on the music and people, not all well-known, who influenced him starting out and along the way, how he crafted his various iconic songs of the time (the Sunshine Superman of the title, Mellow Yellow, Atlantis, Season of the Witch and so on), and his take on the rise and fall of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. (By the way the three hours went by very quickly so don’t use that as a bar to enjoyment on this one). Interestingly enough, although he grew up in Scotland during the 1950s, many of his formative experiences mirror the same trail of self-discovery that many of us in America travelled on the road to our generation’s hallmark jail break-out from the red scare Cold War night that had descended on us and that we insipidly were rebelling against then.

Of course for some of us (like Donovan and this writer) on the front-end edge of the post- World War II baby boomer explosion we got caught up in the back end of the serious “beat” generation thing that got its impetus from Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Allen Ginsberg’s poetic Howl. Those sources gave their imprimatur to our jail-break impulses and one could almost count on kindred having read (and re-read) those sources as their “bible” on the road to the 1960sas well. Naturally the Dylan-Baez-Seeger–led folk minute with its folk festivals, coffeehouses and iterant troubadours (as Donovan described himself) was a huge influence. (Donovan also gives his take on the folk minute controversy over who was king of the hill-him or Dylan).

Those influences are the antecedents of Donovan’s real fame and work more popularly associated with the mid-1960s at first the move to melt folk with rock and then the decisive drug-influenced “acid rock” rage where the theme took over “drug, sex and rock and roll”- and we liked all three just fine. That is the period of Mellow Yellow, Sunshine Superman and other mystical and experimental songs. Of course, maybe we knew it, maybe not, but that whole cultural movement could not sustain itself, began to turn on itself and Donovan had to take stock of his life like we all did. The nice part of the film is that the “talking head” older and wiser Donovan take on things is interspersed with plenty of interesting film footage from back in the time of his time. Were we really that young and innocent? This one is for 1960s nostalgia buffs, countercultural history aficionados and those, young and old but mostly young, who missed it to know what it was like when a significant part of a generation tried to turn the world upside down.