Donovan moved on and had a couple of kids with another woman. The song did not get Linda Lawrence to get with Donovan again. The delay drove Donovan nuts, but it turned out to be a blessing it’s hard to imagine a song any better attuned to that year’s zeitgeist. Because of legal issues, the song didn’t come out until the summer of 1966. (Zeppelin, it probably bears mentioning, only had one song hit the top 10 on the US charts, the #4-peaking “Whole Lotta Love” in 1970.)ĭecades later, Donovan would talk a big talk about the song, saying that he “wanted to get to the invisible fourth dimension of transcendental superconscious vision.” But it’s really just a loopy, silly folk-rock love song, and it’s a good one. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, both working as session musicians at the time, both played on the song, though they brought none of the thunder that they’d conjure two years later, when they formed Led Zeppelin. The song has an endearing lopsided chug and a slick sense of rhythmic interplay. “Sunshine” also was slang for acid, and so the song, with its shambling hippie mysticism and its lyrics about turtles and velvet thrones, was fully in keeping with the early days of the psychedelic era. His idea was that he’d write the song, she’d hear it on the radio, and she’d realize that they should be together. She’d moved on and moved away, but Donovan loved her. He wrote it for Linda Lawrence, an ex-girlfriend of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones who Donovan had dated for a little while. When Donovan recorded “Sunshine Superman,” it was 1965, and he was an angelic little kid, a 19-year-old polio survivor from Scotland who’d learned fingerpicking guitar techniques on the British folk scene. “Sunshine Superman” is the only one that hit #1, and it’s probably also the best of them. Donovan’s best pop songs - and there’s a pretty good handful of them - were amiably pretty little pieces of nursery-rhyme nonsense. So Donovan couldn’t muster the same voice-of-a-generation resonance that seemed to come so naturally to Dylan. Donovan’s five years younger, and he’s lucky to be in the guy’s presence. But there’s a clear hierarchy to every interaction. Then, when he meets Donovan and they play songs for each other, Dylan says something nice about Donovan’s music. Dylan acts politely and insincerely bemused by it. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary where people keep comparing Dylan to Donovan, playing around with the idea that Dylan better watch his back with this kid coming up. He’s a nice guy, though.” The interviewer says, “I’m shattered.” Dylan, grinning bigger now, says, “Well, you needn’t be.” There’s a moment in the press conference where a very earnest young lady asks Dylan about Donovan: “Do you think he’s a good poet?” Dylan noncommittally grunts: “Neh. It lasts for an hour, and the whole thing is riveting. Dylan, smirking at the absurdity of it all, answers all the questions while subtly and mischievously mocking them. ![]() ![]() There’s a famous 1965 press conference where a whole horde of slightly befuddled reporters (and, for whatever reason, Allen Ginsberg) sits in front of Bob Dylan, firing one ridiculous question after another at him: “Do you ever paint or sculpt?,” that kind of thing. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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