Clearly Donovan, of course.
Tell me why?
Donovan’s not responsible for the Wallflowers, I’ll give him that.
i have never heard donovan. but of course it’s not dylan.
SACRED COW
Hurdy Gurdy Man is the best song of the flower power era. Fact.
Yeah, he’s drippy and twee, but he’s drippy and twee on very strong LSD. Plus, drippy and twee with Led Zeppelin as his backing band.
Plus, he has better shirts. And the best West Coast Dylanamericana by way of Glasgow accent until the Jesus and Mary Chain made a career of it.
x-post, I’m not having a go at Dylan’s sacred cow. I like Dylan.
I just like Donovan better.
Dylan kinda pwned Donovan in “Don’t Look Back”.
Then again, it was his film.
Dylan was a putz.
If Donovan had made a film, he wouldn’t have bothered pwning anyone, he’d have just wandered off in his own little world and talked to lillies or aspidistras or something.
dylan is a bit mean to him in that film.
Dylan was mean to everyone during that period. that was his schtick. Amphetamine paranoia makes people not vary nice. (Please do not sue me for saying this, I am not pretending to be Edie Sedgewick or anything.)
He was quite nice to that Sheriff woman.
Oh, and he was going out of his wayyy to old CharismaRecordsToBePerson as well...
Anyway, back to Donovan...
Donovan had better shirts. Fact.
Over here it’s new, it’s now, it’s you, it’s clean
The beard and lipstick scene
So look beyond Big brother, gossip culture,
So bored of stupidity
The myth of common sense
I believe in Donovan over Dylan
x-post What on earth is that?
Dylan’s shirts don’t even come close:
(Also, Donovan’s nose is pointier but only I would notice that.)
saint etienne
True class.
It’s a close call on the pointyness
That isn’t pointy! It’s hooked. And he’s got this weird lump on the end of his nose.
Bob’s got one of those USB turntables there!
So ahead of his time! and not his tie, which I nearly typed.
Oh, Donovan has my current glasses and hairstyle in that pic!
This does not mean I look like Donovan, btw.
This thread couldn’t be any worse if it was just LJ and Derek Belly-Button Piercing swapping details of their sexual fantasies w/ each other.
has Dylan ever written as bizarre a chanting psychedelic anthem to a lost civilisation as “Atlantis” ?!?!? I think not.
donovan may have better shirts but dylan has better suits and songs and even if he was asshole to donovan in don’t look back there wasn’t much he could do... play a crappy song? i don’t know.
Dylan only has one tune. I mean, everyone bangs on about what a great lyricist he was and all that, but at the end of the day, he had only one tune. It was the one that went “jangle-jangle-dinga-dinga-jangle-ding”.
Donovan had *buckets* of tunes, he understood the essence of a catchy melody in a way that Dylan never really got. Donovan knew how to craft a pop song.
This, to me, is far worthier, than all the lyrics in the world.
Plus, he had waaaaay better shirts.
Dylan only has one tune.
This, m’dear, is simply asking for it...
(Dom zing in 34 seconds)
I thought this was a PEW thread.
But Dylan only has one tune!
This is not necessarily a dis. It’s like saying that the JAMC only had two songs. They did! They were just very good songs.
Donovan is Pop, therefore he is better than Dylan.
“Barabajagal” is better than any Dylan album I’ve heard (even though I’ve only heard a few).
Also, Donovan wants to be known by his real first name. Dylan by his fake surname. Therefore Donovan is friendlier.
Coming from Maryhill helps in my case. National pride etc.
“one tune” isn’t even a dis so much as it is just wrong
it’s the laziest criticism ever, perhaps excepting “donovan has better shirts”
Their powers combined foooorm...DYLANOVAN!!!!!!
Can’t I just hate respect-but-not-be-very-fond-of them both?
It was the one that went “jangle-jangle-dinga-dinga-jangle-ding”.
I LOVE THAT SONG
it’s no “janga janga janga janga janga da-JANG” but yeah it’s all right
yeah that is for sure, bro. i can see how one influenced the other, tho.
TEH LEAST THREATNIN ONE TO CHICKS, MANG
But Dylan only has one tune!
This is not necessarily a dis. It’s like saying that the JAMC only had two songs. They did! They were just very good songs.
Donovan is Pop, therefore he is better than Dylan.
all of this makes ZERO sense.
dylan only has one tune! you know, that tune that sounds just like “blowin’ in the wind”, “lay lady lay”, “tangled up in blue”, and “thunder on the mountain”!
and those shirts are uggo, but i like donovan pretty much, he’s cool.
Please take pity on Donovan for having Shaun Ryder as his son in law for a while.
Donovan’s not responsible for the Wallflowers, I’ll give him that.
TS: Teh Wallflowers vs Camp Freddy
It’s like saying that the JAMC only had two songs. They did! They were just very good songs.
And one of them was “Be My Baby”!
Or was it The Leader Of The Pack“...?
The JAMC had lots of songs. They only had two good ones.
they only had two drums. and bobby gillespie played them brilliantly...
Setlist:
1. dum...dum dum tcht, dum...dum dum tcht
2. dumdum tcht dumdumdum tcht dumdumdum tcht dumdumdum tcht dum
3. repeat till bottled offstage
3. repeat till bottled offstage
Good a place as any to post this gem:
“William tunes his guitar every fucking night” rofl
“My favorite colour is gold”
The first close-up of Bobby, sorry, Bobby’s hair, is the best moment in the whole clip.
Donovan sounds like a vanilla sine wave. Dylan copies EVERYTHING from Woody Guthrie.
Nick Drake is better than both.
*flips table and ducks behind it*
Dylan copies EVERYTHING from Woody Guthrie.
Did you fall asleep in 1964 or something.
Nick Drake > Donovan >>>>>> Dylan
Nick Drake, Donovan, and Dylan are all great!
JAMC are masters of the I-IV-V. “Blues From A Gun” is awesome because it sounds like it’s not I-IV-V, but then you realize they’re actually just using the V as the tonic and it’s still those three chords. But it modulates for the “I guess that’s why I’ve always got the blues” section.
Did you fall asleep in 1964 or something.
ok, so maybe Dylan started sounding like his nose was in his mouth after a while (re: dylan-cash sessions).
I think I like Sunshine Superman more than any Dylan albums...but I can’t think of many Dylan albums that I really, really love right now.
Turquoise is as good as any early Dylan love song...
I’m probably trying to overcompensate for Dylan’s myth by underestimating him though.
If Donovan had made a film, he wouldn’t have bothered pwning anyone, he’d have just wandered off in his own little world and talked to lillies or aspidistras or something.
he DID make a film, in which he wanders around the meditteranean in a yacht with his posh hippy friends stopping off every now and then to jam with the locals. while wearing big silly shirts obv.
i will be the sacrificial boring dylan dude and note only that this is basically picasso vs. norman rockwell.
(and i like norman rockwell.)
OTM, except that the population polled seems limited to Connecticut residents with stacks of Boys Life back issues in their sock drawers.
Well, I played both records for my mum last night, as this is why I bought them.
Put on Bringing It All Back Home.
Kate’s Mum: This is not Dylan. This is not nearly WHINEY enough to be Dylan.
Kate: It is Dylan, it’s his most famous album.
Mum: Not whingey enough. Not nasal enough. It sounds like someone else “doing” Dylan.
Kate: ::shows her the album cover::
Mum: We used to listen to this in college, you know. He was kind of a cult thing. We thought we were so sophisticated.
Kate: Yeah, I kinda feel like that about Lloyd Cole lyrics now.
Mum: Are you *sure* this is Dylan? Is Mr. Tambourine Man on it?
Pause while we eat dinner.
Kate: He sure goes on, doesn’t he?
Mum: All his songs sound exactly alike. OK, I’ve had enough now.
Kate: Shall I put on Donovan?
Mum: Yes, this is much better
As straight folk singer/Woody Guthrie copyists, they were both kinda alright. But it’s what they did afterwards that makes the differentiation.
Dylan just turned into this boring rockist rootsy rock’n’roll bluesy boringness. Donovan turned into this... just completely off the wall mental psychedelic flower power pop extravaganza with bongo drums and Mickie Most production. He just became more interesting, musically.
THANKS FOR THE J&MC YOUTUBE!
That’s now in my “My Videos” collection.
man, I wish YouTube worked on my Puter. I’d love to see that JAMC clip.
I did a video collection called “Psychotherapy” back in the day, clips, videos and stuff, up to “Sidewalking”. It’s in the loft somewhere and when I find it I’ll be knocking out some DVD versions.
I don’t know any Donovan albums. Are there are Donovan albums better than Another Side, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks etc?
I can see what’s cool about both performers, but I don’t much like either one tbh.
Donovan is not about albums, he is about singles. (ooh, poppery.) Get yourself any Donovan compilation/best of that has Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, Hurdy Gurdy Man, Superlungs, Wear Your Love Like Heaven, The Trip.
Then again, maybe I should treat Dylan the same way. Thing is, often he has some very good album tracks that are not as well know as the “hitz”—but the albums have a lot of filler, too.
You guys do realize that Donovan is at least as much of a twat as Dylan and much less smart, right?
I don’t actually care. Being a twat or being not very smart never stopped anyone from making great pop records.
I’ve got a Donovan best of (the one with the electric re-recording of Catch the Wind etc) but I really can’t stomach all that Atlantis nonsense.
Catch the wind >>> Love minus Zero, obviously.
Donovan wrote a handful of songs that I’d usually rather listen to than most Dylan, but Dylan wrote a lot more good songs overall. So I’m torn. I think I’d still take Bringin It All Back Home over any Donovan in the end.
I like “The Freewheeling” as that’s basically a picture of me and Dawn in NY, back in 1996 (how snowy it was)
I generally agree that Donovan’s handier with a tune, but how many Dylans have there been compared to how many Donovans?
I barely listen to either, but when, in my impressionable youth, I did, I couldn’t help but feel that there was something slightly ridiculous about Donovan, like he was drinking the Kool-Aid.
Allow me to laud a Donovan song, ably covered by Luna btw, that I like and which has not been mentioned: ‘Season of the Witch’.
ANTI-SEMITES
What do you mean by “how many Dylans?”
How many deliberately obfuscatingly obtuse lyricists who are portrayed as somehow ineffably deep? I think my mum got it spot on with the Lloyd Cole comparison—the kind of thing that seems deep when you are in college. But not so deep when you stop taking drugs and/or drinking coffee and staying up all night talking about said lyrics.
(Then again, what do I know? I do not listen to lyrics.)
Then, many kids got the christian name “Dylan”.
Not so many “Donovans”
Now, th biggest increase is the name “Preston”.
I mean, not even Preston’s christian name is “Preston”...
Thing is, Dylan is on my “list of baby names” while Donovan isn’t.
It’s a lovely name. Like Zimmerman isn’t. (now that may be anti-Semitism, yes. Sigh.)
Dylan just turned into this boring rockist rootsy rock’n’roll bluesy boringness.
oh dear god....
xpost it’s a great name.
But, like “Tyson”, it’s going to get related back to Bob. Or Mike, even.
It’s a lovely name. Like Zimmerman isn’t. (now that may be anti-Semitism, yes. Sigh.)
Well, that and the hook-nose talk.
I ain’t much for twee so Dylan by a ridiculous margin, though I love Andy Merriweather’s glam-funk-spaz version of “Sunshine Superman” and this one obscuro weird-ass freak-out acid rock version of “Season of the Witch” done by some late ’60s group called the Aliens. (Actually the original “Season” is the best kind of spooky shit, too.)
What do you mean by “how many Dylans?”
I am, of course, referring to his notorious habit of re-inventing himself. His lyric stye is mostly of a time and I think his adopted moniker is a conscious reference to D. Thomas. One doesn’t have to like that style but as it goes, I think Dylan can be quite good.
How many deliberately obfuscatingly obtuse lyricists who are portrayed as somehow ineffably deep?
Again, if your looking for straightforward lytics, you ain’t gonna be too happy with Bobby Z, and ‘deliberately’ and ‘obfuscatingly’ are adverbs that I doubt you can back up. He’s not trying to make ‘sense’, he’s trying to associate different words evocatively. Metaphors don’t make ‘sense’ either but poetry wouldn’t be nearly as rich without them.
As to this calumny on my good friend, Mr. Cole, I’m not sure how ‘deep’ I ever thought his lyrics, though I still find them quite clever.
Anyway, as I always say, quoting Emerson, ‘Arguments convince no-one.’ People like or dislike as they will.
“Has great tunes” /= “makes great pop records”
How many times have I swooned at the opening bars of “Season of the Witch”, the bass going down like something warm to drink, the whole machinery starting up... and somehow the execution of it ends up thin, the attempt to realize that promise of apocalypse and foreboding weedily unconvincing. It’s naff to say it, but you want Jim Morrison for that song.
Likewise, Ricky Lee Jones’ version of “Sunshine Superman” folds Donovan’s into a neat square, puts it into a trunk wrapped with locks and chains, and drops it off a ship straight down to the bottom of a very deep part of the ocean.
nate I’d love to hear that Aliens version!
OK, I’m kinda joking with the exchange with my mum. And we’re treading dangerously into exactly the argument I was having with PBW last week.
As I’ve said hundreds of times, generally I don’t actually listen to lyrics at all. There are a few writers whose lines have engaged me to the point where I actually notice them, but generally I’m not “about” lyrics.
90% of the critical/canonical adulation of Dylan is about his genius wordsmithery. I can’t really comment on that. It’s one thing to examine lyrics as poetry, and on that there’s only taste and experience to debate. (I know that sacred cow taking-down is dull and tedious, but hey, I don’t care for Picasso either.) But music is about more than lyrics, and all I can say is that for the most part, his *music* does not engage me.
nate I’d love to hear that Aliens version!
It’s on this comp:
Wait, I think I have that Aliens version on another comp. Probably a mixtape, in fact.
can’t we drop rickie lee jones off a ship straight down to the bottom of a very deep part of the ocean? donovan can be annoying, but rlj is on a whole new level of grating
aka “a singles artist”
waht?
Saying somebody is a great “singles artist” is a great way to wriggle out of the fact that they recorded whole heaping helpings of crap is all I’m saying (and yes I do include RLJ in that category)—however, I have no interest in defending her in toto against/over anyone else; just that almost anybody’s version of a Donovan song—even nonexistent cover versions of Donovan songs—sound better than his, to my ears.
ok, got it—“the role of Ned will be played by Tracer on this thread.”
thank you! xpost
90% of the critical/canonical adulation of Dylan is about his genius wordsmithery.
i think this is a misconception, if a common one. actual dylan lovers might love the words, but not at the exclusion of the tunes, the arrangements and playing, and — crucially — the singing. i think the singing is really where you’re on or off the bus. either you think he’s one of the great popular vocalists of the last century or you don’t. saying “he wrote some good songs” or whatever is basically missing the point. but this is, of course, about the hoariest canon debate in the hoary history of hoary canons. next: BEATLES OR STONES?
(modern times, e.g., is a pretty good songs record, but a great vocal record.)
I agree but I still laughed my ass off when Tom Scharpling disparagingly compared it to the “Mr. Belvedere” theme.
i think this is a misconception, if a common one. actual dylan lovers might love the words, but not at the exclusion of the tunes, the arrangements and playing, and — crucially — the singing.
In my opinion, as a Dylan fan, the words are the LEAST important part of it. His lyrics have always seemed rather dadaist and incidental at their most playful. I guess some kind somewhere wants to know WHO EXACTLY are these lumberjacks who get their facts etc., but I was more about the arrangements, the vocal performances, the songs, etc.
some kid, rather.
For me (Dylan fan), it’s Dylan as a living, breathing, in-the-moment entity. It’s his delivery of the lines, his stance, his humor, his intellect, his style, his point-of-view that matter. The recordings are just glimpses into an evolving, multi-faceted poetic life.
To me, that is rock ’n’ roll.
(It doesn’t even make sense to compare him to other artists.
Other geniuses, maybe)
mike bloomfield and al cooper were fucking awesome...i digz their steez
Dylan’s a song and dance man, Donovan’s just a regular joe.
You guys realize that Donovan is also a deliberately obfuscatingly obtuse lyricist, and it’s just that he’s so bad at it that his songs work really well as comedy. Which I’m not knockin’—they’re great!
Just compare their autobiographies (if you can make it through Donovan’s) and it’ll illustrate who is the most interesting and has the most talent.
sigh. if only Dave Van Ronk sounded sort of like “Dylan”.
I dunno.. Dylan can be devastating or provocative or make me lol. Like, hard. I’m not sure I get that range from Donovan. I certainly LIKE Donovan, but for me this one goes to Bobby. And I do like his singing.
Donovan is a slave to a page in Dylan’s rhyme book.
LOL. Dylan obv.
Gene are better than The Smiths though, and Rush are better than Led Zeppelin. :)