Thursday, February 07, 2008
QUITE RIGHT, SLICK
My friend Tom Pettyjohn and I went to see Donovan at the Orpheum last night. Good show! He didn't just play the hits -- although he certainly did that. He started with a gypsy song (he actually sang several old Scottish folk songs over the course of the evening, as well as a musical interpretation of an Edgar Allen Poe poem), then played "Catch the Wind," and from there he interspersed a lot of obscure stuff from his first, second and third albums almost exclusively.
As a kid I had his "Mellow Yellow" album and I was particularly impressed when he sang "Sand and Foam," a song from that album that had pretty much hidden itself in a back corner of my brain. It's a great song about a trip he took to Mexico with a friend of his, "Gypsy Dave" Mills.
Donovan is almost 62 and can still sing the old songs in the original key.
Being a musician myself I sympathized with Donovan last night -- he had a string (his high E) on his guitar that wouldn't cooperate, and about halfway through the show, after sometimes mid-song retuning, he said, "Tell you what. I'm going to take a five minute break. Then I'll come back and do all the hits." (At least those he hadn't done yet.) Which he did: about five minutes exactly.
His last song before the encore was of course, "Mellow Yellow." Now, for years, I've wondered just what the hell he was saying in the chorus, which has been published as everything from "Quite Righteously" to "Quite Rightly" to "Hi, there, Steve!" I knew none of those were right, so I made a note to pay special attention to what he said.
No help from Donovan, whose mouth was blocked by the microphone whenever he said it.
So I go to Youtube when I get home. I find a recent performance of the song from another Donovan concert. STILL can't figure it out. So I finally did some googling and I can report that the words he's saying are "Quite right, Slick." Apparently, "Slick" was a nickname that Paul McCartney gave him and so there you go. (Also, you do know that the guy making all the noise in the instrumental bridge on Mellow Yellow is Paul McCartney, don't you? Well, you do now!)
Best of all, while he didn't play two songs I'd hoped he would (namely "Riki Tiki Tavi" and "Cosmic Wheels" -- and let's face it, you and I BOTH know he wasn't gonna play "Intergalactic Laxative") he DID keep from singing "I Like My Shirt," probably the dumbest song of all time. This in spite of the fact that people were yelling for it all night and Target or Old Navy or somebody recently bought it to use in commercials.
Hmmm...maybe I need to write dumb songs. Oh, that's right, I already do.
TT
My friend Tom Pettyjohn and I went to see Donovan at the Orpheum last night. Good show! He didn't just play the hits -- although he certainly did that. He started with a gypsy song (he actually sang several old Scottish folk songs over the course of the evening, as well as a musical interpretation of an Edgar Allen Poe poem), then played "Catch the Wind," and from there he interspersed a lot of obscure stuff from his first, second and third albums almost exclusively.
As a kid I had his "Mellow Yellow" album and I was particularly impressed when he sang "Sand and Foam," a song from that album that had pretty much hidden itself in a back corner of my brain. It's a great song about a trip he took to Mexico with a friend of his, "Gypsy Dave" Mills.
Donovan is almost 62 and can still sing the old songs in the original key.
Being a musician myself I sympathized with Donovan last night -- he had a string (his high E) on his guitar that wouldn't cooperate, and about halfway through the show, after sometimes mid-song retuning, he said, "Tell you what. I'm going to take a five minute break. Then I'll come back and do all the hits." (At least those he hadn't done yet.) Which he did: about five minutes exactly.
His last song before the encore was of course, "Mellow Yellow." Now, for years, I've wondered just what the hell he was saying in the chorus, which has been published as everything from "Quite Righteously" to "Quite Rightly" to "Hi, there, Steve!" I knew none of those were right, so I made a note to pay special attention to what he said.
No help from Donovan, whose mouth was blocked by the microphone whenever he said it.
So I go to Youtube when I get home. I find a recent performance of the song from another Donovan concert. STILL can't figure it out. So I finally did some googling and I can report that the words he's saying are "Quite right, Slick." Apparently, "Slick" was a nickname that Paul McCartney gave him and so there you go. (Also, you do know that the guy making all the noise in the instrumental bridge on Mellow Yellow is Paul McCartney, don't you? Well, you do now!)
Best of all, while he didn't play two songs I'd hoped he would (namely "Riki Tiki Tavi" and "Cosmic Wheels" -- and let's face it, you and I BOTH know he wasn't gonna play "Intergalactic Laxative") he DID keep from singing "I Like My Shirt," probably the dumbest song of all time. This in spite of the fact that people were yelling for it all night and Target or Old Navy or somebody recently bought it to use in commercials.
Hmmm...maybe I need to write dumb songs. Oh, that's right, I already do.
TT
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