Jim Donahue, folk singer and friend

Jim Donahue died recently. I remember first hearing him play guitar, a Gandalf like character, with the good magic of Tolkien. It was the deep muffled strum that caught my attention, so powerful and regular that it sounded like eternity’s  freight train . He played a few chords with that magnificent strum and may as well have had a symphony to accompany his deep melodious voice.
Then one night I heard him play a classical guitar piece, one of the classics,   it might have been Handel. It was so  amazing to hear that wondrously intricate heavenly sound watching adept fingers span the whole neck of the guitar. This was years before the ‘unplugged’ era.  It was the time of electric rock and roll ‘lead’ guitar rifts, the most famous being Jimmy Hendrix’s. Yet every once in a while Jim would break off from his  set of Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger type songs and throw in a ‘lead’ that would have pleased the Edge.
He was so inspired.  Mystical and spiritual.  A modern day Hurdy Gurdy man.  He was also a guildsman musician, an old master of his craft, his instrument and voice.  He was a true artist who’d be at home with the Travelling Wilburys, Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. There was a humility about him too. And wisdom. He’d tell stories between songs, Zen, Socratic, Apostolic.
I had helped organize the YWCA “Wise Eye Coffeehouse” at the time.  The going rate for a  singer was $10 a set and the best like Jim , the real draw for a night, might get as much as a $100.  I doubt Neil Young who was playing the same circuit at that time got more.  The coffee houses didn’t serve booze.   Booze was where the owners made their money to pay the talent better. I MC’d the coffeehouse and hired the sets mixing and matching entertainment. Like the night Downchild Blues and Jim played together and the building rocked.
Around the same time I was on Vincent Massey’s High School Student Council with Wes Hazlitt. Carey Asselstine and I were in charge of publicity and entertainment.   We hired the Guess Who that year for our high school dance for $500, a tad before Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman made their millions.
Jim had been in Toronto in the late 60’s. His name was on coffeehouse billboards, in varying orders with Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot.  I asked him once why he’d not made the big record deal contracts.  I knew he’d had the offers.  “The record companies are just business.” He told me.  “It’s all about the money. They didn’t want the musician as much as they wanted his soul. ”  
Jim was a free spirit.  Creative and unfettered. He really would rather be poor as he often was than be contained in some gilded cage or limosine. Not that he wasn’t occasionally caught like the elusive butterfly he was. More than once a truly lovely young lady captured his heart and brought him in from the wild, befriending and mothering him till the inevitable day he left to follow his muse.    He spoke so gently of his mother and his loving creative sister was his very good friend.
I laughed later when his brilliant younger musician brother, Dan Donahue, after making his own perfect record ‘Long Distance Runner” stopped selling his soul to the company store. Instead he began to produce with a sense of what Abbey Road Studio and George Martin did for the Beatles. I loved his contribution to the incredible Bruce Coburn. The Donahues celebrated originality rather than the ‘as like’ factory approach that Joni Mitchell called ‘stoking the fan making machinery behind the popular song.’
Music in that day was about ‘raising consciousness’ ,”finding meaning”, ‘knowing”. The Vietnam War was threatening to become WWIII.  There was an intensity in art.  Visual art had dominated the world in an earlier age with Picasso, Dali and Munch  but this was the era of music with Jim Donahue a regular monk of the day.  So often he’d close a set with the Quaker song, “May the Long Time Sunshine Always Surround you and the Pure Light within you guide your way home.”
We didn’t have contemporary sheet music in the early days and songs were passed along word of mouth or someone would listen to the radio and try to write out the lyrics each time a song was played. Without Jim Donahue I expect it would have been years before Winnipeggers heard the likes of Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire  or Dylan’s “All Along the Watch Tower’.  The kids call it ‘playing covers’ today. But Jim was a wandering minstrel of the day literally introducing us to songs and musicians and ideas that simply weren’t mainstream.  He was so much ahead of his times.
He stayed with me for months one year. It was a particularly tough time in his life and mine.  He’d put aside alcohol after a betrayal and  binge. He was smoking marijuana instead. I’d been injured in a major accident and separated. Late into the night we’d talk philosophy, politics and theology with our visiting genius Jewish friend. I had an East Indian Harmonium.  There was a blizzard raging outside in the Winnipeg winter while Jim like George Harrison filled the space with chants from every tradition.
It was years later we’d meet up again in Vancouver. We’d go for lunch and talk about the ‘times’ mostly.  I loved to hear his tales, He really was a Seanchai, that traditional Gaelic storyteller/historian whose insights are so deeply intuitive.
I will miss him as so many tens of thousands will.  Before Facebook and Instagram and social media he was the “unplugged”  man who had a million hits.

Iraklio, Crete - Dec. 6, 2012

The flight was only a half hour. Landing reminded me of Tinia and the other island landings I've made. Sea on one side land on the other. We were down. Windy on the tarmac. My hair blowing every which way. A day I should have worn a pony tail. We all crossed from the plane to a bus that took us all not very far to the terminal. We could have walked but the bus was a nice touch.

My Europeia car rental person wasn't there when I arrived. The plane had arrived early. I didn’t realize this so walked across the street to a Eurocar place where the girl told me that they were a different company. The major trouble with Greek is not only do I not know the language but the alphabet has alot of different letters and the words are often multisyllabled. My mind gets lazy and registers only the beginning parts I recognise. This has caused me reading maps and driving no end of misery with trying to remember and find roads. GPS would be the answer but the fellow at the car rental says gps works well in cities like Athens but not elsewhere. My bet is the maps aren’t accurate just like on West Coast Vancouver Island when my gps had me sailing a mile overland.

When I returned the young black haired Europeia man was there with a sign showing my name, just as Hannah my assistant, had written there’d be. We signed the contract. It was in Greek but he insisted that all the insurance for everything and everyone else that was possible for a car was covered and included. We then walked me to the lot where there was a little Kia. "I had a ford fiesta a bit like this in Israel," I said. He gave me the keys. I later wondered if the Greek contract had life insurance.
So far I've only had one near death experience, a near head on collision as the sun was in my eyes and both I and the other driver were too much in the centre of the road coming around a hillside corner. Now that’s holiday adventure. The gas tank was empty but the gas station attendant was really helpful. $40 Euro for a tank of gas. 1 Euro is about 1.3 US dollars.

I was booked into Kronus Hotel, a very fine hotel indeed, right on the seaway a short ways up from the 16th century fort. I didn't have a map or gps and the only one of the 2 streets turned out to be on the map the car folk gave me. I was convinced also some enterprising surviving Japanese came to Crete and set up the Kamikazee motorcycle school which continues to this day. I was told to ask directions. This is hard to do from a car, in a foreign language. There was absolutely no parking. Crete is wall to wall parked cars and motorcycles, with occasionally one lane for driving, that must be shared with passing motorcycles, pedestrians, on coming cars and the occasional dog or cat. I drove around for an hour after filling the empty tank. Finally finding a place to stop I was told it was by the fort beyond the 'little boats'. That was the marina I'd passed several times. There was the fort that had held of the Turks for some time and sure enough there was Kronus Hotel.

I was getting irritable (on vacation)  by the time I found it, praying to God and thinking that this town reminded me of Honolulu, Cozumel or LA. It had that rich kid vacation vibe too with lots of tourism motif. This was off season. Apparently in the summer there are 10 times the people and vehicles. I can imagine it. A traffic jam of monumental proportions in paradise. I was reduced to stop and start often a 2 km hour in the town as it was. On the other hand it was noon and in the morning and evening I found things thinned out. I was not like this either in the countryside and towns there. Taxis are everywhere in the town and it's easy to walk all over the downtown area. Lonely Planet recommends buses and taxis. I think the way to go would be by far the scooter.

 After dropping off my bag in the very nice room with great little balcony I returned to the car following the well laid out signs to the Knossus Palace site. I arrived at 3 pm just when it closed. I was miffed.Fortunately the gift shop was open and I could bought a classic hand made Cretan male knife with handle carved from goat bone and a gold bull's head. I'd heard in Athens about these special Cretan knives all the men had. Now I had one. I also bought a guide book of the Palace which I planned to study before going to the excavations. It brings back undergrad as memories are constantly being tweaked. I'm so looking forward to seeing the dolphin fresco and the griffins, I bought a small tera cotta of the snake goddess, the topless Minoan woman so appropriately attired. Civilization has gone down hill since it began in Crete.

 I drove south into the interior arriving at the Monastery Elafonfries. This was a beautiful site. So peaceful, serene and sacred. I felt God here in that special way one does in monasteries. I put it down to all the prayer and meditation that has gone on and goes on here. In the chapel I met a sweet little old lady who came up to my navel. She beamed and rattled on to me in Greek, not a word of what I understood.

I drove across the country with it's wine fields and olive fields and now some industrial windmills looking like the latest crop. Each little village still had people and dated back to time immemorial. I reflected how this was just an 'island' comunity, like Salt Spring Island or Vancouver would be if it had 5000 years of human habitation, with armies invading routinely I was glad to gt back to the hotel.

I've just had a lovely meal at Restaurant Pantheon. The town comes alive at night in a very attractive way. Stores are open, markets doing business, people ambling about the streets, a band playing classic big band anthems. I certainly can see the appeal and frankly envy the rich kids these days whose parents send them here for vacation. I'd like a summer here. I'd sing Carey too, feeling nostalgia for the days when Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were in the islands. I’d dance in Zorba the Greek's village which I drove by earlier in the night too. As it is I’m thankful for this trip and time.

It’s like putting faces to names I’ve known for a very long time. I'm really loving it.