Singing a familiar melody, Donovan re-creates the moment: " Olanatunji, blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay'. ![]() He recalls Paul McCartney popping into his London flat with his guitar and some new lyrics with clear drug references. "It was all moving very fast, and nobody knew how long it was going to last. ![]() He toured in "caravans" with acts such as the Who, Kinks, Hollies and Animals. "The camera was friendly immediately - I went into everybody's living room and the parents went, Ahh, isn't he nice.' " "I was the curly-haired kid from Scotland, the vagabond among the sea of faces," Donovan recalls. In February 1965, Donovan made the first of three straight appearances on the pop music program "Ready Steady Go." He didn't even have a record to lip-sync to at the time, and thus became the first act to sing live on the show. As a teenager, he and a pal, Gypsy Dave, spent their summers hitchhiking through the British Isles, singing for supper.Įarly on, Donovan was dubbed the British Bob Dylan - their first meeting in 1966 is captured in the documentary "Don't Look Back" - but he wisely stepped out of Dylan's considerable shadow and began to assert his own gentle voice, lacing it with Celtic and Eastern influences and fusing elements of folk, rock and what is now called world music. "It's the most fun when it begins, just before the fame," Donovan says, sighing lightly. Interviewed here recently, Donovan did a little time tripping through what he calls "a swirl of mixed memories." In conversation, Donovan's supple, carefully enunciated speech sounds as comfortingly Celtic as it did spinning out fairy-tale landscapes on the introduction to the song "Atlantis." There's a touch of gray to the singer's familiar curls (at 50, Donovan's a granddaddy), and his face radiates an elfin sweetness, not unlike a stress-free Richard Simmons. Like its creator, "Sutras" is soothingly familiar its soft-spun, understated groove reflects both spiritual inclinations and literary inspirations. Now, Donovan's back with "Sutras," his first studio album in 14 years, and a reintroductory tour that's taking him to small venues (the Birchmere tonight) and bookstores (a mini-concert at Borders in Rockville last night). a man-child of magic," and the public embraced such mystic pop hits as "Catch the Wind," "Sunshine Superman," "Jennifer Juniper," "Mellow Yellow" and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven."ĭonovan Leitch, who used to perform on a dais surrounded by flowers, was "new age" before they coined the term. It was truly the Summer of Love for us.Thirty years ago, a brand-new Rolling Stone magazine described Scottish folk rocker Donovan as "the prince of flower power. That was before the hippie scene in San Francisco went bad because of the money everyone was making off drugs, et cetera. We stuck out like sore thumbs, but everyone was really cool and it didn't seem to matter that we weren't dressed like all of them. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Just remembered that we even went to the extent of making our own peace sign pendants from thin copper rods and solder in Metal Shop so we might fit in to the crowd. What a fantastic period to have lived in. Quite an eye bulging experience for 3 - 17 year-old guys at the time! Sure wish someone would organize one more love-in just to have the chance to relive that day. Some of them were so high on other drugs they never realized it when the sheets fell off. ![]() Will never forget the beautiful girls walking around with nothing but a white sheet wrapped around them. Well, besides rasping our lungs out, it didn't do a thing, but we sure had a great time. So we thought, "What the Heck! Let's try it!". When we arrived at Golden Gate Park sure enough, all of the hippies were smoking what they called "Mellow Yellow"! We asked one guy what the high was like and he said it just mellowed you out and it was perfectly legal to smoke it. So one day we loaded up one of our buddy's cars and headed out for San Francisco from LA during the Easter Break. When this song first came out we thought it was about smoking the white stuff scraped from the inside of banana peels, too.
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