MSN Music on Donovan with funny comments from John

A troubadour turned psychedelic pioneer savors his return to the spotlight

By Mark Brown
Special to MSN Music

Everything has its time and place, and now it's Donovan's turn. Again.

He has worked tirelessly over the years, with more than two dozen albums under his belt, but now his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- "the world's biggest spotlight," as he calls it -- is here to remind the world of how much he changed the face of popular music.

"Interviewers ask me, 'Do you feel you should have been in before?' That's not how I live or think. It's perfect timing and a singular honor, like an Academy Award, really," said Donovan from his home in California.

And he's right: The singer-songwriter, most closely associated with his '60s hits "Sunshine Superman," "Mellow Yellow" and "Jennifer Juniper" is undergoing a career reawakening, be it the use of "Mellow Yellow" in a GAP commercial several years ago or last June's onstage collaboration with a '60s studio session man who played on his early hits, a lad named Jimmy Page, pre-Led Zeppelin.

Or as Donovan puts it, "the celebration began before the Rock Hall, and it just continues."

Donovan Leitch was a troubadour of the British folk scene as Bob Dylan, the Beatles and others were coming up in the '60s, who subsequently swapped his rustic denim for caftans and beads to embody the peace-and-love flower-power message of the era. It's something he has never let go of, and something that continues to resonate through the generations. At the time, the work he and his contemporaries were doing was dismissed as disposable pop; 40-plus years down the line, it's as enduring as ever.

"Nobody knew how long rock 'n' roll was going to last. I didn't really think much about that, but we knew we were doing something quite extraordinary. But we didn't know how it would be in context in the future," Donovan said. "I only do things because I was inspired ... otherwise it would become a steady job, and I was never interested in a steady job."

When Donovan was first nominated to be in the Hall of Fame, the "Sunshine Superman" album was "cited as initiating the psychedelic revolution. Maybe this is why time has to pass, to see things in their context and historical place. It predates the Jefferson Airplane's masterpiece. It was recorded in late '65," Donovan said. It was that album that he was performing in its entirety -- and may bring to the U.S. later this year -- when he and Page reunited on the title track in 2011 at the Royal Albert Hall. It was just natural, he said.

"It's an understood thing in the music fraternity -- you can pick up a guitar after 35 years and it's as if no time has passed. ... It seems like only yesterday we last spoke," Donovan said, describing Page as "a great soul and a great guy." The Royal Albert Hall performance, he said, "is on video. It's going to be broadcast in the States at some point."

Besides the impending U.S. tour, a new career overview, "The Essential Donovan," comes out on Tuesday, featuring his greatest hits, deep album cuts and four tracks never available on CD in the U.S. before now.

The Hall of Fame is a particularly great honor, he said, given that they start with 700 hopefuls every year "and they have to bring it down to six. Who did contribute in such a way that it inspired and expanded music?"

Musicians as diverse as Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler and John Mellencamp have been profoundly influenced by his work; Mellencamp, in fact, is inducting Donovan into the Hall of Fame on Saturday, several years after taking Donovan out on the road with him to introduce him to a new set of fans -- "great fun, a great honor for me."

As Mellencamp once said, Donovan recalled, "If it wasn't for Donovan, I wouldn't have gotten any girls on the beach when I was 16 with my guitar."

Donovan paused and laughed. "That's not the first time I've heard that!"

Mark Brown is a veteran music journalist who was pop critic for the Rocky Mountain News until its demise. He is also a contributor to the MSN Music blogs Reverb and Scene & Heard.