Come Along for the Ride

Song 270: If you feel like taking a ride, this week's playlist track is really The Trip by Donovan, who also wrote the song. I mentioned in my post for Song 267 (Somebody to Love) about hearing the Donovan album Sunshine Superman at some point in the months following its release, but however I managed to hear it, I did not have regular access to the LP until a few years later when, as a college kid, I began to slowly build my own album collection, quickly adding Sunshine Superman to that group. I could find good things to say about every cut on the record, which frequently took a spin on my turntable, but this track soon scored a spot near the top of my preferences. I often tried to sing along with it, but, in that long ago era before online lyric searches, I could only guess at some of the words. I did enjoy the reference to Dylan, coupled with a Mad Hatter image, and the line about Joanie that follows which sounded like an allusion to Joan Baez and some sort of sly hint about the nature of the connection between those two. I also felt proud of the fact that I knew who Fellini was, and could name a couple of his movies that I'd seen, but many of the other lyrics eluded my grasp. I could hear the chorus quite well, though, and if you listen to it a few times, and then check out my song Under the Table, you may notice a certain similarity between Donovan's chorus and mine, and I will admit that this similarity is more than mere coincidence. Luckily, I got saved from having my chorus sound too much like The Trip by the "Down, down, down" background vocal part that spontaneously showed up the first time I played my newly-written piece for a songwriting circle of friends -- a guy who I didn't even know very well just started adding that part to the chorus as I was going along, and it sounded so good to me that it naturally became part of my song, disguising the Donovan influence to such a degree that, if I didn't point it out, probably no one would notice. My lyrical question is a bit more pointed than his, though -- he asks "What goes on all around me?" and says "Please tell me" whereas I want to know "What goes down under the table?" and I say "Don't tell me any fables." However, that difference might be due to the fact that I haven't had the experience of getting "caught in a colored shower" while "driving downtown L.A. about the midnight hour" and perhaps if I had, my question might have come out sounding more like his. On a side note, I do plan to have a lyric video of Under the Table posted to YouTube some time in the next 2 weeks or so.