To pop music fans of a certain age, mention of the name Donovan conjures up not only a body of music represented by songs such as “Mellow Yellow,” “Sunshine Superman,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and “Atlantis,” but also an entire era, the second half of the 1960s, with its experimentation, its political awareness and its idealism. Donovan's persona embodied all those characteristics, and his music expressed them. “I wanted to show my generation's hopes and wishes for a future, for a change,” he says more than two decades later. “I wanted to shed light on the subjects and on the ideas that I'd learned in bohemia. I wanted to spread them around the world because of their positiveness.”
  And spread them around the world is exactly what he did. From 1965 to 1969, Donovan was a major commercial success, and in the '70s, though slightly less active, he continued to record frequently while branching out into film scoring and acting and theatrical presentations. Into the '80s, he still toured periodically, and by the start of the '90s, his work had begun to influence a whole new generation of musicians, leading to the release of the tribute album Island Of Circles.
  Donovan himself put out his first new album in eight years in 1991, a recording of vintage live performances called Donovan Rising in the U.K. and The Classics Live in the U.S. In 1992, he was given the boxed set treatment, with Sony Music's Legacy division issuing the two-CD/cassette retrospective Troubadour: The Definite Collection/1964-1976. And, though he became a grandfather not long ago and began work on his autobiography, Donovan is still only 46, with many plans for the future. This, then, must be considered only the story so far.
  Donovan was born into a working class family in Maryhill, a small town near Glasgow, Scotland. The date was May 10, 1946, though it has been given as February 10 in many published accounts and even on the back of his debut album. He was named Donovan Philips Leitch. “Donovan is a last name in Ireland, but I have it as a first name,” he notes. “Middle names are usually Christian names, but my middle name is my mother's maiden name. My father is quite literary, so maybe he had a bit of a laugh when he gave me my name.”
  Donovan spent his early childhood in the Gorbals section of Glasgow. At three, he contracted a mild case of polio, though it left no permanent damage.
  When Donovan was 10, in 1956, his family moved to Hatfield, a town near London. There he attended St. Audrey's Secondary School. He displayed an interest in art, and at 15 began to study it at college (The Campus, Welwyn Garden City), but limited family finances forced him to leave after a year.
  Donovan had also taken up playing the guitar, and he spent a couple of years in the early '60s roaming the countryside, working odd jobs and developing his musical ability, frequently in the company of a friend named “Gypsy Dave” who would prove to be a long-time companion.
  By 1964, Donovan has settled down in St. Albans. “Around London, there were various towns, and these towns were 20 miles, roughly, from London,” he explains. “One was St. Albans. Maddy Prior, who became a singer in Steeleye Span, and I used to sing in this pub called the Cock. There were a big crowd of us there, folk singers, pickers and one electric blues band.
  “[In] every town around London, and every town around Britain, I think, in the late '50s and early '60s, there was one experimental group trying [to be] the Yardbirdsy, bluesy kind of ensemble, and St. Albans was no exception. They called themselves the Cops and Robbers. And we followed the Cops and Robbers down to one of their gigs once to support them in Southend [a seaport town in Sussex]. They had some managers at the time, Geoff Stephens and Peter Eden. Geoff Stephens was a songwriter, Peter Eden, the manager type. Both of them were manager types. Geoff lived down in Southend, so had probably got the band a gig in a club.
  “We all went down there that weekend. Although I'd had no professional gigs to speak of, I'd played around people's flats and pubs and busked on the street in the summers. I got up and played in the interval, and then they [Eden and Stephens] came up to me afterwards and said, `Would you like to go up to Tin Pan Alley?' So, they took me up to the publishing house — Southern Music it was called then; now it's called Peer Music.”
  The Tin Pan Alley of England was Denmark Street in London, and Stephens was affiliated with Southern Music, which was a part of Peer International, the giant song publishing company founded by Ralph Peer, the man who had discovered the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Southern Music had a basement studio for recording publishing demos, and it was there, under the eye of the producer Terry Kennedy, that Donovan made a 10-song demonstration tape featuring such songs as Tim Hardin's “London Town” and Buffy Sainte-Marie's “Codine” (both of which were released for the first time on Troubadour), as well as his own original compositions, such as “Catch The Wind.”
  The songs revealed a young man — still only 18 — who had the time to develop his writing and playing talent, yet remained unpolished. “At the stage of late '64, I had everything intact,” Donovan says. “I'd already had a year and a half of songwriting. So, everything that was to happen in '65 was already formed and shaped in my mind in '64.”
  If the tape revelead his talent, it also revealed distinct commercial prospects, if only because of its relative similarity, on first hearing, to another folk singer. Geoff Stephens sent the tape to Elkan Allen, producer of the weekly TV show Ready, Steady, Go! “Elkan Allen knew immediately that I would be to the European youth what Bob Dylan was to America, the European Bob Dylan, and that may have started off the tag,” Donovan says.
  Though Dylan had begun his recording career in 1962, he hadn't begun to achieve national recognition in the U.S. until 1963, and it wasn't until 1964 that his albums began to chart in the U.K. When they did, they took off, with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan hitting #1.
  Though Donovan was steeped in the same folk tradition as Dylan, and, with his cap and curly hair, had a similar appearance, a more careful listen to his music belied the comparisions. “Blowin' In The Wind” and “Catch The Wind” had similar titles, but one was a philosophical inquiry and the other was a light, hopeful love song. And Donovan's singing was also very different. As Donovan himself later pointed out in SongTalk magazine, in an interview reproduced in Paul Zollo's 1991 book Songwriters On Songwriting (Writer's Digest Books), his voice has a “comforting sound.”
  “Dylan may be the very opposite,” Donovan said, “in the sense that he isn't comforting, but it [his voice] is arresting and it is totally absorbing.”
  “For marketing purposes, of course, that Donovan didn't actually sound like Dylan was a minor distinction. He was a scruffy young man with an acoustic guitar, and scruffy young men with acoustic guitars seemed to be the coming thing. Elkan Allen booked Donovan on Ready, Steady, Go!, and his appearance was even touted in the music papers, a remarkable publicity coup for an unknown.
  Donovan's February 6, 1965, appearance on the show lived up to the hype. For one thing, he sang live on a program that otherwise had its singers lip-sync. He had to sing live, he had no record! So he sang in the studio, playing a guitar whose body bore the written message, “This machine kills,” a curious abbreviation of a similar sign printed on Woody Guthrie's guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” Then he was interviewed by the show's host, Cathy McGowan.
  “I [sat] and [talked] about my life on the road, which I was only really weeks from leaving,” Donovan recalls. “I suppose a lot of people thought, `This can't be real, this just-walked-off-the-street-onto-television.' But it was real. And I took to the camera very well. My father had been a photographer all his life, an amateur, and I never really felt shy in front of a camera, and therefore I could relate.”
  Donovan was invited back for a second week, and then a third. In its February 12 issue, New Musical Express reported that he had been signed to Pye Records. Actually, the deal doesn't seem to have been quite that simple. “Publishing is the center of the business,” Donovan explains, “and it goes back through the years; it's an old business. Some old companies would be attached to a label, and Southern Music had an affiliation with Iver Records. Whether it was their own independent label, I'm not sure. So, in the act of recording in the basement studio of Peer Music, I must have been signed to Iver Recordings, who leased or sold the tapes to Pye for release.”
  At the same time, Southern Music's affiliations in Nashville led to the licensing of Donovan's music for American release to the small Hickory label, a record company that had been formed in 1957 by Roy Acuff and Wesley Rose, who also ran the powerful Acuff-Rose song publishing company. Other than Donovan, Hickory was known for country music, not folk or pop. These deals would have important implications for Donovan's recording career later on.
  Donovan went on recording in the basement of Southern music after signing his record contracts. The first result of this was a single version of “Catch The Wind” (not the original demo recording) released by Pye just after the end of Donovan's three-week residency on Ready, Steady, Go! The song became a #4 hit in the U.K., selling 200,000 copies. By April 11, Donovan was performing with the British music industry's top names at the New Musical Express poll winners' contest at London's Wembley Empire Pool.
  His connection in many people's minds to Bob Dylan, however, was making Donovan a controversial figure. For some, his sound and image were a deliberately contrived act concocted for commercial purposes, a sentiment later expressed by Charlie Gillett in his book The Sound Of The City (Pantheon Books, 1983). “Folk singer Donovan craftily reconstructed Dylan's persona for local consumption,” Gillett wrote, “and hit the charts with his own song, `Catch The Wind,' a fair approximation of Dylan's style but altogether more wistful than Dylan would ever allow himself to sound.”
  The controversy was still raging when Dylan himself turned up in England for a tour at the end of April. Dylan was accompanied by documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and a film crew, and the resulting movie, Don't Look Back, features Donovan as an amusing leitmotif. Dylan may never have heard of his rival when he touched down in London, but before long, he's musing, “Who is this Donovan?” Dylan and his entourage are glimpsed reading newspapers with headlines reading “Is Donovan Deserting His Fans?” (“He's only been around three months,” notes former Animals keyboard player Alan Price) and “Dylan Digs Donovan!”
  Only later in the film does Donovan actually turn up, but, sure enough, Dylan does dig him, listening to him sing “To Sing For You” and exclaiming, “Hey! That's a good song, man!” The film wasn't released until 1967, but the meeting between the two and Dylan's apparent blessing did much to dampen criticism of Donovan.
  Meanwhile, “Catch The Wind” had been released in the U.S., where it made the Top 30. Pye released Donovan's second single, “Colours,” in May, and like its predecessor, it reached #4. At the same time came the debut album, What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid, which reached #3.
  Hickory issued its version of the album, which it titled Catch The Wind, in June. Among the LP's 12 tracks were both Donovan originals such as “Josie” and “To Sing For You,” plus his versions of his friend Mick Softley's “Goldwatch Blues” and Woody Guthrie's children's song “Car, Car.” The album hit the U.S. charts in July and reached #30.
  Donovan made his first trip to the U.S. to promote the album. “I came over, and Pete Seeger had me on his show in New York with Blind Gary Davis,” Donovan recalls. “Pete Seeger introduced me, in a way, and there, I'd arrived.”
  But it wasn't only folkies Donovan had come to convert. “I was going around mostly pop TV shows in America,” he says, “which was a continuation of my television image in Britain, which suited me fine, because television I knew was going to promote this music, and it should, 'cause folk music has traditionally been kept off the airwaves. So, I promoted myself on television. I liked it. But they were all pop-y shows, Hullabaloo, Shindig, Hollywood Palace.”
  He also, however, found time to appear at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival in late July, where he was introduced by Joan Baez. “Joan Baez and Pete Seeger had told America that here is an important figure in our folk world arriving, which was marvelous,” Donovan says. Newport itself “was my first big festival, and to be doing the Newport Folk Festival was much more comfortable, obviously,” he adds. “It was just great.”
  Newport '65, of course, was the festival at which Dylan went electric, playing rock music to an audience of folk fans. “I can understand now what the shock must have been, for any change,” Donovan says, “because the audience were in Bermuda shorts and bobbysocks and short hair. I mean, it hadn't happened yet. This was a middle class folk — what I would call `folk purists' — who came to hear what they wanted to hear and that's all they wanted to hear.”
  It was at Newport that Donovan was first approached about joining CBS Records, according to Clive Davis, whose account appears in his autobiography, Clive, Inside The Record Business (William Morrow & Company, 1974), which was written with James Willwerth. Once again, it was the Dylan connection that influenced a significant development in Donovan's career.
  “I was deeply taken with Dylan at the time,” Davis writes, “and I think it was Donovan's lyrics which caught me...I never objected to signing artists of similar talents who had genuine ability.” Davis asked legendary A&R man John Hammond to approach Donovan at Newport. The subsequent negotiations would be long and involved.
  Meanwhile, Hickory released “Colours” in the U.S. It reached #40 in Cash Box, but only #61 in Billboard (“Catch The Wind” had done a little better in Billboard than it had in Cash Box), indicating that the song's success was more sales-orientated than radio-orientated. (Billboard factors radio play into its singles chart; Cash Box does not.) This isn't surprising, given that American Top 40 radio was not receptive to songs with a simple folk instrumentation; even Dylan hadn't hit the singles chart till he went electric. Later, a similar dichotomy between Donovan's singles sales and radio play would occur, though with a different probable cause, as we shall see.
  In the U.K., Pye released a four-song EP, all of whose songs expressed anti-war sentiments. (Donovan's detractors, who accuse him of being a softer version of Bob Dylan, never seem to remember that Donovan sang songs in opposition to the Vietnam War from 1965 — when the was was still popular — on, while Dylan never opposed the war in song while it was going on.) The lead song on the EP was Buffy Sainte-Marie's “Universal Soldier.” The EP topped the U.K.'s EP chart for eight weeks and even got into the singles chart, where it reached #14.
  Hickory released a standard 45 of “Universal Soldier” in the U.S. at the end of August. It reached #45 in Cash Box, but only #53 in Billboard. Donovan appeared on Shindig on September 30 to promote it.
  In October, Pye released Donovan's second album, Fairy Tale, and his next single, “Turquoise,” in the U.K. Neither was as much of a success as Donovan had become used to, with the album only reaching #20 and the single #30.
  Donovan toured the U.S. in November, and Hickory's version of Fairy Tale was issued at the end of the month. As it had in England, the album was less successful than Donovan's debut, reaching #85. (Dating the release of subsequent Hickory singles from this point on is difficult, but the label released two 45s from the album, “The Little Tin Soldier,” probably in November 1965, and “To Try For The Sun,” either in late 1965 or early 1966.)
  Toward the end of 1965, Pye announced that Donovan's next single would be called “Sunshine Superman.” Then something happened, or rather, a few things.
  Donovan had indeed written a song called “Sunshine Superman” (which he originally called “For John And Paul”), inspired by a separation from his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence. “`Sunshine Superman' was the first split with Linda when she needed some space and went to America,” he says, “I knew in the song that we'd meet again. There's a prophecy 'cause that happened.”
  Another thing that happened was that Donovan split with Geoff Stephens and Peter Eden. “Geoff Stephens and Peter Eden were succeeded by Ashley Kozak, who began to manage me,” Donovan says. “I met Ashley through [musician and songwriter] Shawn Phillips. He was working at NEMS Enterprises [run by Beatles manager Brian Epstein]. That was my concert [booking] agency. Ashley then somehow was introduced to [New York accountant and manager] Allen Klein, who introduced me to Mickie Most. Therefore, Ashley continued to manage me, Allen Klein made the deals. When Mickie and I met, then we started making records.”
  Most, whose real name is Michael Hayes, was a top British pop producer who had made hits with the Animals and Herman's Hermits. He had originally been a performer, forming the Most Brothers in the late '50s with Alex Murray, whose backup band was stolen by Cliff Richard and turned into the Shadows. He had had extraordinary success in Africa in the early '60s copying unavailable U.S. rock 'n' roll music, then returned to Britain in 1962 in time for the Beat trend. Most was extremely commercially-orientated, which wouldn't have seemed to make him a likely fit with Donovan.
  He acknowledged this in an interview printed in the book The Record Producers, by John Tobler and Stuart Grundy (St. Martin's Press, 1983). “[Donovan had] had a couple of very big records and then he had a problem with two or three stiffs, and he was also getting labeled as a bit of a Bob Dylan copy, and he came to see me,” Most told Tobler and Grundy.
  “Although we were very unlike, two unlikely people to get together, we did get on very well from the start. He played me this song, `Sunshine Superman,' and it had a very different color to it from the way it is on record, and he'd got together with a guy called John Cameron. So John Cameron and Spike Heatley, I think it was, worked hard on an arrangement, we went into the studio at two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and by five o'clock it was finished.
  “I was happy with it because it sounded different, and it sounded as though Donovan had got his own sound, which I was pleased about, because it was away from his acoustic folk guitar sound — a mysterious electronic sound, which wasn't just electronic rock 'n' roll, and `Sunshine Superman' was the start of that mysterious sound.”
  That mysterious sound was exactly what Donovan was after, on this and the other song he was writing at the time. “It was late '65 when I was forming the Sunshine Superman songs and moving briskly away from the folk scene and into jazz and blues fully,” he says. “I'd already experimented with the jazz element on `Sunny Goodge Street' on Fairy Tale and I wanted to develop that.”
  Though Donovan says that it was Most who introduced him to John Cameron, not he who introduced Cameron to Most, he concurs on Cameron's significance, noting, “John Cameron was the third member of this hit trio — Mickie Most, Donovan and John Cameron — and we were a powerful trio because, drawing on the classical and the jazz elements I loved so much, John Cameron was perfect. He was a trained arranger/mucisian himself who loved jazz, had just come down from Cambridge.”
  A new team and a new sound. All well and good, but, as is usual when artists end mangerial and production relationships, there were considerable legal complications. The confusion was reflected in Billboard magazine, which reported on December 4 that Allen Klein, acting as Donovan's business manager, was negotiating a deal between Donovan and Most, and then on December 18 reported that Donovan's business manager denied this. In January, Pye deleted “Sunshine Superman” from its release schedule.
  Kozak and Klein were negotiating with CBS, which had recently signed Most to an exclusive production contract, but this brought them into conflict with Pye Records, which wanted to keep Donovan. The battle dragged on for months.
  “They said my career was over,” Donovan recalls. “`That's it, your record will not be released.' I went away to Greece and wrote `Writer In The Sun.' [The song, which later appeared on the Mellow Yellow album, has a chorus that goes, “Here I sit, the retired writer in the sun, and I'm blue.”] That's why I wrote `Writer In The Sun': I'm retired now, and the career is over. We had some fun in the interim period, but I also worked, I didn't just sit there for six months. I just kept touring, doing lots of gigs, and my career had just started.”
  Nevertheless, the loss in momentum caused by the absence of record company promotional support and a new single was felt. New York rock critic Lillian Roxon caught a Donovan show of the time. “I was very sad when Scotsman Donovan came to America for the first time [sic] in February 1966 to play to a two-thirds empty Carnegie Hall and to be put down for presuming to do a Dylan on Dylan's own home ground,” she wrote in Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia (Tempo, 1971).
  Donovan also found time to work with friends. Along with John Lennon, he contributed lyrics to a new Paul McCartney tune, “Yellow Submarine,” the backing track for which was recorded May 26, 1966, at Abbey Road studios in London, and he may be part of the chorus of singers and party-goers heard on the record. Not only was this the first of many interactions between Donovan and the Beatles, but his participation suggests a close relationship between “Yellow Submarine” and his later hit, “Mellow Yellow,” which shared not only a color but a celebratory tone (and a certain backup singer) with the Beatles song.
  By this time, Donovan's managers seem to have worked things out at least on the Amnerican end of his record company affairs. Donovan left Hickory Records acrimoniously; the label retained the rights to his 1965 material and, as will be shown, it periodically release competing reissues when Donovan releases new albums.
  The new American deal was with CBS's Epic Records subsidiary, and it was a modest one. “Our risk exposure to Donovan was relatively small,” Clive Davis writes, “signing him for $100,000 and giving him a guaranty of roughly $20,000 a year for five years.” Davis does not specify how many albums Donovan was contracted to deliver, but a standard contract for the time would have called for two per year, for a total of 10.
  Donovan was now free to return to recording, which he did at CBS studios in Hollywood with Most in the producer's chair. “In late '65, I'd been forming the ideas that would become this album,” Donovan says of the resulting Sunshine Superman LP, “and when you look through it, the folk element is definitely still there with `Guinevere,' very strongly, but then I'm listening to the Byrds all the way through '65, and I was very influenced by using the drums.
  “But the subject matter of the Sunshine Superman album, it seems to be all happening by late '65. `The Trip' would have to just have been written — I mean, I'm performing in the club called the Trip on the Strip [Sunset Strip in Hollywood]...A lot of these elements on this album have been titled `psychedelic,' and of course there are definitely trippy songs on there.”
  One of those trippy songs was an ominous number called “The Season Of The Witch,” a song that has lived on in cover versions by Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger and the Trinity in England and by the Vanilla Fudge and Al Kooper and Stephen Stills in the U.S., among others. Its threatening feel is not characteristic of Donovan, but it has proved to be one of his best-remembered songs.
  He himself remembers it for slightly different reasons than the rest of us. “In a way, I'm proud of having written a blues-style song which has actually got a lot of that Goth element — this wailing, strange, dark, gothic imagery, Edgar Allen Poe-ish, all those elements,” Donovan says, noting the song's influence on such bands as the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
  “And the song was sort of prophetic of a time which I would go through,” he adds. “I was the first rock 'n' roll bust, and I didn't know I'd written about it before it happened, but in my mind I put it together because the witch seemed to turn out to be — Gypsy Dave, my road buddy, had a girlfriend. Her name was Maggie, and she busted us in England, and I have to say, this is only for a smoke, the soft drug. I don't advocate, or ever did use hard drugs in any way, and the drug culture now is extremely organized and very dangerous and I wouldn't encourage anybody to go anywhere near it. But in those naive days, we all had a smoke.
  “`Season Of The Witch' was a strange song for me to write at the time because my songs were full of light and hope and optimism, and this dark A-minor, D, E, D-9th came out, and it chunking away there. `The Season Of The Witch' was recorded in Los Angeles with a pickup band out of a club, and it had all the elements of very hard-edged rock 'n' roll that would come. It had that punk element to it, as well. I'd just picked up the electric guitar, so I was just getting used to it, and so it was very raw.”
  The album sessions were completed in May, and “Sunshine Superman” was released as a single in early June. It sold 800,000 copies in six weeks, hitting #1. In only a few months, Donovan had gone from having a career that was over to the top of the heap.
  “To be accepted in America was the big thing for a British artist,” he says. “I'd already been in the charts here, but to go to #1 was amazing, was wonderful, followed up by the set of tours and other records...”
  Record stores registered advance orders of 250,000 copies for the Sunshine Superman album, which was released in August. It entered the charts in September and went to #11.
  Donovan cites the album as a favorite, proud that it was something of a precursor to psychedelic music. (“The Fat Angel,” a song for Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas — and a humorous parody of their version of the Beatles' “I Call My Name” — even mentions Jefferson Airplane, long before the group became successful. “Fly Jefferson Airplane,” Donovan sings, “gets you there on time.”)
  Critics have tended to agree. Phil Hardy and Dave Laing's The Encyclopedia Of Rock, Volume 2 (Panther [U.K.], 1976), notes, “Sunshine Superman...saw Donovan at his observational best and was a deserved classic.” French critic Jacques Vassal, in his book Electric Children (Taplinger, 1976), agrees. “The influence of Sunshine Superman since its release can not be overstated,” he writes. “...It has become one of those albums that practically everyone interested in pop music owns. Certainly it has now become recognized as the absolute acme of Donovan's writing career...”
  In September, Hickory released its first competing album, notably entitled The Real Donovan. The album's 12 tracks contained four songs lifted from Catch The Wind, four from Fairy Tale, one song only previously released in the U.S. on a single (“Turquoise”) and three songs previously unreleased in the U.S. (“Oh Deed I Do,” “Hey Gyp” and “The War Drags On.”) It reached #96 in the charts.
  On October 24, Epic released Donovan's next single, “Mellow Yellow,” a rollicking number with an arrangement by London studio musician John Paul Jones and uncredited backup vocals by Paul McCartney. (No, that's not him saying “Quite rightly” on the chorus, but he is in there.) Perhaps Donovan's most popular single ever, “Mellow Yellow” went to #2 in Billboard and #3 in Cash Box. It was awarded a gold record by the Record Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies on January 19, 1967.
  Despite the twin successes of “Sunshine Superman” and “Mellow Yellow,” Donovan, like many other recording artists of the time, was beginning to run afoul not only of the law (that bust he spoke of occurred during this period), but also of radio programmers and other guardians of the media due to what people thought he was singing about. “Sunshine Superman” noted that its narrator “could have tripped out easy, but I've changed my way” and vowed to “blow your little mind.” “Mellow Yellow,” of course, had that “electrical banana.”
  It was part of a trend. “During 1966 and 1967, numerous records...[described] experiences which could be regarded as drug-induced but which did not have to be explained in this way: for instance, Donovan's `Mellow Yellow' and `Sunshine Superman,' writes Carl Belz in his book The Story Of Rock (Harper & Row, 1972). “They thought people were actually burning the skins of bananas, scraping them and smoking them,” Mickie Most told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy, “when in fact an electrical banana is a vibrating machine [i.e., a vibrator]...”
  But if the specific references were innocent (of drug allusions, anyway), Donovan admitted to Paul Zollo that the tone was, in fact, guilty. “As far as the lyrics are concerned, it was interpreted by many people as many different things,” he said of “Mellow Yellow.”
  “But essentially, over it all, was the sense of being mellow and laid-back, which had something to do with smoking the pot or being cool.”
  Donovan was branded in uncool circles as a doper, which would have an impact on his career. It's notable that, after “Mellow Yellow,” his singles nearly always did better in Cash Box than they did in Billboard (as was also true of such controversial contemporaries as Jefferson Airplane and the Doors), indicating a resistance from radio to play his songs despite their sales. (And the resulting lessened exposure, in turn, of course, held sales back from what they otherwise might have been.)
  In the U.K., Donovan's contractual problems were settled in the opposite manner to the way they had been in the U.S. He was signed directly to Pye Records, which issued “Sunshine Superman” in November, a year after it was first announced. The single went to #3, selling over 250,000 copies. Pye followed rapidly with “Mellow Yellow,” which went to #8.
  In January 1967, Donovan played at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where he was accompanied by a ballerina, who danced during a 12-minute rendition of “Golden Apples.” New Musical Express reported on January 14 that Donovan would write incidental music for a National Theatre production of Shakespeare's As You Like It, which would star Laurence Olivier. This plan apparently was scuttled, since nothing more was heard about it.
  The same month, Epic (but not Pye) released a new, non-LP single, “Epistle To Dippy,” and, on the 30th, a new album, Mellow Yellow.
  One of Donovan's more effervescent tracks, “Epistle To Dippy” was full of psychedelic imagery — “meditating rhododendron forest,” “elevator in the brain hotel,” etc. — and one with a particularly personal message. Who exactly was Dippy?
  “He was a school friend,” Donovan told Paul Zollo. “He was actually one of three school friends, and we all had nicknames and he liked a Zen monk named Diplodocus or something like that, and we called him Dippy for short. The song was about him and me and friends in school; it was a memory of school days.”
  But there was more to it than that, according to Brian Hogg, who wrote the liner notes for Troubadour. The song was “an open letter to a school friend who had become a soldier and was spending part of a seven-year post in Malaysia,” Hogg writes. “`Dippy' heard the song and made contact with Don, who then bought him out of the army.” A number of record buyers must have thought that the song spoke to them, too: “Epistle To Dippy” hit the Top 10 in Cash Box, though it only made #19 in Billboard. (The Mellow Yellow album, meanwhile, went to #14 in the LP listngs.)
  Donovan continued to find himself in the same studio with the Beatles. On February 9, he was one of the invited guests who attended the Abbey Road studio session at which the orchestral parts of “A Day In The Live” were laid down.
  Like the Beatles, Donovan was spending more time in the studio on what would turn out to be an ambitious project. And like them, he was expected to turn out regular singles to keep the public satiated while it waited for the album's completion. In July, Epic issued “There Is A Mountain,” a catchy song with the simplicity and inexplicability of a haiku or zen koan: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”
  The song was another hit (it got to #11 in Billboard); while in Cash Box it was Donovan's fourth straight Top 10 single), but, like “The Season Of The Witch,” it's also turned into a perennial cover song, notably in the elaborate variations enacted by Duane Allman and the Allman Brothers Band on their “Mountain Jam” four years after it came out.
  “What I like about that is, there are certain songs, and I've written a handful that other people have covered in a big way and they've made it their own song,” Donovan says. “It's wonder to have written a song that can be interpreted, and the `Mountain' is one of those songs, which allows guitar players, flute players, drummers, bass players — you can jam on it, and I think that is the essence of the `Mountain' cover and `Season Of The Witch' cover. Especially `Season Of The Witch' with Brian Auger on the keyboard.
  “Any keyboard player would like `Season Of The Witch' because it was suggested that in the bridge, you could jam or improvise wherever you want. And the two chord structures, I didn't invent the chord structures, but I invented the form that they sat in, and so I've invented two jazz, blues-based songs that a lot of people can interpret. It's nice.”
  In the fall of 1967, Donovan launched a U.S. tour. In New York, he played a packed Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall at Lincoln Center, where Lillian Roxon returned to find a very different story from what she had seen in February 1966. “In a piece of showmanship worthy of the Maharishi, Donovan stepped out on stage into a sea of massed flowers, feathered boas and burning incense, looking, in his floor-length white robe, like an escapee from the Last Supper,” she wrote. Reportedly, Donovan ended the concert by telling the crowd, “I love you, and you love me,” a remark at least one critic thought insipid, but Donovan's demonstrated rapport with his audience made it hard to doubt.
  The singer went on to a similarly ecstatic response at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was seen by writer John Carpenter, who wangled an interview that later appeared in the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine on November 9, 1967. The first subject of a Rolling Stone Interview summed up his views for Carpenter by saying, “There's only one thing in the end, and that's singing truth in a pleasant way.”
  The same month that the interview appeared, Epic released A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, a two-record boxed set with a cover picture of Donovan wearing a robe and holding flowers, the colors altered into a psychedelic scene. On the back, “the author” was shown holding hands with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
  Album packages were becoming increasing elaborate, of course. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with its unforgettable cover had been released the previous June, and the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, with its 3-D cover, came out the same month as Donovan's Gift. But two-record boxed sets were something new to pop music.
  “Classical musicians had them,” notes Donovan. “Jazz had them. But pop music wasn't allowed to have them. Sid Maurer, the art designer, fought for me with Clive Davis...All they particularly wanted was a convenient photograph, it's true. I was very ambitious on this, wanted a children's album, and a parents' album, as it were, 'cause we were beginning to make children, our generation.
  “It was an ambitious project with what they call `multi-color separation.' In the business of art covers and art in general, one color is cheap, two colors is more expensive, three colors, a little more expensive, but multi-colors is impossible. `No,' is the word. Unless you pay for some of it.” So, an artist who wants a real fine cover can pay for it. And I did.
  “...Clive Davis insisted that it [also] be split into two albums and sold separately. The boxed set then went on to be a gold record over a period of two years, but he was probably right in saying that it won't happen immediately. They wanted records to happen in the first six, seven months.”
  Gift gave Donovan the appearance of having several records released at once. The album's single, “Wear Your Love Like Heaven,” was a Top 30 hit. The “parents'” album, also called Wear Your Love Like Heaven, went to #60, while the children's album, For Little Ones, only grazed the charts at #185. The big winner was the box, however, which reached #19 and would be certified as a gold record on April 1, 1970.
  Beyond its music and its commercial impact, however, A Gift From A Flower To A Garden had a curious message in its liner notes. “Yes, I call upon every youth to stop the use of all Drugs and heed the Quest to seek the Sun.” The note was signed, “they humble minstrel, Donovan.”
  It was a message that made Donovan as controversial with the left wing as he had been a year before with the right wing. in that time, of course, Donovan had been busted, he had seen the effects of that bust when he was denied a visa to attend the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 and he had taken up Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi. But in the polarized days of the late '60s, Donovan's anti-drug stance definitely raised hackles in some quarters.
  At the end of 1967, Donovan realized one of his long-term ambitions by contributing songs to Kenneth Loach's British film Poor Cow. Donovan's theme song for the movie would be the B-side of his next single. That single, released in February 1968, was the playful “Jennifer Juniper.” “Jennifer,” Donovan told Paul Zollo, “was Patti Boyd's sister.” (Patti Boyd was George Harrison's wife at this time.) But, he added, “A love song for a woman is for all women. It's for womanhood.”
  Both Donovan's male and female fans responded to the tribute, with “Jennifer Juniper” hitting #18 in Cash Box, #26 in Billboard.
  As the single went into the charts, Donovan flew to India, where he spent the late winter and early spring with the Maharishi and, as he later put it, “four Beatles, one Beach Boy [Mike Love] and Mia Farrow.”
  In March, Hickory Records struck again, working up a psychedelic cover for an album called Like It Is, Was And Evermore Shall Be. Not only did the album acknowledge on its back cover that all the tracks had been released previously, it also listed the previous three Donovan albums on Hickory and noted which tracks came from which albums! The repackaging went to #177 in April.
  When Donovan returned to England, he had in hand a new song called “Hurdy Gurdy Man.” He seems to have begun the song on a Jamican vacation and finished it in India. Asked if he considered himself to be a hurdy gurdy man, Donovan told Paul Zollo, “Yeah. Oh yeah, I am the hurdy gurdy man. But also the hurdy gurdy man is all singers who sing songs of love. The hurdy gurdy is an instrument from the 16th century. The hurdy gurdy man is a chronicler, the hurdy gurdy man is like a bard, and the hurdy gurdy man is any singer-songwriter in any age...Any singer for peace is a hurdy gurdy man.”
  Donovan had met and befriended Jimi Hendrix in 1966 when he was brought over to England. Now, having written “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” he decided it was a good song for Hendrix to record. “So, I told Mickie Most, `I've written this song,'” he recalls. “He said, `What is it?' And I could never figure out what singles were and what they weren't, so I thought it was just another song I wrote. I played it through for Mickie Most, and I said, `I want to give it to Hendrix.' Mickie said, `No, it's for you. It's a single.' I said, `Oh? Well, alright. Well, let's get Hendrix to play on it.' So, we phoned him up and he was touring, and he was not available on the time we were gonna record the song.”
  Most, however, agreed that “Hurdy Gurdy Man” should have a Hendrix-like or at least a “heavy” approach. Donovan's singles had been dipping somewhat in the charts, and the always commercially-conscious Most thought a change was in order.
  “I felt that Donovan needed something a bit heavier,” he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy, “...and out of that came `Hurdy Gurdy Man,' which was a bit more weighty, and was what he needed to widen his audience, because America had become a bit heavier...you could see Cream happening and the things which we now know as heavy rock 'n' roll.”
  In place of Hendrix, Donovan and Most enlisted Allan Holdsworth of the group Blue Mink. “So, Allan came up,” Donovan says, picking up the story, “and it's debatable whether [John] Bonham played drums or whether John Paul [Jones] played bass, but it's definite, according to Jimmy Page, he was on the session, and my memory is, he was. But it wasn't the basic session, because we layered the guitars on afterwards. Allan Holdsworth went on, then Jimmy Page went on, I believe there was a third guitar player. So, it was built up, like a collage or a montage of sound.
  “I like to think that [Led] Zeppelin was in the minds of John Paul, Bonham and Page when they were sessioning still, but I also like to think that `Hurdy Gurdy Man' encouraged them, pushed them over the edge to actually create a band that Jimmy would be able to play his acoustic styles like on `Stairway To Heaven,' which he loves, and play his power guitar, which he's great at, and completely exciting ethnic drums and then these poetic, interesting lyrics, which was what `Hurdy Gurdy Man' ended up being.”
  “(While the exact personnel on the session remains unknown, it's worth noting that Page's previous group the Yardbirds did not officially break up until July 1968, at least a couple of months after the session, and no account of the formation of Zeppelin suggests that Page had met Bonham — who was drumming for the northern band Hobstweedle — before his bandmate, Robert Plant, suggested he be approached. That, of course, doesn't mean that Bonham couldn't have gone down to London, done a tracking session for “Hurdy Gurdy Man” and left without meeting John Paul Jones or Jimmy Page, but it doesn't seem likely.)
  “Hurdy Gurdy Man” was released in May 1968 and became one of Donovan's biggest hits — #3 in Cash Box, #4 in the U.K., #5 in Billboard. It has also proven one of Donovan's most durable hits, even inspiring a cover version by the Butthole Surfers that Donovan says he loves, though “they tore it to bits.”
  Donovan was in Olympic studios in London in May, following the “heavy” “Hurdy Gurdy Man” session with another one, this time working with the Jeff Beck Group. The song was called “Goo Goo Barabajagal (Love Is Hot).” Asked by Paul Zollo if “barabajagal” was an invented word like the kind Lewis Carroll would use in one of his children's stories, Donovan agreed. “Yeah, like `Jabberwocky,'” he said. “He would make up words. Also, it was influenced by `Goo goo ga joob,' from `I Am The Walrus.' Lyrically, it was about a young girl who goes to an herbalist for a cure.”
  Mickie Most suggested using the Jeff Beck Group on the track. “One of Donovan's problems was that he never really had a band,” Most told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy, “He never had anybody he could bring into the studio, there was never that sort of working relationship, so I always used to use the people who I'd used on the Herman's Hermits records, the session guys. But when Jeff Beck had his group buzzing away, I thought it might be an idea to put the two things together after Donovan sang me this song called `Barabajagal.' It was partly alright, and partly a mess. I don't really know, but if somebody played it to me now, I'd probably feel it was a mess — at the time, it was a real attempt to get other influences into both their musics, because I wanted Donovan to get a little more heavyweight, and Jeff a little more lyrical.”
  Donovan recalls the session: “Beck was invited, and at the time, Ronnie Wood, I believe, was playing bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano.” [Donovan is unsure of the drummer. The notes to Troubadour list Tony Newman, but a more likely candidate is Mickey Waller.] We arrived at the session, and Jeff arrived a bit late, and the drummer was tuning the kit, and as he was tuning the kit he was playing a pattern. [Donovan scats the drum pattern for “Barabajagal.”] I said, `So, you've heard the song,' and he said, `What song?' I said, `The song we're gonna do.' He said, `No, I haven't.' I said, `That's the pattern.' He said, `Fine, that's great.'
  “So, Nicky Hopkins came in...I said, `Do you want to hear the chords?' He said, `No, just play it.' And he opened up on the music stand in front of his piano a Superman comic. So, he started reading comics while he waited. And then Jeff came in...and he'd left [his guitar] at the last hotel. He said, `Just get me any old Fender.' So they got him any old Fender. And it doesn't sound like any old Fender. It sounds incredible.”
  It does indeed, but it wasn't released at the time. Instead, “Barabajagal,” its eventual B-side, “Trudi” (which also featured the Beck Group), and the tracks “Superlungs My Supergirl,” “Where Is She” and “Happiness Runs” were all shelved.
  In July, Epic released Donovan In Concert, a live album culled from a fall 1967 concert at the Anaheim Convention Center that was notable for the absence in its selections of any of Donovan's hit singles except “There is A Mountain” and a show-closing “Mellow Yellow.” The album reached #18.
  The artist himself, meanwhile, was spending the summer working on a new album. The Beatles were nearby working on their double album, The Beatles, and a bootleg has since appeared featuring Donovan trading songs with Paul McCartney. The bootleg includes songs that were later to turn up on Donovan's second children's album, H.M.S. Donovan. It also features what would be his next single, “Lalena.”
  “Lalena” was released as a single in September. An acoustic ballad whose title character's name was inspired by singer Lotte Lenya, according to Donovan, “Lalena” seemed to fly in the face of Mickie Most's encouragement of a “heavier” Donovan. And Most's commercial instincts seemed confirmed when the single only got into the low 30s in the charts. It was followed by the new LP, The Hurdy Gurdy Man, whose commercial prospects probably were dimmed by its containing earlier hits such as the title track and “Jennifer Juniper,” but not “Lalena.” The album nevertheless reached #20.
  After a fall tour of the U.S., Donovan was back in the studio. He again did sessions with Paul McCartney. McCartney was producing an album for Mary Hopkin, who had scored a hit with “Those Were The Days.” Her debut album, Post Card, led off with two Donovan songs, “Lord Of The Reedy River” and “I Love My Shirt,” on which Donovan played.
  McCartney returned the favor at Donovan's sessions, playing tambourine and joining the chorus for “Atlantis,” which was released as a single in the U.K. on November 22 and reached #23 in the charts there.
  The start of 1969 brought the release of a second film for which Donovan had provided the music. This time it was the comedy If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.
  On January 20, “Atlantis” was released in the U.S. on the B-side of a gentle anti-Vietnam War song called “To Susan On The West Coast Waiting.” “Susan” became a moderate hit, reaching the Top 40, but when DJs flipped it over and played the seemingly unlikely “Atlantis,” with its recitation, arcane subject matter and extended (over four minutes!) length, the song took off, soaring into the Top 10.
  January had also seen the release of the 11-track Donovan's Greatest Hits, which was notable for featuring the first LP appearances of “Epistle To Dippy,” the single version of “There Is A Mountain” and “Lalena,” and re-recordings of the contractually unavailable “Colours” and “Catch The Wind.” The album quickly became Donovan's biggest seller, going gold by April 22 and reaching #4, Donovan's only Top 10 LP. It stayed in the charts more than a year.
  Though Donovan was spending less time on the road, he did turn up as one of the opening acts at the Rolling Stones' free concert in Hyde Park, London, at which the group introduced its new guitarist, Mick Taylor, replacing the dismissed Brian Jones, who had died two days before. It was an event that must have had a special poignance for a man whose companion, Linda Lawrence, was the mother of Jones's son Julian, who the couple was raising.
  The same month, “Barabajagal” finally was released as a single in the U.K. and the U.S. In England, it got to #12, but in America it didn't do as well, getting to #28 in Cash Box and #36 in Billboard. Nevertheless, a Barabajagal album, matching songs from the May 1968 sessions with some from the fall, was released in August 1969. The album reached #23 in the U.S.
  Hickory, meanwhile, perhaps stimulated by the sales of Donovan's Greatest Hits, weighed in with another repackaging of the 1965 material, using a current photo drenched in green and titled The Best Of Donovan. Released in October, the album hit #144.
  One of the rarities included in Troubadour is an early version of the song “Riki Tiki Ravi,” recorded, according to the notes, on October 14, 1969. Just above that notation are the words “Produced by Donovan,” an interesting credit for anyone trying to date the singer's breakup with Mickie Most. In fact, the last Donovan sessions for which Most is credited in this period are from November 1968, but it appears the two did try to work together after that.
  Clive Davis writes that he began getting calls from both Donovan and Most that revealed to him “a conflict between Most's commercial instincts and Donovan's experimental impulses.”
  Most described the split in more specific terms. “I had an argument with [Donovan] over in Los Angeles about how a session should be controlled, ”he told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy, “and I felt that a lot of hangers-on shouldn't be there, apart from a lot of goings-on that I didn't like anyway. I said that as I was paying for the sessions, he could either do it my way or...and he said he wanted to do that record with someone else, so that was goodbye. So we parted for a couple of years.”
  According to Davis, Donovan “disappeared. I heard he'd gone to live in Greece; for some time he was completely out of touch...More than six months later, I got word that Donovan was finally working on an album by himself.”
  Of the album that eventually emerged under the title Open Road, Donovan says, “I made it after the disillusionment of all the '60s things that were going on, and at one point I said, `I've had enough. I'm going into the studio with a three-piece, back to the roots.' But I created the term `Celtic rock' on there, and I'd finally found the phrase that I was looking for, to try and fuse this traditional music with this power guitar and power ethnic drums. So, on the album, I was almost like turning my back on the record industry, the management, managers, the record producers, even Mickie Most. I said, `I'm goin' in myself.' I kind of liked the way the three-piece sounded, it was so raw and emotional and in a way rather punky...”
  Ironically, after breaking away from Most, Donovan was doing two things Most favored: His sound had turned more toward rock, and he had formed a band with drummer John Carr and bassist Mike Thomson (plus pianist Mike O'Neill), also called Open Road. The songs were energetic and infused with Donovan's usual poetic gift: comic, mystical and political. If it was not the best overall album Donovan ever made, it was a close second.
  This view is well-expressed by Jacques Vassal. “The year 1970 marked for Donovan a musical advance that even his most ardent admirers had hardly hoped for any longer,” Vassal writes. “The album Open Road...seemed to show that he was progressing toward regaining his second wind, the second wind which had been so long awaited, through his new experiences working with other musicians.”
  The band was intended to undertake a tour to promote the album, and Donovan and Open Road appeared at a CBS Records Convention in the Bahamas, at the Bath Festival of Progressive Music on June 28, around the time of the release of the album, and at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival during the last week of August. But the tour never materialized.
  “I think Open Road came out and it limped out, it didn't sort of run out,” Donovan says, “and I don't think CBS knew what to do with it.” (In fact, Open Road went to #16 in the charts and was listed for 19 weeks, an average performance for a Donovan album. “Riki Tiki Tavi,” the single, went to #40 in Cash Box, #55 in Billboard.
  It seems that Donovan didn't know what to do, either. “In the early '70s, I just didn't feel like it anymore,” he says. “I think I'd done enough...I'd achieved more than any young musician could possibly want. Apart from 14 hit records that charted [not including “Riki Tiki Tavi”], I was one of the first what they called `album artists.' The album is the life. The single is the bright light that shines on the album, for me. That was how I saw it. But then single succeeded single, and the 14 singles were amazingly received, but the albums were the important things.
  “Basically, I think I was in what you would call retirement mode. I'd gone backwards and forwards, and I'd really had enough of various things. A lot of us were worn down by the end of the '60s. So I went in and had emotionally done this album. The three-piece was to go on the road and promote it all over America, and I think I just didn't have the energy or I was bored, and I was happy with the album, anyway. It came out, and it was received quite well, but I don't believe there was any serious promotion from the label.”
  Davis's version of the story is that Donovan “disappeared again,” which made the album difficult to promote. “He'd gone long enough to need a tour; he also needed a hit single,” Davis writes. “We got neither; the album sold about 350,000 copies, a good sale but not great.”
  One can't help noting in contrast to what Donovan says and what Davis implies that Donovan wasn't really an “albums artist,” at least in commercial terms, though his albums were modestly successful. In fact, he was a singles artist for the most part. His only really big album sale was for his greatest hits album. A Gift From A Flower To A Garden did go gold after more than two years, but this was at a time when the standard for gold status was earning $1 million in sales at wholesale prices, which would have been higher for a two-record set, thus setting a lower unit threshold.
  Given that all of Donovan's Epic albums had roughly similar chart peaks and lengths-of-stay in the chart — the peaks range between #11 and #23 and the weeks-charted range from 19 to 31 — if we assume that overall record sales increased steadily over the period, thus making chart position more difficult to maintain, the sales of Open Road would be on a par with what CBS had come to expect of Donovan, or even a little better — tour or no tour, single or no single. And CBS had made a handsome profit on its $100,000 investment so far.
  But there's the rub. Donovan's five-year contract of 1966 was due to expire at the end of 1970, though, by the label's reckoning, he had failed to deliver all the albums called for by the contract. All told, Epic had released 10 Donovan albums in five years, but that was only by counting a greatest hits album, a live album and adding the different versions of A Gift From A Flower To A Garden together. Count another way, and you'd say he'd only delivered six or seven.
  That's how CBS counted. “Donovan had already earned the original guaranty many times over,” Davis admits, but “we felt he still owed us three or four albums under the contract.” Davis says negotiations for a new contract “bogged down quickly,” but that he finally settled on an offer of a $2 million, five-year contract requiring 10 albums. After Donovan “disappeared again” and Open Road registered its “good, but not great” sales, Davis says he heard that Donovan had signed to Warner Bros. Records.
  Davis says he was stunned, and that he reacted by suspending Donovan's contact — that is, extending it indefinitely until he fulfilled the album commitment — and suing. He says that, during the legal battles, Donovan realized his managers had treated CBS unfairly, and he then returned to CBS, re-signed for $2.5 million.
  All of this occured between mid-1970 and September 1972, a period during which Donovan was more active than is suggested in Davis' account. On October 2, 1970, Donovan finally married his lover of nearly six years' standing, Linda Lawrence. The same month, Janus Records, taking over from Hickory, issued yet another compilation, a two-record set called Donovan P. Leitch. Remarkably, it sold well enough to chart, getting to #128. (The label also issued three singles from the LP as part of an “antiquity series.”) It was followed shortly by a single-disc set, Hear Me Now, that did not chart.
  By December 1970, Open Road had officially broken up, and Donovan was on to new projects. In February 1971, Epic released a new single, “Celia Of The Seals,” its picture sleeve crediting it to Donovan “with Danny Thompson.” The B-side was “Song Of The Wandering Aengus,” Donovan's musical setting for a poem by William Butler Yeats. (According to the Troubadour notes, “Celia Of The Seals” was recorded in 1969, but many of the recording dates in the package are suspect.) The single grazed the bottom of the charts, peaking at #84 in Billboard.
  Meanwhile, Donovan was working on a new film, scoring and playing the title role in Jacques Demy's The Pied Piper. He was also recording a certain album Clive Davis never mentions in his account of the contract dealings, an album called H.M.S. Donovan.
  It was an album Donovan had had in mind at least since the evening captured on the McCartney bootleg from the summer of 1968. Now he had two albums' worth of material, all children's songs. (In fact, he notes, this and the earlier For Littles Ones album represented only a third of the children's material he'd composed.) It was a project clearly close to the heart of a man who was now married and raising a family, and who had been interested in children's music from the beginning of his career, when he recorded Woody Guthrie's “Car, Car.”
  H.M.S. Donovan “is a wonderful album,” says its creator. “It was rejected by Clive. I think he wasn't happy with [For Little Ones'] sales...So, categorically, it was refused by Clive...I was headed in the direction of making a movie. I really wanted to make music for movies, for children, and that to me was teaching the young, teaching the future generations.”
  H.M.S. Donovan was released by Pye in the U.K., where it did not chart and received little attention. Jacques Vassal, who had so praised Open Road, was dismayed by this follow-up. “He dissolved his backup group and released a double album of songs for children, H.M.S. Donovan,” Vassal fumed. “Where his earlier attempt in this direction, For Little Ones, had had a simplicity that ensured it stayed well clear of syrupy self-indulgence, H.M.S. Donovan was not so fortunate.”
  Donovan also seems to have toured the U.S. in 1971, though there are apparently conflicting accounts about the result. One says he filled Madison Square Garden; another describes the tour as “sparsely attended.” The dates were Donovan's last in the U.S. until 1974.
  The Pied Piper, described by film critic Leonard Maltin as a “chilling story” in which Jacques Demy “succeeds in weaving a grimy portrait of the Middle Ages,” was released in 1972, by which time Donovan was working with Franco Zeffirelli on Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a film about St. Francis of Assisi. (Donovan had at one time been slated to do songs for Zeffirelli's previous film, Romeo And Juliet.)
  In September, Donovan's dealings with CBS were settled when he signed his new record deal and the label issued a new two-record compilation, The World Of Donovan, though, ominously, it didn't chart.
  To complete his return to active duty, Donovan once again hooked up with Mickie Most. “He came back to me...and said, `I've made a couple of things, but they were nothing, so can we do something together again,' and we did the Cosmic Wheels album,” Most told John Tobler and Stuart Grundy. “I was credited as Michael Peter Hayes, but there was no particular reason for that except that Donovan said he'd always liked my real name, and asked me if he could put it on the album, so I said I didn't care what he put on it. There was nothing devious about that at all.”
  Cosmic Wheels was released in March 1973. The first of Donovan's quarter-million-dollar Epic albums, it had all the earmarks of a '70s superstar release, from its elaborate gatefold sleeve (including a celestial illustration inside bearing the legend, “Get out your cosmic crayons, kids and colour in”) to its custom-designed record label. Money had also been spent on the production, which found Most employing a session rock band plus a full string section on many tracks.
  Critical reactions varied, though it was notable that journalists treated the album not as a new major statement from an established artist, but as an attempted comeback. They reserved special, humorless scorn for a song called “The Intergalactic Laxative,” in which Donovan, over a sprightly folk backing, speculated about the excretory procedures in space capsules. “The one or two really fine performances on the record are lost completely in the rather self-indulgent and tasteless remainder,” wrote Jacques Vassal.
  Probably the key to the album's commercial reception, however, was not critical reaction but rather Donovan's decision not to tour the U.S. to promote it. Nevertheless, the album reached #15 in the U.K. and #25 in the U.S. and spawned two singles, “I Like You” (#57 Cash Box, #66 Billboard) and “Maria Magenta” (which did not chart). Good, Clive Davis might say, but not great.
  Speaking of Clive Davis, probably the most important development in Donovan's career in 1973 was Davis's firing from the CBS Records presidency over the Memorial Day weekend. Though the two had had their differences, Donovan had been Davis's first artist signing and he was closely associated with the ousted president. With Davis, Donovan had a modicum of record company support; without him, he was a medium-level recording artist with a superstar contract.
  Nineteen seventy-three also saw the release of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which turned out to be a box-office failure, though it has attracted a cult following among film buffs since. And Donovan released his second live album, Live In Japan, in Japan only, on Sony/CBS Records.
  On October 1, 1973, Donovan returned to his favorite recording venue, Morgan Studios in London, with ex-Rolling Stones manager/producer Andrew Oldham, and spent a month working on a new album. For the sessions, Oldham employed the cream of '70s sessions musicians, drawn from the L.A. singer-songwriter scene and from such groups as the Dominos, Humble Pie and Wings — drummers Jim Gordon, Russ Kunkel and Danny Seiwell, percussionist Ray Cooper, bassists Carl Radle and Leland Sklar, guitarists Peter Frampton, Henry McCullough, Steve Marriott and Danny Kortchmar, and keyboard players Nicky Hopkins and Craig Doerge. Guest stars included Carole King and Tom Scott.
  The result was a smooth, professional '70s pop-rock album, a classy work with song titles like “The Dignity Of Man” and “Life Is A Merry-Go-Round,” and when it was released in January 1974, Essence To Essence appeared in a glossy white sleeve, its title embossed on its cover.
  The money spent on the sessions and the sleeve, however, belied the attention given to the album upon release. Without Davis to bestir the troops at CBS and to guide its way through the marketplace, and without Donovan, who was busy moving to California, to do a promotional tour for it, Essence To Essence never found its audience, reaching only #174 in the charts. A single of “Sailing Homeward” did not chart at all.
  Donovan's next release was a one-off single released in August in which he covered David Bowie's song “Rock And Roll With Me,” which had appeared earlier in the summer on the Bowie album Diamond Dogs. Donovan's version didn't reach the charts.
  During the year, Donovan was developing a new set of songs with an overall theme treating the changeover in attitudes from the '60s to the '70s. He put on some shows in California featuring the material and using dancers and various visual effects. In September and October, he spent three weeks in Quadrafonic Studios in Nashville with producer Norbert Putnam. By November, the album, 7-Tease, was in record stores. The album “dealt with the fate of hippy mind-searching and drugs,” notes The Encyclopedia Of Rock, Volume 2. It also included some of Donovan's most autobiographical writing and reflected an apparent pessimism (some said cynicism) about the world in general.
  Donovan returned to the concert stage and to interviews in the press to promote the album, but he still seemed less than enchanted with the business of selling his music. Speaking to Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times in December, he said, “I was disillusioned with the 1960s. I was also disgusted with the music business. I got so disgusted with all of the rotten aspects of it that I had to get out.”
  “Music and business just don't seem to mix. It's hard to be an idealist and just want to make good music and not get trampled on by all the ruthless people who just want to make money. That's why artists freak out, run away, get sick or do anything to escape.
  “Recently I came terms with this business and decided to work with it instead of against it. I've cooled down somewhat. It may be a mistake. I don't know yet.”
  Despite this resolve, 7-Tease received relatively little support from Epic and did only a little better than Essence To Essence, getting to #135. It single, “Rock And Roll Souljer,” didn't chart.
  “A very underestimated album,” is Donovan's assessment today. “I think it's becoming clear that it sort of escaped. The actual life of certain albums with CBS...I followed my direction, I went into each album and made the album I wanted to make without any thought for the commercial value of it, and yet in those years between '65 and '71, there were singles that came from albums, and during the '70s, although they weren't successful, I don't know why they weren't. I entered into those albums just in the same excitement as any album. I think it's a put-down of the hundreds of thousands of musicians that don't ever make commercial success if one thinks that each album has got to have some commercial value, because the true value of music is in its playing.”
  Donovan toured Australia and New Zealand and in 1975, but otherwise was not heard from for the rest of the year. In the fall, Epic repackaged some of his '60s albums, issuing Hurdy Gurdy Man with Barabajagal and Donovan In Concert with Sunshine Superman as twofers. Pye Records also turned up with a U.S. Donovan release in its The Pye History Of British Pop Music series.
  From August 1975 to March 1976, Donovan worked on his next Epic album, which he produced himself. Eschewing the more commercial approach of his previous three albums, he returned to the folk-jazz sound of his late '60s albums, even recording two songs by his old friend Derroll Adams. The backup musicians included such session aces as drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Klaus Voorman, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and members of the Crusaders.
  The album had a distinctly melancholy tone, set by the song “A Well Known Has-Been,” in which the singer notes, “I pretend I'm unaffected by the chains that bear me down/When only those that love me can see behind the frown.” “Use this album before the next century,” advised a sleeve note.
  Released in May, Slow Down World failed to turn Donovan's commercial slide, getting to only #174, with its single, “Dark-Eyed Blue Jean Angel,” not making the charts. Donovan toured to promote the record, though by this time he was appearing in clubs rather than concert halls. (Pye, meanwhile, issued a second album of 1965 recordings in the U.S., marking the umpteenth time the tracks had appeared on record.)
  After three poor-selling albums, Epic decided not to continue to pay Donovan $250,000 per LP for the next six records on his contract and dropped him. Clive Davis, who had in the meantime taken over Arista Records, continued to see potential in the singer, however, and signed him. The two then brought back Mickie Most for another go-round.
  “Getting back together again with older bedfellows sometimes doesn't work,” Donovan notes, “but I thought it worked quite well with Mickie Most, Clive and I. We really did get on so well as a team, and I didn't really feel bad feelings for the past. There was a lot of mess in the past, you know, and there were a lot of things that were done that happened in any business that is successful, but I didn't mind. I wanted to go back and try it one more time. We made a record, Mickie and I, it was reasonably satisfying for me and it wasn't a super success and Clive put it out and that was okay. But perhaps one shouldn't go back, one should move on.”
  Most was less charitable in his remarks in The Record Producers. “The Donovan record...was motivated purely by finance,” he said. “I was owed a lot of money from previous work with Donovan, and the only way it seemed I would be able to get it back was to perform as his producer once again, so I think the motivation was really the pay day. I sound like a boxer talking about his last fight, but it was money which couldn't be sneezed at, and it required me to produce again for it to be paid up. So I did, but it was 10 years too late, really.”
  Released in August 1977, the Arista album, titled Donovan, was more of a rock 'n' roll record than Slow Down World. Lyrically, it was still imbued with the artists' disillusionment, from its opening track, “Local Boy Chops Wood (A Death In The Sixties),” about the ups and downs of a rock star as reflected in the headlines, to “Brave New World,” which noted, “There's a disappointment awaiting all you fools out there/If you entertain the notion that society cares.” Donovan retained a certain hopefulness, singing in the chorus of “Sing My Song” that “I want the whole wide world/To sing along,” but the verses to the same song castigated the music industry: “The words need not be committed/Though you'll be if it flops/So we're pickin' out your straitjacket/For the Top of the Pops.”
  Donovan went virtually ignored. It was Donovan's first new album to miss the Billboard chart entirely, though it reached #138 in Cash Box. Its single, “Dare To Be Different,” didn't reach the Hot 100.
  The album was Donovan's final major label effort in the U.S. and U.K. Three years later, in August 1980, he released Neutronica on Mickie Most's Rak label in Europe only and undertook a European tour that began at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and continued into France and Germany. He followed with another Rak album, Love Is Only Feeling, in November 1981.
  Donovan's next U.S. album was Lady Of The Stars, released on the Allegiance label in 1983. The album's title track was a re-recording of a song from the Donovan album, and the LP also included remakes of “Boy For Every Girl” from Essence To Essence, “Local Boy Chops Wood,” “Season Of The Witch” and “Sunshine Superman,” plus some new songs.
  “For those that are reading your magazine that wonder where I've been,” Donovan says, “it's been an on-and-off relationship with the record companies, me, and never a problem in concert. I've always played concerts every two or three years. I've done tours in Europe and America. Although it looked like I disappeared from the face of the musical earth in 1973, in actual fact...in the '70s I released nine albums, three of which were very well promoted, and the other six I really wasn't interested in promoting.
  “I suppose I got a little bored, and I had a family, and I raised my family, and I wrote songs, and I did tours. But there is a '70s Donovan and three in the '80s, which I hope in the future to make available to fans and the general public alike.”
  Meanwhile, by the start of the '90s, a Donovan revival started taking place. “Late 1990 in England saw the re-release of 11 albums [in England],” Donovan notes, “and following the trend of '60s and '70s artists being rediscovered by young bands, it was my turn, and I ran into lots of young people in my concerts and also many young musicians in England, and so, to celebrate the 25 years, which I was intending to do, I pulled off the shelf a set of live recording which are on release now in America under the title The Classics, and what it is is a collection of the finest high-quality recordings of acoustic Donovan concerts from late '60s into the late '70s. It was a good thing to do because there was a bootleg going around for many years, and the fans were satisfied with it, but it was terrible quality.”
  At a concert at New York's Bottom Line in August 1991 to promote the newly released The Classics Live, potential standees to the sold-out show waiting in a line across the street from the 400-seat club. Inside, Donovan's performance (including his story about the writing of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” in India and George Harrison's extra verse that went unused on the single due to time constraints) was received ecstatically and there was a crush of backstage visitors to greet him. Donovan did manage to meet the crew from Sony/Legacy, however, and to set in motion the work that would result in the release of Troubadour in 1992.
  Now, with that album out, he can concentrate on his autobiography, on a musical by his wife (Lives Of The Wives) that is still in the planning stages, and, when cataloguing the past is out of the way and the world has been duly reminded of his past accomplishments, something for the present. “I have brand new material in the works,” Donovan confirms.

submitted by Randy Reeves