John once came up to me and said, `Hey, man, that's a really cool song.' I went on the Andy Williams show, the Smothers Brothers show, and maybe I shouldn't have. "People thought `Mellow Yellow' was a silly song about smoking bananas to get high. No wonder Donovan is hard-pressed to see anything silly in what he did once in the name of mystic pop. It was a wayward bit of foolishness that resonates with hope decades later. It began with more than 90 seconds of monologue, in which Donovan condensed the contents of a Victorian-era book about a mythical continent, "Dweller on Two Planets," and followed it with an anthemic chant-"Way down below the ocean, way down below the sea"-that echoed the elongated coda of the Beatles' "Hey Jude." And, in turn, George (Harrison) taught me a lot about Indian instruments."ĭonovan's oddball charm was encapsulated a year later by a five-minute mini-epic, "Atlantis," his last top-10 hit. "John (Lennon) especially drew on it-he wanted to learn everything. "I was a source of numerous childrens' ballads for them, as well as a jazzy style of acoustic playing that they were quite interested in," Donovan says. Two years later, Donovan was accompanying the Beatles to India, where they visited with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the singer exerted a profound influence on the making of the band's legendary 1968 release, "The Beatles," a k a "The White Album." He got used to me, and a few nights later he introduced me to the Beatles. "But Bob and I had another life that you don't see in the film. But the scene that day was very edgy and uptight, and I suppose it had to do with the fact that the Americans were all taking amphetamines whereas I was more into pot, so it made it appear even more that I was the little boy lost. I was kind of naive, and it was shocking to me to be compared to him. "But the film was propaganda on a grand scale, presenting this rivalry between the two camps. "I suppose I sounded like him for about five months," Donovan says of the Dylan comparisons that greeted his hit "Catch the Wind." Pennebaker's classic documentary of Dylan's 1965 English tour, "Don't Look Back." In the film, Dylan is seen taking the measure of his teenage rival with his condescending tone and a biting version of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," but Donovan laughs it off now. His voice was considered so profoundly original when he burst on the scene as a teenager in the mid-'60s that he was considered a threat to Bob Dylan as the premier singer-songwriter of his time, as made clear by D.A. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Donovan walked the zen highway like he talked it. I fell off the road lots of times, but for me it's like riding a bicycle. "I read Alan Watts' `The Way of Zen' as a teenager and have been obsessed with these ideas ever since. "The songs I write are about searching, and they're ambiguous-always to be understood in different ways," Donovan says. And, recalling his '60s prime, Donovan's new lyrics blend Celtic myth with Eastern teachings he searches for the Holy Grail in "The Clear Browed One," pays homage to the "Everlasting Sea" and declares that we live in "The Evernow." "Sutras" might seem a slightly pretentious label for a collection of pop songs, but Donovan did borrow lyrics from an ancient Chinese text for one song ("The Way") and a melody from an Asian Indian sect for another ("High Your Love"). Not only did Rubin produce the Donovan's new album and release it a few months ago on his American Recordings label, he also titled it "Sutras" after a Hindu and Buddhist term for religious writings. "Who could ask for anything more," he sings.
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