Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
DONOVAN – Universal Soldier (Pye Records EP, 1965)
Soft-voiced beat poet Donovan was Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan although when a meeting between the two artists was filmed for D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back , he looked like a goofy schoolboy beside Dylan’s mature wit and worldly wisdom.
The one original song by him on this EP, The Ballad of a Crystal Man, features Dan who fought in Vietnam, a crass rhyme that sounds doubly weak when compared to Dylan’s acerbic Masters of War written two years earlier. It’s a neat tune for all that and one of four with an anti-war theme to add to the late sixties resistance to America’s foreign policy.
The title song is a Buffy Sainte-Marie cover, which she said is “about individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal thinking kills us all”.
Versions of songs by figureheads of the British folk scene continue on much the same theme – “Do You Hear Me Now” (Bert Jansch) and “The War Drags On” (Mick Softley).
On the back sleeve, Donovan’s free-form ‘poem’ of his “dream of freedom” is proof that LSD, along with moral outrage, had reached the UK: “I’ve never seen a jerking man touch a flower / Never seen a fast man dig the slowness / Never seen the dream-end of the ridiculous state the world is in / Never seen anger in Joanny when the hate-words of confused minds lap their shores”.
Groovy.
