[12] In an interview with KFOK radio in the US on 14 June 2005, MacLeod said: "The press were fond of calling Donovan a Dylan clone as they had both been influenced by the same sources: Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jesse Fuller, Woody Guthrie, and many more.

Their collaboration produced successful singles and albums, recorded with London session players including Big Jim Sullivan,[20] Jack Bruce,[21] Danny Thompson,[22] and future Led Zeppelin members John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page.

[23] Many of Donovan's late 1960s recordings featured musicians including his key musical collaborator John Cameron on piano, Danny Thompson (from Pentangle) or Spike Heatley on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums and congas and Harold McNair on saxophone and flute.

He immersed himself in jazz, blues, Eastern music, and the new generation of counterculture-era US West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.

He was entering his most creative phase as a songwriter and recording artist, working with Mickie Most and with arranger, musician, and jazz fan John Cameron.

[25] The US version of the Sunshine Superman album features instruments including acoustic bass, sitar, saxophone, tablas and congas, harpsichord, strings and oboe.

The song was covered by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity on their first LP in 1967, and Al Kooper and Stephen Stills recorded an 11-minute version on the 1968 album, Super Session.

On 9 February 1967, Donovan was among guests invited by the Beatles to Abbey Road Studios for the orchestral overdub for "A Day in the Life", the finale to Sgt.

[8] Public attention was drawn to his marijuana use by the TV documentary A Boy Called Donovan in early 1966, which showed the singer and friends smoking cannabis at a party thrown by the film crew.

"Be Not Too Hard" was a musical setting of Christopher Logue's poem September Song, and was later recorded by such artists as Joan Baez and Shusha Guppy.

Lennon used this technique on songs including "Dear Prudence", "Julia", "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "Look at Me", and McCartney with "Blackbird" and "Mother Nature's Son".

[citation needed] Donovan credits Page and "Allen Hollsworth" (a misspelling of Allan Holdsworth) as the "guitar wizards" for the song, saying they created "a new kind of metal folk".

[39] The heavier sound of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" was an attempt by Most and Donovan to reach a wider audience in the US, where hard-rock groups like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were having an impact.

The album also includes extended group arrangements of "Young Girl Blues" and "The Pebble and the Man", a song later reworked and retitled as "Happiness Runs".

The album The Hurdy Gurdy Man followed (not released in the UK), continuing the style of the Mellow Yellow LP, and reached 20 in the US, despite containing two earlier hits, the title track and "Jennifer Juniper".

[citation needed] After another US tour in the autumn he collaborated with Paul McCartney, who was producing Postcard, the debut LP by Welsh singer Mary Hopkin.

McCartney returned the favour by playing tambourine and singing backing vocals on Donovan's next single, "Atlantis", which was released in the UK (with "I Love My Shirt" as the B-side) in late November and reached 23.

On 26 June 1969 the track "Barabajagal (Love Is Hot)" (recorded May 1969), which gained him a following on the rave scene decades later, was released, reaching 12 in the UK but charting less strongly in the US.

Only the recent "Barabajagal"/"Trudi" single and "Superlungs My Supergirl" were 1969 recordings, the remaining tracks [clarification needed] were from sessions in London in May 1968 and in Los Angeles in November 1968.

[citation needed] In the late 1960s to the early 1970s he lived at Stein, on the Isle of Skye, where he and a group of followers formed a commune and where he was visited by George Harrison.

In the 1995 BBC Radio 2 The Donovan Story, Most recounted: The only time we ever fell out was in Los Angeles when there was all these, I suppose, big stars of their day, the Stephen Stillses and the Mama Casses, all at the session and nothing was actually being played.

[43]Donovan's plan for Open Road was to tour the world for a year, beginning with a boat voyage around the Aegean Sea, documented in the 1970 film There is an Ocean.

The title song from the Zeffirelli film provided Donovan with a publishing windfall in 1974 when it was covered as the B-side of the million-selling US top 5 hit "The Lord's Prayer", by Australia's singing nun, Sister Janet Mead.

After a new deal with Epic, Donovan reunited with Mickie Most in early 1973, resulting in the LP Cosmic Wheels, which featured arrangements by Chris Spedding.

There was a respite when he appeared alongside Sting, Phil Collins, Bob Geldof, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck in the Amnesty International benefit show The Secret Policeman's Other Ball.

Accompanied by Danny Thompson, Donovan performed several hits including "Sunshine Superman", "Mellow Yellow", "Colours", "Universal Soldier" and "Catch the Wind".

At a series of Beat Cafe performances in New York, Richard Barone (The Bongos) joined Donovan to sing and read passages from Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

[55][54] A tribute album to Donovan, Gazing with Tranquility, was released in October 2015 under nonprofit label Rock the Cause Records to benefit the charity Huntington's Hope.

[60] Donovan and Lawrence created an animated children's television series, Tales of Aluna, with 26 episodes produced by Australian studio Three's a Company.

And we have been placed in this extraordinary position, almost on the edge of extinction, by this totally, overly male view that every resource, every river, every breeze, every cloud, every metal in the land should be raped and pillaged and sold as a commodity.