Donovan promotes Transcendental Meditation Subject: Donovan promotes Transcendental Meditation


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This article is appearing in newspapers across the USA

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He's not 'mellow'
PBS special features '60s icon Donovan, singer's music still popular

What: "The Donovan Concert, Live in L.A."
When and where: 7:30 tonight on KVCR, Channel 9 on Time Warner Cable,
Channel 24 over air. 9 p.m. Monday on KOCE in Orange County and on Channel
50 on Direct and Dish satellite.
Additional screenings: KCET in Los Angeles/Palm Springs is expected to
screen it in August. It will be screened on other PBS stations around the
country throughout the summer.

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Bruce Fessier
The Desert Sun
June 2, 2007

Donovan likes to say he's not selling out, he's selling in.

The Scottish '60s icon has songs in six TV commercials, including three
using his 1965 hit, "Catch the Wind."

His "Hurdy Gurdy Man" is featured in three films and a rarely heard verse by
George Harrison is being nationally debuted on Donovan's PBS special, "The
Donovan Concert, Live in L.A.," airing at 7:30 tonight on KVCR, Time Warner
Cable Channel 9.

But, if Donovan is selling anything, its Transcendental Meditation. He's
been practicing it since visiting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968
with The Beatles.

This PBS special began as an attempt to promote TM with film director David
Lynch, whose foundation is working with the Maharishi University of
Management in Fairfield, Iowa, to bring TM into classrooms for kids from 6
to 16.

When PBS didn't jump on a special on TM, producer Joni Ravenna of Palm
Springs and Bob Roth of the Lynch Foundation sold them on a TM lecture by
Lynch with a concert by the folk-rock troubadour.

It was filmed at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood in January. The special will
air all summer, minus the lecture.

For Donovan, who stepped out of the limelight to raise his family in Joshua
Tree in the mid-1970s, this is another comeback of sorts.

His first kids, Donovan Leitch Jr. and Ione Skye Leitch, are actors.
Astrella Celeste, a daughter from his second marriage to Linda Lawrence,
widow of Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, sings with Donovan in the
special.


Donovan, who moved from Joshua Tree to Dublin, Ireland in the 1980s,
released an autobiography in 2005. He's recorded a multi-media album, titled
"Ritual Groove," that is waiting for videos to be applied to it.
He said in a recent interview in Los Angeles his phone never stopped
ringing, but he's now answering it in a big way.

THE DESERT SUN: Is this a concerted return to public life?

DONOVAN LEITCH: It's quite concerted because of the extraordinary amount of
requests for our music for films, television series and commercials the last
five years. I think I must be the most heard singer-songwriter of my
generation in the last six months. I've had six major movies with my music
in it the last six months.

TDS: What's your new album like?

DL: I describe it as a soundtrack to a movie not yet made. As a matter of
fact, it is a movie soundtrack and at least five directors have expressed
interest in doing scenes. So it's very much a new media platform project.
I'm hoping David (Lynch) will pick one of the scenes. David and I have been
meditating for a long while.

TDS: Have you been doing TM continuously since India?

DL: Yes, I've been meditating, trying other forms and finding TM to be the
most instant and important. Many other forms of meditation require longer
periods and often retreat from life. With TM, you remain in life.

TDS: When you moved to Joshua Tree, was that a retreat?

DL: No. In the early '70s, Joshua Tree was not so much a retreat, but
putting into practice what Linda and I had found. We lived in the desert
there with our two young children because we wanted the least amount of
hassles in bringing up a family. Of course, the beautiful weather of the
high desert was just perfect.

TDS: Your book said music was going in a harder direction in the '70s.

DL: Largely that. It got to be very unspiritual for a while, but it wasn't
the music that I walked away from. The mission was complete. I as an artist
had done what I set out to do, and that was to bring the bohemian manifesto
to pop culture, along with the other poets from bohemia. It was an
intentional plan which was begun by the Beat poets in the late '40s and the
'50s to bring conscious lyrics back to popular culture and with it, civil
rights protests, an understanding of ecology, feminism, the spiritual path
and an answer to the madness in the 20th century.

TDS: I met you a few years ago at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage with
Pete Seeger's manager, Harold Leventhal. Certainly Seeger and Woody Guthrie
had made it a mission to do just what you said.

DL: Yes, the Beat poets were bringing the bohemian ideas in, but Woody and
Pete were most important in bringing the return of meaningful lyrics to the
music and re-establishing folk music as the root of all music. If it wasn't
for those two guys, the '60s music wouldn't have gotten off.

TDS: But I don't see how the mission could ever be completed.

DL: When I say the mission was complete, the re-introduction of meaningful
lyrics to popular culture was complete in 1969. It could never be taken
away. I don't mean the mission is complete, but it could never go
underground any more. Lost knowledge was now available everywhere. That
would now have to be applied.

TDS: You sound optimistic about the future.

DL: Well, it's what the people want always. If people don't care, nothing
happens, but when they start caring, governments have to start caring.
Optimistic? How else can one be?

TDS: Well, I was at the Coachella festival recently and what was amazing was
the mass celebration of people who were seemingly detached from corporate
America and were now feeling empowered. The message of Rage Against the
Machine, which was the message left by that festival, was you can't wait
once every four years to try to change the government. It's a non-stop
process.

DL: It's a very odd thing, politics. America leads the world in so many ways
and should be leading in so many other ways. The most powerful nation in the
world should have the most powerful vision for the future.

These students who are meditating, between the ages of 10 and 16 on average,
they will be the future. In the work of David Lynch, Linda and I, Maharishi
and the Maharishi University of conscious-based education, there is a future
government being planned, and that government will be a world government.
The old guard with older technologies are passing away. It's a constant
state of change.

We look to the future generations by preparing them now to be conscious. And
the only way you can be conscious when you're in school is by being able to
contact your deepest levels.



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