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Revision as of 16:29, 27 July 2004 by Dunks58 (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Donovan Philips Leitch (usually known simply as Donovan) (born May 10, 1946) is a British musician. He spent his early years in Glasgow, and although he contracted a bout of polio as a child he fortunately suffered no permanent injury.
In 1956 the family moved to Hatfield, England. Influenced by his family's love for Scottish and English folk music, he began playing guitar at fourteen. He and longtime friend Gypsy Dave travelled the country playing folk songs. He began writing original songs in the early Sixties and by late 1964 he had met his two original managers and was signed to a publishing contract. He recorded his first ten-track demo tape at the London basement studio of Peer Music in Denmark Street; this included the original recording of what was to be his first single, 'Catch The Wind', a song that showed the unmistakable influence of Bob Dylan although the tape made it clear that he was already a performer of considerable skill and originality. He was also a very fine acoustic guitarist and self-accompanist, a talent that is often overlooked, as it so often is with his early hero Bob Dylan.
It was while recording the demo that he met and became friends with Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. Soon after, he met Brian's girlfriend Linda Lawrence; she had already had a child to Jones, but when she met Donovan the relationship wwas breaking up and she and Donovan susequently became lovers and eventually married. Linda became Donovan's muse and was to have a profound effect on his music, inspiring songs like 'Catch The Wind' and 'Season Of The Witch'.
The tape was heard by Elkan Allen, producer of the television pop show Ready Steady Go! which led to the unknown musician (then only 18) being invited to appear on the show. Donovan made his TV debut on 6 February 1965. Unusually for pop programs of this time, Donovan played and sang live, and after his performance he was interviewed by host Cathy McGowan. His appearance was so well-received that he was invited back for the next two weeks, and this in turn led to a recording contract with Pye Records and a meteoric career start.
Donovan's first UK single, a re-recorded version of 'Catch The Wind', was released soon after his third Ready, Steady Go appearance and it was a hugely successful debut shooting to #4 on the UK charts and selling more than 200,000 copies. On 11 April he performed with the biggest stars of the day at the annual New Musical Express poll winners' concert at the Empire Pool, Wembley. The single was subsequently released on the small Hickory label in the USA, where it managed an impressive #30 chart placing.
Donovan's early musical style and appearance led to him being touted as a British version of Bob Dylan and this brought with it a certain degree of criticism from folk purists, who wrongly assumed him to be a simple Dylan imitator. Not surprisingly, the meeting between the two musicians in April 1965 made headlines. However, the initially wary Dylan was impressed, as can be seen in the scenes featuring them in D.A. Pennebaker's film of Dylan's '65 UK tour, Don't Look Back, which was released in 1967 and as a result he was invited to tour with Dylan and Joan Baez.
Donovan's second single 'Colours' was released in May, reaching #4, accompanied by his debut LP 'What's Been Did And What's Been Hid', which reached #3 in the UK album charts. Retitled "Catch The Wind" for the US, it reached #30 there. He made his first trip to the USA at this time, performing in New York with Pete Seeger and Reverend Gary Davis and appearing on Hullaballoo and Shindig, as well as performing to critical and audience acclaim at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in July.
His next recording was a four-track EP, "Universal Soldier", which included his classic cover of the Buffy Saint-Marie title track, along with three other overtly anti-war tracks. As Australian rock historian Glenn A. Baker has observed, this was quite a radical move for an emerging pop performer -- the Vietnam war still had majority popular support in 1965 -- and Donovan's pioneering pacifist stance is often overlooked by his critics, and it would not be his last anti-war recording. Despite its contentious subject matter, the record was a significant commercial success, topping the British EP chart for eight weeks and even reaching #14 on the singles chart. It was also released in Australia, where it reached #17 on the singles chart.
'Colours' was also released in the USA but it fared rather poorly, reaching #40 on the Cash Box charts but only reaching #61 on the Billboard chart. At this point Donovan's success was greater in sales than in radio airplay, since American Top 40 radio tended to avoid folk-style recordings, preferring more highly arranged pop records. The Catch The Wind LP had also charted better in Cash Box than Billboard, reflecting the fact that Billboard's charts factored in radio airplay, whilst Cash Box did not.
A single version of "Universal Soldier" was issued in the USA in late August 1965 and it mimicked the chart performance of 'Colours', reaching #45 in Cash Box but only #53 in Billboard. Pye released Donovan's second UK album, "Fairy Tale", in October 1966, along with his next single, "Turquoise". Both were less successful than his previous releases, with the album only reaching #20 and the single peaking at #30. Donovan made a second US tour in November, and hickory released the American version of Fairy Tale later that month, but as in the UK it did charted much lower than the first LP, only reaching #85.
In late 1965 Donovan split with his original managers and signed with Ashley Kozak, who was working for Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises. Kozak introduced Donovan to American impresario Allen Klein (who would later take over management of The Rolling Stones) and Klein in turn introduced Donovan to producer Mickie Most, who was then riding high on the success of his chart-topping productions with The Animals and Herman's Hermits.
Mickie Most was to produce most of Donovan's music in the late Sixties. The tracks they recorded together repesent some of the best UK pop releases of the period, and feature the cream of the London session scene, including contributions by future Led Zeppelin members John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page. Many of the earlier Donovan-Most recordings were backed by a regular group of players drawn from the jazz scene, including Danny Thompson or Spike Heatley on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums and congas, John Cameron on piano and Jamaican-born Harold McNair on sax and flute. Carr's distinctive conga style was a recurring feature on many of these recordings, and he and McNair also toured the U.S with Donovan.
It has been claimed that Donovan introduced Page and Jones to each other and that this essentially created Led Zeppelin. In fact, Jones and Page had already known each other for several years -- they were among the top freelance musicians in London at that time, and worked on literally hundreds of well-known British recordings in that period, until Page retired from session work in 1967 to join The Yardbirds. Nevertheless, Donovan himself has stated that the 'heavier' pop sound of his 1967 single 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' had a definite influence on Page and Jones, although it is generally thought that the duo's work on the Jeff Beck single 'Beck's Bolero' (with Beck and Who drummer Keith Moon) was the real start of Led Zeppelin.
By 1966 Donovan was abandoning the overt Dylan/Guthrie influences and taking on a definite 'flower power' image; more importantly, his music was developing and changing rapidly as he immersed himself in jazz and blues and Indian music. He was now entering perhaps his most creative and original phase as a songwriter and recording artist, working in close collaboration with Most and arranger, musician and jazz fanatic John Cameron.
The first fruit of their collaboration was the funky pop-psych classic 'Sunshine Superman', an innovative and eclectic blend of folk and psychedelia, a sinewy jazz arrangement augmented by classical elements including a harpsichord, set against a catchy percussive backbeat. It also contained subtle but unmistakable references to LSD such as the line "coulda tripped out easy, but I changed my way".
Unfortunately, it was at this point that his career threatened to stall. In December 1965 Billboard lifted the lid on the impending deal between Klein, Most and Donovan and then followed up on 18 December with a report that Donovan was about to sign with CBS Records. Despite his business manager's denials, Pye Records abruptly dropped the single from their release schedule.
The dispute dragged on into early 1966, but during the hiatus in his recording career Donovan holidayed in Greece, where he wrote one of his best songs, the wistful 'Writer In The Sun', which was inspired by the current gossip that his recording career was over. He also toured the USA. playing some sparsely attended gigs, and he collaborated with The Beatles, contributing lyrics (and possibly backing vocals) to the song 'Yellow Submarine, which was recorded at Abbey Road Studios on 26 May 1966.
By late 1966, with the American contractual problems had been resolved and Donavan signed a $100,000 deal with the CBS subsidiary Epic Records . Donovan and Most then headed to CBS Studios in Los Angeles where they recorded the tracks for a new LP, much of which had been formulated and written over the preceding year. Although folk elements were still prominent, the album showed the increasing influence of rock, American west coast psychedelia and folk-rock, especially The Byrds, whose records Donovan had been listening to constantly through 1965.
The LP sessions were completed in May and the title track was released in June. It was a huge success and furnished the all-important American breakthrough, selling 800,000 copies in just six weeks and and eventually reaching #1 in the US. The LP followed in August, preceded by advance orders of 250,000 copies, and it reached #11 on the US album charts.
The Sunshine Superman LP is probably the best, most consistent and most durable of Donovan's albums; it contains many beautiful and memorable songs, fine arrangements, top-notch playing and Most's inimitable production. Highlights include 'The Fat Angel', a song written for 'Mama' Cass Elliott of The Mamas And The Papas and which famously namechecked cult San Francisco acid-rock band Jefferson Airplane long before they became successful. Other standout tracks include 'The Trip' , the gorgeous 'Guinevere' and the dark, portentious 'Season Of The Witch'. Recorded with a pick-up band he had met in an L.A. club, this classic track was later covered by Brian Auger; the Donovan version was used to fine effect, years later, in the memorable closing sequence of the Gus Van Zant film To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman.
On 24 October 1966 Epic released the second single from the LP, the rollicking 'Mellow Yellow', arranged by John Paul Jones and featuring Paul McCartney on uncredited backing vocals. Believed by many to be about the supposed practice of smoking banana peels, the "electrical banana" line supposedly referred to vibrators . It became his signature tune and was an even bigger success, reaching #2 in Billboard and #3 in Cash Box and earning Donovan his first US gold record award for sales of more than one million copies.
During the first half of 1967 Donovan worked on a new studio project. In July Epic released a new single, 'There Is A Mountain', which became a Top ten hit in the U.S. and was later covered by The Allman Brothers. In the northern autumn he began a new tour of the United States; dressed in flowing robes, on a stage decked with feathers, flowers and incense, he played to a packed house at the Phliharmonic Hall in New York. His performance was rapturously received and immortalised by a mention in Lillian Roxon's Rock Encylopedia. A similarly ecstatic performance at the Hollywood Bowl was followed by a notable landmark -- Donovan was interviewed by writer John Carpenter and featured as the first ever Rolling Stone interview in the magazine's debut issue, published on 9 November 1967.
Later hits include the psychedelic nugget "Hurdy Gurdy Man", and his snarling 1968 freakbeat classic 'Barabajagal' on which he was backed by the Jeff Back Group, who were also under contract to Most at the time; the anthemic "Atlantis" (again featuring an uncredited Paul McCartney) is as pagan and hippy-dippy as they come.
Donovan was by now a close friend of The Beatles and on 9 February 1967 he was one of the invited guests for the all-star orchestral overdub sessions for the brilliant Lennon-McCartney collaboration 'A Day In The Life', the grand finale to the Beatles' new opus Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Donovan also penned "Jennifer Juniper" in honor of Jenny Boyd, sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd and the following year he accompanied the Beatles and Mike Love of The Beach Boys when they travelled to Rishikesh in India to study meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
In 1969 he married his girlfriend Linda Lawrence and became the father to her daughter from her earlier relationship with Brian Jones.
In the late 1960s, seeing many of his friends and many in his audience succumb to hard drug use, Donovan went on record opposing the use of drugs. His rejection of drugs was perhaps also motivated in by the fact that in early 1967 he had become the first in a series of high-profile drug busts targetting British pop stars, which culminated in the famous arrest and trial of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard.
Donovan was the first to find himself in the sights of the Murdoch-owned tabloid 'News Of The World'. In late January 1967 the paper began a three-part expose entitled "Drugs & Pop Stars - Facts That Will Shock You", in which it was alleged that Donovan and many other leading pop stars including members of The Who, Cream (group) and The Rolling Stones regularly smoked marijuana and otehr drugs, including the hallucinogen LSD. It emerged much later that Murdoch's showbusiness reporters were using their access to the stars to covertly observe their drug use and then pass information to the Drug Squad. More than twenty years later, a story in The Guardian revealed that News Of The World tipped off the Drug Squad about the party at keith Richard's house, Redlands, which was famously raided in the early hours of 12 February 1967.
Donovan became a student of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, embracing vegetarianism and Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
He provided the songs for Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), Franco Zeffirelli's film about St Francis of Assisi.
Donovan has two children who have become actors, his namesake son, Donovan Leitch, Jr., and his daughter, Ione Skye.
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