A guy playing around on his guitar for his own amusement is nothing out of the ordinary, but one London evening in 1966, that strumming would end up reverberating for decades:
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Sitting at a party strumming his guitar, the Scottish troubadour Donovan came upon a riff that seemed to hypnotize him. He played it over and over again and was told later he worked on it for seven hours. This riff was to become “Season of the Witch.”
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The song was polished up and presented to the public on Donovan´s next album,
Sunshine Superman, and on an album largely devoted to psychedelic whimsy (check out
Legend of a Girl Child Linda, for example),
Season of the Witch is notable for being “a dark and prophetic song suggesting the new age dawning brings with it darkness”. There is a limit to how dark Donovan can sound, but the surging organ and lyrics about some unspecified unease do a pretty good job of conjuring up a swirling sinister mood.
This is Donovan, years later, talking about his song:
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"There was a feeling, even then, that all was not perfect in the Garden of Eden. Dealers were moving into bohemia and hard drugs were on the fringes. The song was also prophetic. It was about the bust, although of course I couldn't know that then….. There is a line in it that goes ‘Some cat looking over his shoulder at me’ … Soon these bad cats would come calling at my door.”
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He was referring to his arrest for possession of cannabis—the first high-profile London drug bust of the sixties—which prevented him from travelling to the United States, where he was due to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival, in June, 1967. "Sadly, for Donovan, the summer of love was over before it began", one pop journalist wrote.
And the same year as Donovan's bust I enter the story myself: a schoolboy watching tv one evening as Julie Driscoll wove her extraordinary magic. Brian Auger takes the song for a leisurely excursion, but it's JD’s captivating voice and performance that stays in the mind:
Next up, chronologically, is probably best known cover of
SotW, on the 1968
Super Session album. The highlights for me are the organ/guitar jams that punctuate this version. As the song develops, a horn section comes in with some great touches too. For me, as for many I imagine, this version is the yardstick against which subsequent covers must be measured:
And subsequent versions there are in abundance - here's a list which should explain why I'm not reviewing them all:
Spoiler for List of versions:
• Julie Driscoll covered the song in 1967 along with Brian Auger and the Trinity on their album Open.[citation needed]
• Al Kooper and Stephen Stills covered the song on their album Super Session in 1968; the album's other featured guitarist, Mike Bloomfield, performed a version with Kooper at a New York "Super Session" concert eventually released on disc in 2003 as The Lost Fillmore Concert Tapes 12-13-68, though a subsequent bootleg concert recording features Bloomfield declining requests for the song saying he disliked the song. The Kooper-Stills version has been sampled in a number of hip-hop songs. This version also features "Fast" Eddie Hoh on drums, who played on Donovan's original recording.[citation needed]
• Sam Gopal covered the song on their album Escalator.
• The acid rock band Vanilla Fudge achieved mild success with a cover of "Season of the Witch" on their album Renaissance in 1968.
• Terry Reid performed a ten-minute cover of this song on his 1968 debut album, Bang Bang, You're Terry Reid.
• Pesky Gee! (pre-Black Widow psychedelic rock band) covered the song on their album Exclamation Mark in 1969.
• Covered regularly by Alan Hull, Doug Griffin and John the Baptist on N.E. Folk Circuit in 1969-70.
• South-African psychedelic band Suck recorded a version of the song on their album Time to Suck in 1970.[6]
• Hole covered "Season of the Witch" during their MTV Unplugged session.[citation needed]
• Boston band Heretix covered the song on their EP AD in 1990.
• The alternative rock band Luna released it as a single (1996).
• The phony 'supergroup' The Masked Marauders performed the song on their lone LP, with vocals by Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger impersonators.
• A demo of the song appears on Jellyfish's Bellybutton & Spilt Milk Deluxe Reissues as well as the Fan Club (From the Rare to the Unreleased... And Back Again) box set.
• Covered by Robert Plant several times live. The first was in the medley "That's Why I'm In The Mood" in 1993, and in 1999 when he toured with his short lived project Priory of Brion.
• Covered By Dr. John on the Blues Brothers 2000 Soundtrack; Dr. John's version plays during the scene in which the band arrives at the swamp lands, and is featured on the soundtrack album.[citation needed]
• Lou Rawls recorded the song for his 1999 album Brotherman!: Lou Rawls Sings the Hits.
• Covered by the darkwave band Babylonian Tiles.
• Covered by Joan Jett on her released-in-Japan album Naked.
• Covered by Richard Thompson on the Crossing Jordan soundtrack album Jordan Crossing; this version was used in opening sequence of an episode of the television series, Crossing Jordan.
• Covered by Jenny Devivo on the Hed Kandi Nu Cool 4 album in 2000.
• Covered by Vanilla Fudge on the album The Return from 2002.
• Covered by Bobby Hughes (remix from Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Stephen Stills Super Session album) in May 2005
• The Strangelings included a cover of "Season of the Witch" on their album of the same name in 2007.
• Covered by Karen Elson as a b-side to her first single from her 2010 debut album
• Covered by poet and musician, Alan Pizzarelli as "Boneyard, Ghoul of the Blues" on his 2010 debut album, Voices from the Grave.
• Covered by the band Tea Leaf Green many times live.[citation needed]
• Covered by Mundy.
• Covered by the Chicago protopunk garage band Little Boy Blues, flip side to their 1967 release "Great Train Robbery".
• Covered by the folk singer Cindy Lee Berryhill on Straight Out of Marysville 1996.
• Covered by the Minneapolis-based alternative hip hop artist Astronautalis on the album Gazing with Tranquility: A Tribute to Donovan.
Just a couple of versions I'd like to mention quickly:
> Vanilla Fudge start out well enough, but when a solumn voice intones, “ And here we sit immersed in a liquid sea of love…” I was too embarrassed to continue.
> Dr. John’s version was disappointing; just the usual Dr.J treatment.
> Richard Thompson plays very well on a track made for a tv series.
> “Boneyard Ghoul of Blues” aka Alan Pizarelli creates a spooky atmosphere, stopping just short of parody:-
.....
So why is
SotW such a popular song among musicians? Well, we have actual musicians on MB who are invited to answer that question with more authority than me, but I did find this out:
i) Jimmy Page played the guitar on Donovan’s original, which is presumably why Led Zep regularly used it as their sound check/ warm up song when they were touring. That’s got to be pretty good publicity for a song.
ii)According to Mojo magazine: “ This song is ideal for long jams. The two main chords (A and D) are played during the verses, and during the chorus there are three chords (A, D and E).”
iii) Donovan again: "Season of the Witch continues to be a perennial influence because it allows a jam – not a 12-bar or Latin groove, but a very modern jam... it makes me very proud that I've created certain forms that other bands can get off on, to explore, be experimental, or just break the rules."