Hailed Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan — despite originally being spawned from Scottish lands — a 19-years-young Donovan made his Stateside debut on this day in 1965 on the short-lived variety show, Shindig!, fresh-face troubadouring, yes, very much like Bobby D with his first single, “Catch the Wind.”
Donovan would do the stereotype impossible and break free from any likeness to Dylan later on in his career with his whole calypso “Mellow Yellow” strut, but at the time, with “Blowin’ in the Wind” three years unto the world, and the folk-revivalist movement in full feast, sitting up on a stool with a harp and guitar and a melody eerily similar to “Chimes of Freedom,” and a hint of prairie-weary country vocal yip, you can’t blame the American public for slapping around labels.
“Catch the Wind,” though, was no wispy political rhetorical, rather just another ebb in the flow of the cause of and solution to the history of unrequited love, an ode to a heart he couldn’t quite catch, which a teenage Donovan played the woe-is-me card with a frustrated analogy in trying to catch a piece of Lady Wind, in a way adding to Dylan’s conversation that there are actually answers blowin’ along in said wind, as irony would have it, the lady in question trying to be caught, Linda Lawrence, Donovan wound up marrying her.
Moral of the story: go on and grab at that wind, friends:
For standin’ in your heart
Is where I want to be
And long to be,
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.
