Donovan

Today's featured artist is the best solo singer/sonwriter in the UK in the 60s. He's from Scotland, and like another fabulous singer from Scotland, Lulu, he's widely known only by his first name: Donovan. He earns this presentation because of a very good gay favorite he wrote. The fact that he also wrote some of the best songs in the 60s doesn't hurt either. Let's go!

Donovan Philips Leitch was on born 10 May 1946. "I lived in Glasgow (the Maryhill district), although there was more Irish in my family than Scots", he recounts. His father was Protestant and his mother was Catholic. He contracted polio as a child, which left him with a limp.

"I just heard nothing but songs all the time. Somebody would put a chair in the middle of the room, and sing their song. That happened at parties, birthdays, funerals, weddings, births - somebody would go into the middle of the room, and there would always be songs. And then when I was ten we moved down to England. My father moved us down as part of the mid-1950s migrations. People were leaving the industrial cities and coming down to the new towns around London. So my Dad moved us into Hatfield, and that's when I heard Buddy Holly and I went - 'aaah, this is incredible!"

"And so - Buddy Holly was a great influence, but then I went to further education college, and immediately met bohemia and I said "this is where I belong. This is bohemia. The girls look better. The guys dress better. There's art, there's poetry, and the music is better." In the school I'd been to - a secondary modern school, the only instruments they had were a recorder and a tambourine. And y'know - once a month, they had us bang the tambourine and try to blow the whistle. They called it a music lesson! They had no idea about what they were trying to do. So when I went to further education college the world of art lay before me. And that's when I first heard Woody Guthrie and Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger."

In 1963, he made a pivotal journey to St. Ives, Cornwall, with Gypsy Dave, and in 1964, they travelled to Manchester together. In late 1964 Donovan had been signed up to a record label and asked Dave to accompany him on his first tour. Donovan wrote To Try for the Sun and Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness) about his time with Gypsy Dave. Both songs, and especially the first, were enveloped in a discreet homoerotic atmosphere. Donovan's view on the subject:

"I brought in the 'feminised male'... in my songs, the songs which I sang. I used words like 'beautiful' and 'lovely' and 'kind' - and they were usually attributed to the feminine part of our race. As if only women had those emotions. And men don't. Why is that? I account that to two World Wars and the Depression. When men were put in uniform, had their hair cut off, were de-humanised, demoralised, given weapons to kill, until all softness and all humanity was sort-of squeezed out of them. And I brought that back in the 1960s into songs. And at first they thought I must be gay. Gypsy Dave will tell you - half my audience in New York and San Francisco at a couple of early concerts were gay, and they were knocking the doors down to meet me. And I'm saying 'yeah yeah yeah, I'm hetero guys, I'm actually hetero, but I understand exactly where you're coming from.'"

The lyrics of To Try for the Sun certainly feel like they have a direct connection to me - and I'm gay. Judge for yourselves:

We stood in the windy city,

The gypsy boy and I.

We slept on the breeze in the midnight

With the raindrop and tears in our eyes.

And who's going to be the one

To say it was no good what we done?

I dare a man to say I'm too young,

For I'm going to try for the sun.

We huddled in a derelict building

And when he thought I was asleep

He laid his poor coat round my shoulder,

And shivered there beside me in a heap.

And who's going to be the one

To say it was no good what we done?

I dare a man to say I'm too young,

For I'm going to try for the sun.

We sang and cracked the sky with laughter,

Our breath turned to mist in the cold.

Our years put together count to thirty,

But our eyes told the dawn we were old.

And who's going to be the one

To say it was no good what we done ?

I dare a man to say I'm too young,

For I'm going to try for the sun.

Mirror, mirror, hanging in the sky,

Won't you look down what's happening here below?

I stand here singing to the flowers,

So very few people really know.

And who's going to be the one

To say it was no good what we done?

I dare a man to say I'm too young,

For I'm going to try for the sun.

We stood in the windy city

The gypsy boy and I.

We slept on the breeze in the midnight,

With the raindrop and tears in our eyes.

And who's going to be the one

To say it was no good what we done ?

I dare a man to say I'm too young,

For I'm going to try for the sun.

In Hey Gyp, Donovan mixes the genders in a playful way, alternating between "Just give me some of your love, gal" and "Just give me some of your love, man", in way that makes you unsure about who's singing what to whom. And why did he call it Hey Gyp and dedicate it to Dave? Strange...

Hey Gyp was the B-side to his 4th single, Turqoise, while To Try for the Sun was an album track on his 2nd album, Fairytale. Both were released in 1965.

Let's go back a bit; In late 1964, he was offered a management and publishing contract by Pye Records. His first single, Catch the Wind, revealed the influence of Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who had also influenced Bob Dylan. Dylan comparisons followed for some time. Catch the Wind peaked at #4 in the UK, #5 in Australia and #23 in the US.

His 1st album, called What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid, was released in May 1965. It received good reviews and made #3 in the UK.

Another song that stood out was the opening track, Josie:

His 2nd album, Fairytale, also released in 1965, was even better; Colours was the lead single: it peaked #4 in the UK.

Colours and To Try for the Sun weren't the only good songs in Fairytale. In Ballad Of Geraldine he is writing through female personae, writing with sensitivity from a female point of view, a third person short story approach that no-one else - not even Dylan, had attempted till then.

Universal Soldier was written by Buffy Sainte-Marie in 1964, but it was Donovan who made it a hit: it peaked at #5 in the UK and at #13 in Australia.

Turquoise was a UK-single-only release and peaked at #30:

In late 1965, Donovan split with his original management and signed with Ashley Kozak, who was working for Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises. Kozak introduced Donovan to American impresario Allen Klein (later manager of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles). Klein in turn introduced Donovan to producer Mickie Most, who had chart-topping productions with The Animals, Lulu, and Herman's Hermits. Most produced all Donovan's recordings during this period, although Donovan said in his autobiography that some recordings were self-produced, with little input from Most. Their collaboration produced successful singles and albums, recorded with London session players including Big Jim Sullivan (Tom Jones' band), Jack Bruce (Cream), Danny Thompson (Pentangle), and future Led Zeppelin members John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page.

By 1966, Donovan had shed the Dylan/Guthrie influences and had become one of the first British Pop musicians to adopt flower power. He immersed himself in Jazz, Blues, Eastern music, and the new generation of counterculture-era US West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead. He was entering his most creative phase as a songwriter and recording artist, working with Mickie and with arranger, musician, and Jazz fan John Cameron. Their first collaboration was Sunshine Superman, one of the first Psychedelic Pop records. The title track would go all the way to #1 in the US, #2 in the UK, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, #4 in Ireland, #7 in Germany, and #9 in France. But it didn't come easy. Let's hear what Donovan has to say about it:

"Sunshine Superman was very important. A #1 in America was extraordinary; it was more extraordinary than that because the record had sat in the courts for nine months (in a legal dispute), which means that I made the Sunshine Superman album in late-1965 and early-1966. Which, by the way, was a year-and-a-half before Sergeant Pepper... - and Sunshine Superman just sat there. My producer Mickie Most said "don't play advance copies of this to Paul (McCartney)," but of course I played it to Paul, because we make our records for our peers - did you know that? We don't really make them for the audience. First, we make them for us, then for our peers. Also I was the first to be targeted by the drug squad. I was busted, and following me was the Stones, The Beatles, and lots of other people. So we just said 'forget all that Court Case stuff' - and we buggered off, Gypsy and I. We went back on the road. And then - we were in Greece. We were in Greece living on one shilling, and threepence a day in a deserted island with no hotels, the island of Paros in the Cyclades.

I was actually already writing the next album - Mellow Yellow, although I didn't know I was writing the next album, 'cos I didn't know I'd make another album. "Days of wine and roses, are distant days for me,/ I dream of the last and the next affair and girls I'll never see,/ and here I sit, a retired writer in the sun." (Writer in the Sun). And it really felt like that. I was there, I had my books, and I was writing songs. And we were there until we got a telephone call that took three days to come through; because that was the way it was in those days. There was only one telephone on the island. Gypsy and I took the call in a taverna and my manager said "come back to Athens immediately, your record is finally released and it's #1 all over the world." So we took out what money we had and we put it on the table and it added up to… like, nothing. We couldn't even afford to get the tramp steamer back to Athens. Then the taverna-owner saw a portable record-player/ tape-recorder that I'd brought in a briefcase - one of the first out of Japan. We had three records; I had [The Beatles] Rubber Soul, Leonard Cohen, and my white album - not 'white album', but my white-label first demo-pressing version of Sunshine Superman. And he looked at the record player and he said "how much for the record player?" So we sold the record player for the steamer-ticket back to Athens where the first class tickets were waiting. So - I waved goodbye to that Greek island, but, I realised I was waving goodbye to a way of life I would never live again. And that was a great sad farewell to a bohemian side of me. Then we were back in business again..."

Also in that album is The Fat Angel, which was written for Mama Cass. It was later covered by the Jefferson Airplane.

Season of the Witch, a great song, was covered by many, more successfully by Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, and by Vanilla Fudge.

Guinevere was a token of Donovan's fascination with medieval themes. In this version he collaborates with Shawn Phillips:

On 9 February 1967, Donovan was among guests invited by the Beatles to Abbey Road Studios for the orchestral overdub for A Day in the Life, the finale to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The follow-up album, Mellow Yellow, was released in the US in March 1967, and was as successful, critically as well as commercially. The lead single, the title track, was a #19 hit in the US. Paul McCartney can be heard as one of the background revellers on this track, but contrary to popular belief, it is not McCartney whispering the "quite rightly" answering lines in the chorus, but rather Donovan himself. The "electrical banana" mentioned in the song is a yellow vibrator.

Writer in the Sun was one of the songs written in the island of Paros:

Young Girl Blues was written for his wife Linda, who - basically, walked away from modeling.

Donovan's thoughts on fame:

"Well, it was fun to begin with. And... although I took it as an accolade, and - in a way, the success I deserved, 'cos I'd worked so hard on my 'masterpiece', none of us - The Beatles, the Stones, I - or any of us, expected that kind of mania. I talked to Lennon, and I talked to Joni Mitchell about it - did you intend it, do you actually want to do this? It wasn't a stroke of luck all the way, was it? You wanted to do it. So we knew we were going to do this. But the shock was, the amount of the success. Until it got - it became dangerous for the fans, and for us. We had to invent security systems for the fans, and us, and really - we had to invent what they call 'minders' to look after us, but in looking after us, also looking after the audience. 'Cos the police used to bring dogs and when the audience got excited they'd set the dogs on them! Things like this... That was scary. That the actual fans were being treated like that... Yet I took it on, as all my contemporaries did. Took on the mission to introduce bohemian ideas to popular culture. Because bohemia provides the possible cures for the illness of society... Karl Jung - the psychologist says "the modern societies of the world suffer from a grand complex which has been imposed upon them for thousands of years by church and state." That situation had to be addressed. We didn't realise the un-tapped restraint that the world had endured in the 1950s, the conventions, the conditioning, all that was breaking, we were breaking it! So - there's a calling. And we were called. With the result that now, what's let loose upon the world is freedom. Freedom to express yourself in any form that you want... And that's what the 1960s were. It's a door that was opened. Doors of perception... That was Aldous Huxley's book - The Doors Of Perception. And the American band The Doors took their name from that book."

There were two stand-alone singles in 1967. The first was released only in the US, where it made #19. Epistle to Dippy was written in the form of an open letter to an old school friend; the song had a strong pacifist message in addition to its florid psychedelic imagery. The real "Dippy" was, at the time, serving in the British Army in Malaysia. He heard the song, contacted Donovan and left the army as a result.

Next single was There Is A Mountain (#8 UK, #11 US). The Allman Brothers Band's Mountain Jam (from Eat a Peach, 1972) is a long, improvised jam song based on this song. The Grateful Dead also sometimes incorporated it.

The next album was A Gift from a Flower to a Garden. It was the first double album of Donovan's career and one of the first box sets in Rock music. Wear Your Love Like Heaven made #23 in the US. The song mentions seven dye and pigment colours: Prussian blue, Scarlet, Crimson, Havana lake, Carmine (color), Rose carmethene and Alizarin crimson.

Follow-up album, The Hurdy Gurdy Man (1968), included hit single Jennifer Juniper (UK #5, Australia #16, US #26). The track was written about Jenny Boyd, sister of Pattie Boyd, while they were all with The Beatles in Rishikesh. She married Mick Fleetwood and was, at one time, the sister-in-law of George Harrison and, later, Eric Clapton. Layla was written for Pattie. Both sisters inspired two classic songs. Jennifer Juniper features a wind section with oboe, flute, and bassoon. The last stanza of the song is sung in French.

Also in this album (being the title track), Hurdy Gurdy Man not only was a big hit single (UK #4, US and Australia #5), it was also the unofficial birth of Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham all appear on the record. Plant is the only one missing.

This wasn't on the album, but appeared as a bonus track on later CD editions. What a Beautiful Creature You Are was a track recorded by Donovan featuring fellow Scot Lulu, during The Hurdy Gurdy Man sessions 67-68:

Laléna was a US single-only, peaking at #33. The song was inspired by the actress Lotte Lenya. The song's lyrics, addressed to a societally marginalized woman, were Donovan's reaction to Lenya's character in the film version of The Threepenny Opera. It was very successfully covered by the Deep Purple.

The next album, in 1969, was Barabajagal. The first single off it was a double-A-sided single. Both sides were included in the album. The A-side in the US (#7) is an anti-war song called To Susan On The West Coast, Waiting.

The A-side in the UK is a beautiful song called Atlantis. In Donovan's words:

"Atlantis was kind-of a prose poem, I suppose... More of a kind of declamation... Yeah, like a prose poem. Most of my poems are rhymed, 'cos my father taught me how to listen to poetry. Donald was his name. He was a self-taught, well-read man. And he read - didn't he just! He read poetry again and again. And from the age of two, he read to me constantly. He read me everything. Celtic visions. And visionary poetry... In fact - it was my daily bread-and-butter. I just took it in my stride. I didn't think listening to great poems was anything different from going to see cartoons. And so reading my Atlantis piece was very natural for me. Because my father used to get up and read to the family."

His next single, Barabajagal, (UK #12, Australia #28, US #36) was a collaboration with The Jeff Beck Group. In an interview, Donovan explained that the song title was an invented word and had been inspired by the phrase “goo goo ga joob" from The Beatles’song I Am the Walrus.

Barabajagal would be Donovan's last hit single. There would be good songs later, though. Like Riki Tiki Tavi (1970):

Celia of the Seals (1971):

in 1972, Donovan wrote the music and songs, as well as starred in the movie Pied Piper. Here's People Call Me The Pied Piper:

During the same year, he wrote songs for Zeffirelli's film Brother Sun, Sister Moon:

Cosmic Wheels (1973) was his last hit album. Here is the title track:

From the same album, here's Maria Magenta:

While Donovan was recording Cosmic Wheels, Alice Cooper was recording their 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies in the same studio. Alice Cooper guitarist Michael Bruce suggested asking Donovan to sing co-lead on the title track with Alice Cooper himself. Donovan agreed, and the resulting song helped propel Billion Dollar Babies to #1 in the US.

In 1974 he released Rock and Roll Souljer:

The last song for today is a song from 1977, appropriately titled Dare To Be Different. 3 members of Smokie are on backing vocals:

Still, Donovan never stopped working: In 1990 Donovan released a live album featuring new performances of his classic songs. A tribute album to Donovan, Island of Circles, was released by Nettwerk in 1991. The 2-CD boxed set Troubadour: The Definitive Collection 1964–1976 (1992) continued the restoration of his reputation, and was followed by the 1994 release of Four Donovan Originals, which saw his four classic Epic LPs on CD in their original form for the first time in the UK. He found an ally in rap producer and Def Jam label owner Rick Rubin and recorded an album called Sutras (1996) for Rubin's American Recordings label.

A new album, Beat Cafe, in 2004, marked a return to the jazzy sound of his 1960s recordings and featured bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Jim Keltner, with production by John Chelew (Blind Boys of Alabama). In January 2007, Donovan played at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC, at Alice Tully Hall, in New York City, and at the Kodak Theatre, in Los Angeles, in conjunction with a presentation by film maker David Lynch supporting the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and world peace. The concert at the Kodak Theatre was filmed by Raven Productions and broadcast on Public television as a pledge drive. Donovan's partnership with the David Lynch Foundation saw him performing concerts through October 2007, as well as giving presentations about Transcendental meditation. He appeared at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, in May 2007, and toured the UK with David Lynch in October 2007. Donovan is certainly a tireless "Rock and Roll Souljer".