Jenny Boyd on Jennifer Juniper

In an extract of an extensive interview with Jenny Boyd she discusses George Harrison’s 1967 trip to Haight Ashbury, The Beatles in Rishikesh and Donovan writing ‘Jennifer Juniper’ for her.

So when did you become in the orbit of Donovan?

What happened was that in 1967, I decided I wanted to find out more about life and a friend of mine who lived in San Francisco said she was opening up a shop. “Would I like to come and help her with it?” I had enough money for three months rent or a one-way ticket to San Francisco. So I decided to go off and it was amazing. I would go and listen to all those amazing San Francisco bands, like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin. It was as if there was like a subculture and it was very different. Then I remember telling Pattie and George about it and saying, “You have to come over. This is incredible.” But by the time they came over, it was August and all the good hippies, real hippies had left and gone to Marin County or Sausalito. Instead, all the kids had been told to turn on tune in and drop out right across America.

So they were all in Haight Ashbury. Pattie and George arrived and then they wanted to take some acid before they went for their walk to get the vibe. It was all fine for about two minutes. Then suddenly all these people realised it was George. They just started following us and it got quite frightening because we were sort of pretty out of it anyway. I remember him sitting down in the Panhandle and someone said, “Oh, give him a guitar, give him a guitar.” And someone did. Everyone was shouting out going, “Play us some chords. Come on, George, play us some chords.” So George then went C, D, E, and gave the guitar away. Then we started walking back to the limo that wouldn’t come down Haight Ashbury. As we walked closer and closer to it, the crowds just got bigger and bigger and it started getting a little bit hostile. So they decided I’d been in San Francisco long enough, six months was long enough.

So I was staying with them for a while and Maharishi was actually giving a talk in the Hilton Hotel at that time. We all went to go and listen to him and he wanted us to go to Bangor in Wales to go and get initiated. So we’d be doing transcendental meditation, that was the idea. But then Brian Epstein died. And so we all had to come back early. I remember driving back with Pattie and George. As they dropped me out in London, George said, “Would you like to come to India with us? We’re going to Maharishi’s ashram”. I said, “This is amazing, how can I ever thank you?” And he said “Just be yourself.”

But there were two months we had to wait before we went to the ashram. They just were starting to open up the Apple shop and asked me if I would work there. While I was working there, Donovan came trotting down the stairs one day. I’d met him before. He wanted to know about San Francisco, meditation and all this kind of thing. Then he asked me to his manager’s house one day and he said he’d got a song for me. And he just started singing ‘Jennifer Juniper’. I was pretty shy in those days. So I didn’t know quite where to look because it was obviously a sort of declaration of love or obviously he’d got a crush. But it’s a lovely song and I often hear it. I hear people who’ve called their kids Juniper. For some reason, it really touched people.

You mentioned the Maharishi, another theme of your book is sources of creativity. In Rishikesh you had Donovan, The Beatles, Mike Love. It was the spark of so many great songs. You were there watching this play out.

Yes, we had our own little bungalow set of rooms and everybody else further down the track had theirs. John, Paul and George would get up onto the roof of the bungalow and Cynthia, Pattie and I, would sit there too.

I’d actually hear John come in and say, “Well, I didn’t sleep very well last night”. Then they’d start playing their guitars and start turning it into a song. That happened a lot. It happened with Prudence, Mia Farrow’s sister too. She’d overdone the meditation and gone into a sort of trance and nobody could get her out of it. So I went in there with my flute from San Francisco. And John was in there with his guitar singing ‘Dear Prudence’. ‘Bungalow Bill’was another song. Whatever was going on in the ashram, that’s what they made a song from. It was incredible, it’s like every day they’d be singing more songs.