Donovan Quotes

England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren't individual to myself.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

The whole 'anniversary of punk' thing really compounded what I thought was wrong. I was so disillusioned. I remember thinking, 'I don't want anything to do with this.'

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen. It was so exciting. You had a social depression going on in the U.K. There was a sanitation strike. London was really grim, gray. You had Margaret Thatcher coming in. It was a really revolutionary time.

Woodstock was not about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was about spirituality, about love, about sharing, about helping each other, living in peace and harmony.

In many ways, I have no idea what would have become of me if punk hadn't happened, because the '70s turned out to be so stale, and so boring, and so backward compared to what had come just before. We were too young to have fully experienced the '60s and the fervor of the anti-war movement.

I'm tired of all these hippie jack-offs

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.

When I was young in the 1960s, all the world watched the youth. Everywhere was the sensation of wanting to break the chains but to do something beautiful. It is my privilege to have beauty always near me.

My dad has seen and done a lot. He comes from the hippie era where music and living life to the fullest is more important than stability and playing by the rules.

That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.

I've always been enthralled with chaos and mayhem musically, and I loved speaking out and challenging stuff, and I thought, why is my music not representing this?

I'm a hippie child of the '60s. What drives me crazy about mass media entertainment is that it's so often devoid of any ideas.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.