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."
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" :
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5 comments:
Ann... you're not going to mention that today is Bob's birthday? Or is this post a subtle way of acknowledging it?
EMC: I can honestly say I can't remember any celebrity's birthday. Unless you count Jesus.
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.
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!
Agreed ... my "ugghh" was over the title.
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