AVC: You write about hearing "Love Me Do" and it being an inspiration for you to write songs with a pop sensibility. Did you have a hard time reconciling your commercial aspirations with your folk and bohemian principles?
D: Well, cheap popularity, I would say, is a great thing. It's not cheap. Actually, popular culture is where it's possible to present the most ideas from bohemia. I embraced it. And actually embraced it at a time when television was rising, and when 45 revs-per-minute records were cheap and easy to get by millions of youths. I didn't feel the sellout. In fact, more like a sell-in, like a pop artist who would use a popular image to present a social comment in a work of art. That's pop art. Pop music really is the same thing. And experimenting with different styles was fun, and still is.
AVC: One of the more striking comments you make in your autobiography is your claim that Dylan was a better lyricist, but you were more experimental musically. You started as a fairly straightforward folk singer—when did the experimentation come in?
D: Well, I kind of tipped my hat to Bob Dylan's writing, although I'm a highly skilled poet myself. I was trying to define that—it's heavy with words, Bob's work, and the music is kind of rhythm & bluesy. It's not folk-rock. It's not rock. Bob plays kind of a blues style, yeah? My experimentation began very early with my father playing me Billie Holiday and classical music, and with my uncle playing folk music. There was a mix going on when I was a kid. But it wasn't until later, when I started absorbing, at 16, what we call "world music" now, that it just all became a fusion. Anyone could put any kind of sounds together, like a collage. Because most of those songwriters that come out of Britain came out of the art-school diaspora, we knew about collage and montage and images, so putting different sounds together was a very painterly thing. If I sang about a harpsichord, it would be interesting to have one. But having John Cameron with me, as well as Mickie Most, the top pop producer—we would look at music like soundtracks in a movie. So fusing all these things was fun, and easy. Hanging out in the Blue Beat clubs of London—well, you go and score a bit of African bush and hang out with the Rastas, so of course in that kind of music would come easy to us Brits. In the studio I worked with jazz musicians. It meant a lot to me that the brotherhood promoted by bohemian socialism could also be a brotherhood of sound.
AVC: So was your 1966 drug bust your first indication that maybe the '60s would have a dark side?
D: It was my first indication that we would be victimized by the press and the establishment to try and stop something that they felt was not good. It was an indication, and it came later to all of us, that there was a purge, as we say in China. A purge going on, yeah? We were being pointed at. In the end the guy who busted us busted himself for planting it on us, so that was very clear. But no, the dark side wasn't drugs. The dark side of the '60s for artists was the extraordinary amount of fame that we were having to deal with. Our private lives were completely gone. We hadn't expected that.
AVC: When was the first time you realized that?
D: I suppose it would happen really early with 200 girls chasing Gypsy Dave and I with scissors. Something had changed. Why would they want this lock of hair? Do they know they're endangering themselves? When this frenzy started, it was very frightening and difficult to deal with. We had to create a whole set of security rules to protect not only us but the fans. There's a very dark side to fame, which ends up in the most darkest place possible with John Lennon getting shot.
AVC: Does that kind of feed in to the pessimism of a song like "Season Of The Witch"?
D: "Season Of The Witch" was kind of prophetic. It was anticipating the bust, so it was a dark song for that reason. It was a chilling sound to come from me, and I didn't know where it was coming from at first. Now it has become a seminal jam song, for three decades now, of all kinds of bands. Why? You know, Al Kooper is saying that it changed his life. It certainly changed my life. I was told that when I discovered the riff and sang the song to myself at a party, I played it for seven hours. There's something kind of ritualistic about it. Maybe it is the first kind of Celtic-rock thing I was doing, a rediscovery of our roots in Britain, which of course became the British sound.
AVC: Rock stars aren't known for sustaining long-lasting relationships, but you've been with Linda for decades now, and you stayed close with Gypsy Dave, who you were friends with before you were famous. How do you do that?
D: [Laughs.] Oh, gosh, you can look at it in different ways. The '60s wrecked most relationships in the popular music world that I lived through. Fame would do that. Too much time away from each other, extraordinary things happening outside your house, fans camping in your garden, your children being ridiculed at school—celebrity stories all over the place. But Linda and I met in 1965 and then parted after a wonderful affair when, as the book tells, she had to grow up. She was so young. She also had a child with Brian Jones and was still trying to come to terms with being the first charismatic girlfriend of the first charismatic star in Britain and the music world. So when we met, we fell in love, but then we kind of divorced without marrying. We spent the '60s apart. That is one of the elements why Linda and I survived the '60s. But why the longevity? We've been friends. We share the same interests. You might say it's astrological.
Gypsy Dave and I, when we put our thumbs out in the road in 1964, at the age of 16, we were vagabonds. Society was something to leave. The camaraderie that you find and shared experiences when you're young… When you meet again, there's a knowingness when you look at each other, because you've experienced something at very, very important times of your life. We haven't seen each other off and on for five or six years at a time, but we're always close. When I met George Harrison—who we all miss tremendously—he said, "It's always nice to see you, Don, because you never ask any questions." There's something about friendship that there's not much you have to say to each other.
AVC: You spent a lot of time assembling the new box set and digging through your past for your autobiography. What did you find that surprised you?
D: I've been picking away at it for over 30 years, with memoirs and journals and diaries and little scribbles here and there. I learned more about myself than any reader would, extraordinary things about my past—the first 10 years of my life in Glasgow, that was interesting. I was a sick child, and it was post-war and the bombed buildings… kids running after the disaster of the Second World War. Families torn up. It was very emotional, but then I saw the smiles and I remembered the poetry and looked at the photographs—my father was a photographer—and saw the child smiling, people smiling in the face of disaster. It was hard, but I managed to get in there, and I'm glad I did.
I learned about a lot of things. Learned how much I loved Linda in those early days, and just had to listen to the songs to see my life open up. I saw changes and I saw bravery. We courageous poets were standing up and presenting, through the medium of pop music, important issues in popular song. Not sitting back and combing our hair and enjoying the money on a yacht in Greece, but actually going for it. And I didn't realize that I'd spent more time—spiritually, socially, and musically—with four guys called The Beatles than any in my generation. I didn't understand that until I read the book. We had a kind of a—what did I say, unspoken bond? There was something happening to us that was extraordinary. We were so experimental that we could go anywhere that we liked with no rules. We knew no rules in music, and we liked each other that way.
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