Images
All of us '60s pop stars came from old cities which had a jazz club, a folk club, a coffee house, and an art school.
Donovan
Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.
Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.
Yogis have human emotions, but the thing is not to let anger and doubt become an obsession.
When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.
I feel strongly that having a disability in one area makes you explore others instead.
I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.
The poet is the voice of the people. And when the poet presents certain ideas, two phrases in one poem can alter a generation's view. So poets have always been feared - and controlled and jailed.
In 1968, I bought a 114-foot yacht, built in 1946, and lived on the Greek islands for a while. We had an extraordinary time in it. Then I gave it to The Beatles.
There's only one thing, in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.
It's really much more than the plastic of album covers and record sales and dollars and cents. Music is just everybody's mother. Music is the power of you.
The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous - always to be understood in different ways.
I can't save the world, but if I can share some ideas, people might be able to save themselves.
The planet is alive, and it's a woman.
I sounded like Bob Dylan for about five minutes, and it was blown out of all proportion.
The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.
The similarity between my music and The Beatles' music is it has within it a very positive quality. It's woven with humor.
When I was a boy, I had a grand, big tape recorder, and I made late-night radio shows with glasses of water and funny voices. I just loved radio plays.
I didn't realise that I was so accomplished on the guitar until someone said to me, 'How do you do that?' That someone was John Lennon. He asked me to teach him my technique.
A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!
I think my legacy is important because my songs - perhaps more than those of any other songwriter I know - cover every movement from 1965 on, socially and artistically. If you want songs about ecology, I've got ecology songs; if you want songs about spirituality, I've got spiritual songs.
Linda loves an argument, and I like to engage, too, but she knows that I'm a poet, so I will engage forever. We are in the Chinese astrology of dogs, and we are forever snapping at each other.
Spiritually, I'm a floating entity, but Buddhism is as close as I can get to describing it.
In England, we'd leave school at 15 and go on to a college, and I went to further education in a town called Welling Garden City. I fully immersed myself in bohemia there, which included poetry and modern art, jazz, philosophy, social radicalism.
My guitar-playing always included bass lines, melody lines, and rhythm-guitar grooves.
With songwriters like me who are prolific, you just write the song and then put it on tape.
Coming from art school, I had a great sense of style - as did The Beatles and the Stones - and I enjoyed projecting that. Image, attitude, great music and great lyrics - that was the '60s.
I was making the music and writing the songs which reflected the emerging consciousness of my generation.
I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.
I regard myself as an international man, a citizen of the earth.
In the 1960s, I was convinced that the world was extremely mentally ill.
I first met Linda Lawrence in March 1965 in the green room of 'Ready Steady Go!', the British pop TV show. Linda was a friend of one of the co-hosts. She had an art-school vibe, and after a brief conversation, I asked her to dance to a soul record playing. As we jazz danced, I fell in love.
I never considered myself an entertainer. I always felt I had to be connected to something meaningful, or it wasn't worth doing.
I have amassed an enormous amount of songs about every particular condition of humankind - children's songs, marriage songs, death songs, love songs, epic songs, mystical songs, songs of leaving, songs of meeting, songs of wonder. I pretty much have got a song for every occasion.
I learned that if you wait long enough, you just grow older.
I think of myself as a poet. I grew up with poetic influences - what I know from my background is the bardic poetry, which came down through oral tradition.
I'm in the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Jimmy Page gave me the MOJO Maverick award. I got an Ivor Novella Award for my very first song.
I get plastic nails done in the salon. When I was younger, they were stronger, but now I get my nails built up. Then I can dance over the strings. I say, 'Okay, I need four nails; I'm a guitarist.' Sometimes if I'm in a strange place, the girl says, 'Yeah, all the guys say that.'
The idea of the mystic solo, meditating away on his own, is only one path of yoga. Very early on, I chose the path of Life. One path is austerity and isolation, the other is Life. But they both lead to the same place.
When I met Bob Dylan, I was definitely impressed. This guy had come from the American folk world, but he was very schooled in poetry, too. He'd studied the Beat poets, of course. I grew up in the British bohemian scene. Dylan grew up in the American bohemian scene. So I was very pleased to meet such a guy.
My father brought me up to be a socialist.
Society may shun bohemia, may put it down, may consider it useless and ineffective, but it is where everything cooks and boils and is created.
'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.
'Superman' had nothing to do with the superhero or physical power. It's a reference to the book 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the evolution of consciousness to reach a higher superman state.
It's not like me and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr hang out every week, but we keep together in promoting Transcendental Meditation.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
Publishers and record companies love a broken heart.
Sometimes the songs just come to me. I don't sit down to write like you'd sit down to make a pair of boots.
Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.
I found in Rick Rubin a kindred soul. When I visited his home and looked in his library, I saw he was reading the very same New Age books I had picked up the month before.
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