Donovan (Donovan Phillips Leitch, born 10 May 1946, in Glasgow), is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist. Emerging from the British folk scene, he developed an eclectic and distinctive style that blended folk, jazz, pop, psychedelia, and world music. Donovan came to fame in the United Kingdom in early 1965 with a series of live performances on the pop TV series, Ready Steady Go!, and his popularity spread to the USA and other countries. After signing with the British label, Pye Records in 1965, he recorded a handful of singles and two albums in the folk music vein. After getting out from his original management contract, he began a long and successful collaboration with leading independent record producer Mickie Most, scoring a string of hits in the UK, the USA, Australia and other countries, including several British and American #1 hits and million-selling records. Donovan was the first artist to be signed to CBS/Epic Records by then-new Administrative Vice President Clive Davis, who later became head of the CBS Record empire.
Donovan was one of the most popular British recording artists of his day, producing a series of hit albums and singles between 1965 and 1970. He became a friend of leading pop musicians including Joan Baez, Brian Jones, Bruce Springsteen, and The Beatles, and was one of the few artists to collaborate on songs with the Beatles. He influenced both John Lennon and Paul McCartney when he taught them his finger-picking guitar style in 1968.[1] Donovan's commercial fortunes waned after he parted ways with Mickie Most in 1969, and he left the music industry for a time.
He continued to perform and record sporadically in the 1970s and 1980s, but gradually fell from favor. His gentle musical style and hippie image was scorned by critics, especially after the advent of punk rock. Donovan withdrew from performing and recording several times during his career, but he underwent a revival in the 1990s with the emergence of the rave scene in Britain. Late in the decade, he recorded an album with producer and long-time fan Rick Rubin and released a new album, Beat Cafe, in 2004. <--- taken from Wiki's site [here].
Open Road:
Just upon the release of this album in 1970 it was made illegal to sell in the United States over copyright violations, or so they said...
They claimed Donovan "stole chords from Bob Dylan", how the hell can a singer steal a guitar note anyway?
I think and I'd bet money on it that it was something else. I'd bet it was the content and the topic of the album.
If you listen to it from beginning to end you would see that it describes a love of a man through the eye of a singer who is also a man and that in 1970 was a bad topic to be discussing, especially in music, especially in music aimed at teens who listened to that music. I think that's why it was outlawed in the U.S.A..
This was Christmas week in 1970 and although they could not sell the album there was no law preventing them from giving it away. Both my mother and aunt got brand new Hi-Fi stereo record players that year for Christmas and in those days with every new stereophonic record player you got your first album free. You selected it out of a box of albums put aside for the occasion. My mother selected Roberta Flack, my aunt selected Donovan's Open Road.
I loved that damn album and it took months of conniving and begging to get her to trade it off to me, but eventually I got it. I was about ten years old at the time.
Come age twelve or so and with the help of a good stash of Marijuana I smoked myself into oblivion and left the record on replay mode on the disk changer and the sun came through the window and warped it on me "Dammit!", but I still cherished the album until it was stolen from me.
I ran away from home at age 13 and in doing so I gave everyone free run through my belongings. I searched for that album everywhere and found it nine years later in an album collection at a house that my sister used to babysit at and it was my copy "it was warped exactly the same" so I took it back. I held onto it about ten or fifteen more years but always searched for a new undamaged copy of it. Never could get one anywhere until recently.
Playing cribbage in Social Lounge (Yahoo Games) I met a wonderful friend and she replied "Well the albums not illegal here" and after over twenty-five years of searching she bought it for me and sent it to me.
One more comment, although it's irrelevant in art form, but still I'm going to make it. I had no idea that this album was about sex or relationships between men. I was only ten years old. I just loved it because I was reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and the trilogy and I loved the troll songs Curry Land and Celtic Rock, plus I hated the Catholic religion because of the way the generation before me was abused under their ways and rules. Grown now and understanding more now I can see what it was really about and my opinion is that it's a beautiful production, a loving gesture, a showing of deep concern and a masterpiece of musical element!
Changes [Download]
"Everyone is right, everything is wrong. Don't let the changes get you down man"
This is the first step into a new lifestyle & encouragement to help him face the "changes".
