Back in the sixties, we’d buy greatest hits albums.  But only sporadically, when a band we hadn’t thought was a stayer turned out to be, or one we didn’t think we liked that much ultimately churned out so many hits we didn’t even know where to start, there were too many albums to buy, so we figured we’d get all the radio songs at one time.

My first Rolling Stones album was "Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).  No one called it "Big Hits", everybody called it "High Tide", maybe "High Tide and Green Grass", and it was a killer.  Released for Christmas long before we knew that was how the music industry operated, the track I was riveted by was not the overplayed, but unable to burn out on, opener, "Satisfaction", but the follow-up, which was never an AM hit, not in my market anyway, but possessed one of the greatest guitar sounds of all time, "The Last Time".

I told myself once, I told myself twice, that I always loved "Tell Me", but I became enraptured with "Play With Fire".  Every time I take the tube in London and I see "Stepney" I’m brought right back.  Listening to this dark song during those dark days of winter I experienced the true English sound, made on damp, dreary days.  There’s a certain soul in the music of people who live in bad weather.

But the song off of "High Tide" I heard this afternoon, on my way to Beverly Hills, was "19th Nervous Breakdown".  It was playing on XM’s Top Tracks.  I heard it after pushing the button from the folk station, the Village.  Where I’d been listening to Donovan’s "Colours".

Not that I could remember what track it was.  I pulled up my iTunes library as soon as I got home, didn’t see anything that immediately jolted me, and I didn’t want to look for my copy of the two CD best of, so I just went to Amazon to look at the track listing.  And that’s where I saw it.  The album I purchased back in 1969, which is in a box of vinyl somewhere in my house, which I’d forgotten I owned, even that it existed, until I saw the album cover photo online.

I know, I know, Donovan’s the guy Dylan puts down in the movie.

Bob’s right, Donovan is no Dylan.  But he was pretty good.  He had quite a run.  I needed to own the greatest hits album because of "Sunshine Superman".

Some songs are made for the summer, they brighten your whole day, they put a bounce in your step.  That’s "Sunshine Superman".  Positively sixties, but somehow timeless.

The greatest hits album also contained "Mellow Yellow", back when "electrical banana" was seen as a marijuana reference, back before people were shooting heroin on TV…and then going to rehab, ALSO ON TV!

I must say I found "High Tide" more satisfying than Donovan’s "Greatest Hits", but I loved owning "Hurdy Gurdy Man", never mind "Catch The Wind".  But it was the secondary tracks that came alive.  When you bought albums in the sixties, when your money was dear, when you couldn’t afford that much, you played your purchases out, you became familiar with every track on the record…that’s the genesis of the term "album track"…we knew them!  So I know every lick of "Epistle To Dippy" and "Lalena".  And came to love "Jennifer Juniper" and "Wear Your Love Like Heaven".  Never mind the cut that Al Kooper turned into a classic, "Season Of The Witch".

But I couldn’t immediately place the track I heard on XM today.  So familiar, yet…  "Colours"!  Also on that album!

The Donovan track that sticks out most in my mind these days wasn’t on the original "Greatest Hits" album (although it makes the reissue).  It was the last Donovan hit I remember, when time had passed him by, when he was seen as a bit of a joke.  Did Donovan know "Atlantis" would be a single?  Who broke this track, a deejay?  I don’t know, but it was on the plane stereo system when we flew to Aspen as a family back in February 1970.  Every time we’d ride the chairlift, my sister Wendy would put on a haughty voice and say HAIL ATLANTIS!

Yes, Donovan ended his high profile career as a joke.  But listen to these tracks, they are no joke.

And as I’m driving west, listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage on Sirius, I suddenly hear another Donovan track, "Catch The Wind".  And I think how it’s too late for baby boomer acts to come back, no one cares, too many years have gone by.  I don’t mean having radio hits, that’s impossible.  But going on a big time tour.  Donovan played clubs a while back, right?  Is he just in a time capsule, or is there any way to rejuvenate his career, get young people interested?

Maybe if they heard "Colours"…

I think every generation needs its own voices.  It’s just that being young and singing your song doesn’t make you good, doesn’t make you legendary.  Joni Mitchell is better than everybody who came thereafter, never mind Sarah McLachlan, who’s already long in the tooth.  Joni didn’t only have a great voice, she had something to say!

I don’t want to put forth the proposition that Donovan had an equal amount to say, but he possessed a mellifluous voice, listening to his exquisitely crafted music took you away, on a flying carpet above this dirty, dangerous world to a place where love permeated the atmosphere, where you could wallow in your own thoughts and feel good about it.  Try listening.