‘Sunshine Superman’: The 1960s classic John Paul Jones thought sounded “awful”
Working as a session musician often involves arranging music that isn’t always top-tier. Artists depend on session players to elevate their performance and reveal something within themselves they didn’t know existed. However, there’s a limit to what can be achieved when the primary focus is simply on keeping everything in tune and maintaining the groove. While John Paul Jones was better suited to providing the low end to Led Zeppelin, he admitted that it was torturous trying to get the basis of Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ to work.
Then again, the entire session scene had started to change ever since the psychedelic movement began. The Beatles had broken down the rules as to what could be done in the studio, so it wasn’t out of the question to ask session musicians to play things in an unconventional way or play the bare minimum to get the sound they were hearing in their heads when they played.
It’s not like Jones wasn’t willing to go with the flow, either. He had been known for orchestrating beautiful pieces for The Rolling Stones like ‘She’s A Rainbow’, but as soon as he walked into the folksy singer-songwriter’s studio for ‘Sunshine Superman’, half of his job was playing janitor to get everything back in order.
As much as Donovan is known these days for his mellow tunes, he had already started moving towards something a bit heavier than his peers. For all of the great musicians rising up in his wake, there was no way that James Taylor was going to release a tune as ramshackle as ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ during his lifetime, but ‘Sunshine Superman’ had to have at least a little bit of that acidic sweetness.
According to Jones, though, what he was left with was a mess by the last arranger, saying, “The first Donovan session was a shambles, it was awful. It was ‘Sunshine Superman’ and the arranger had got it all wrong, so I thought, being the opportunist that I was, ‘I can do better than that’ and actually went up to the producer. He came around and said, ‘Is there anything we can do to sort of save the session?’ And I piped up, ‘Well, look how about if I play it straight?’”
That was far from the first uphill battle that Jones had to suffer through, either. When working on the following Donovan singles like ‘Mellow Yellow’, he remembered getting severe pushback from some of the hangers-on who were convinced that Donovan was moving too far away from his roots.
But this wasn’t just a matter of one songwriter changing. The entire culture of rock and roll was changing, and given that Jimmy Page showed up during a handful of sessions to play lead guitar on Donovan tracks, one half of Led Zeppelin may have ended up giving him a level of credibility he wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Then again, this was far from just a fly-by-night job for Jones. Considering where he would take Zeppelin, this was practically a breeding ground for the bassist, and once that first Zeppelin album, he had turned himself into one of the greatest arrangers in the music industry.
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