What’s going on in Season of the Witch?

Hi! Another audio thing to read and think about on a lazy Sunday.

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These Sunday things will deal less with the technical aspects of production and more with the creative, artsie fart side of making records and music. That was always my strong point in the studio, anyway.

This morning I was walking around Montreal, and the song “Season of the Witch” by the singer Donovan popped into my head. Maybe it was the temp I was walking at - that is my theory on why songs pop into your head: something about the rhythm in that moment is a trigger.

Season of the Witch was on Donovan’s Sunshine Superman album, which was his best charting effort. One of the first truly psychedelic albums, Sunshine Superman was very influenced by the times and also highly influential on the music coming after it, which included Sgt Peppers by the Beatles and the first Jimi Hendrix record.

There is a lot going on with this deceptively simple song.

The Recording

Recorded in the spring of 1966 at Columbia Studios in Hollywood, Season of the Witch is probably a four-track recording, but it could be an eight. Remember, though, at that time it was very common to cut things mostly live and to only use as many tracks as needed, so the recording might effectively be a five or a six-track. It’s got that fun, hard panning of tracks, with nothing recorded in stereo (see last week here). You can hear the parts very clearly, especially on headphones.

Donovan himself starts the song off, playing the very simple progression on a very chunky chinky sounding telecaster. There’s no riff, per se, just the chords played in a very rhythmic way - they sound more like drums than a guitar. And when the drums come in, the hi-hat plays off the guitar wonderfully and there’s a great ticky tappy sort of groove. Listen for it. The song was cut mostly live, with an overdubbed lead vocal and perhaps an additional guitar.

Huge Bass, for 1966

The bass is HUGE, especially for 1966. Huge bass was just starting to become a thing, started by The Beatles in 1964 with songs like Ticket to Ride and I Feel Fine, and of course, then Rain and Paperback Writer. Donovan was friends with the Beatles and probably heard test pressings of Rain before he went to California to record what is one of the first truly psychedelic albums, Sunshine Superman.

The engineers at Columbia at first wouldn’t cut the bass the way producer Mickie Most wanted it — hot to tape and pushing the VU meters over 0dB nominal and “into the red.” They were afraid of breaking equipment. Most had to threaten their jobs (he had a lot of industry clout at the time), and they finally gave in. The resulting sound is compressed and round and fat — it’s a great bass sound and a simple, memorable bass line by a session player named Bobby Ray.

Quick thought on studio procedures back then. Studios were commercial enterprises and run really tightly. Often much of the gear in the studio was built by the people who operated it (hence the term “engineer”) and if something blew up, it could put the studio down for days. There also wasn’t a lot of spare equipment in the studio at that time. If the compressor wasn’t working, that could be one of two or three in the entire complex. Blowing up stuff was a big problem back then.

Let the tempo breathe

Pay attention to the ebb and flow of the tempo. Too many records are cut these days so fucking tight, quantized to death against a click. It’s boring and the song doesn’t “breathe" along with the structure and the lyrics. On this recording, the tempo tracks the journey of the song. Drummer “Fast Eddie” Hot, who was a major studio player at the time, lays back on the verses, starts picking up the tempo on the pre-chorus and pushes through the chorus itself. But note at the end of the chorus: he does a fill and slightly increases the spacing between each snare hit to bring the song back in tempo such that the verse is again laid back. This is something that’s hard to program. Listen for it and you’ll see how well it works. Stewart Copeland does similar things on Police records. In fact, any good band with a good drummer would do such a thing. Eddie Hoh was a monster that no one remembers.

At about 3:15, as the song rolls into the chorus yet again, someone dubbed in a really loose, totally sloppy loud guitar part. It lasts for maybe four measures and then vanishes and never comes back! Did they use an entire track on it??

How to sing when you’re not a great singer

Donovan doesn’t have a particularly powerful or wide-ranging voice, but he uses it well and gets the maximum mileage and character out of it. This is a great vocal. He switches between a clipped, spoken delivery in the verses and into his barely stable upper range on choruses. His voice gets thin and wheezy up there with a very plaintive quality. The desperation and angst in it, especially in the choruses is wonderful. Notice too how he ends every single vocal line slightly differently. Sometimes he cuts off the word “witch" to pop out the CH, and it fits in with the clicks of the guitars. At other times he elides it and makes it longer. The important thing here is he doesn’t strive to make everything the same each time. It's like how Jeff Beck plays: he never does the same thing twice. It's so much more interesting than picking up a part and moving it all over the place using cut and paste. Donovan might have cut the vocal in a take or two and it might have been while he laid down his guitar part. A great vocal doesn’t have to be labored and picked over.

On lyrics

The opening lyric...
When I look out my window
Many sights to see
...was somehow perfect for walking around the neighborhood, passing strangers and people in restaurant windows.

The next lyric...
And when I look in my window
So many different people to be
...interesting. Donovan is setting up an external world/internal world sort of thing. In fact, through the entire song, he’s really singing about himself, but there isn’t a lot of I I I Me Me Me I feel I feel I feel I feel crap to the song. It’s not self-absorbed.

A lot of the imagery is just plain old strange:
You’ve got to pick up every stitch
Two rabbits running in the ditch.
Wheat mix out to make things rich.
You've got to pick up every stitch
The rabbits running in the ditch
Beatniks are out to make it rich
Oh no must be the season of the witch

It does strike me as being just a bunch of stuff that rhymes, which I usually hate, but against the music it works. It’s really about the repeated “Chuh Chuh Chuh” sound of the CH at the end of each phase, and how that fits in with the guitar. Wheat mix... I think this is a reference to Weetabix?

Often, good lyrics don’t have to make a lot of sense. What they have to do is serve as a container into which a person can flow their own ideas. Think of the lyrics as a cup and the emptiness of the cup is what is valuable, really. What good is a cup you can’t drink from? The value is in what you can put into the cup. There’s a lot of space in these lyrics. For me, the song was about walking through the neighborhood and strangers. The reality of what Donovan was up to is entirely different.

Season of the Witch isn’t Halloween season and pumpkin spice: it’s about Donovan looking out of his window in 1966 and seeing drug dealers moving into his neighborhood. Hard drugs starting to infiltrate the rock and folk scenes in England and in the US. Things were moving beyond pot and into heroin and it was ominous to him. It did not bode well. The police started cracking down on any sort of drug offense. Six months after Season of the Witch was released, Donovan himself was busted for marijuana possession and it was in all the papers.

In 1966, getting busted for pot would be the press equivalent these days to being caught naked with a member of Congress. It would be the kind of thing that could cost a musician their career. There were a bunch of drug busts in the mid-60s – Donovan, Keith Richards, John Lennon. Now there are dispensaries all over the place and it’s basically legalized. Times have changed.

In 1966, he’d have been censored by the record company for lyrics like “drug dealers are in my neighborhood” and the album wouldn’t have ever gotten released. So he encoded his ideas, and the fun for us in decoding the lyrics is that we find our own things. That’s how art is supposed to work. Of course today, one can write a song called Wet Ass Pussy. Times have changed.

Remakes and spin-offs

Season of the Witch wasn’t a hit, but it has been remade a number of times, most notably on the album Supersession by organist Al Kooper and guitarist Steve Stills. Some excellent wha wha guitar on this particular remake - tons of things to steal.

And of course, there is a Nick Cage movie that sorta sucks with the same title as the song. Season of the Witch is a fantastic phrase.

Bruce: Maury - I have a great title: Season of the Witch. Whadda ya think?

Maury: I love it! It has potential! I’m seeing... a hot girl turning into an ugly witch!

Bruce: I love it. Subliminal. It’s about marriage.

Maury: Yes! But with swords! Quick! Call Nick Cage’s manager!

So, have a listen on headphones. What ideas can you steal? What do the lyrics pull up for you?

And more:  do you want these things delivered earlier in the morning? Something to read over coffee and a croissant, in keeping with a lazy Sunday?

Have a great week. Hopefully you get your butt into the studio a bit.