Stacks apologizes for not keeping to its regular every-Wednesday schedule. We'd use yesterday's blizzard as an excuse, except we were actually among the lucky one's who never lost power during either of these immense storms. Anyways, a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short.

This week's edition is a bit of audible. I had another, perhaps more prescient, post ready to go in which I was to begin my crusade to get the Electric Light Orchestra to play next year's Super Bowl halftime show. We'll definitely get to ELO down the line, but I think it might make for better first days of Spring reading.

If anything, Stacks aims to maintain a level of transparency; I want this column to accurately reflect and capture as best as I can my current and ongoing musical fascinations. I spend an awful lot of time consuming and seeking out new music...but truth be told, it's the old stuff that really sets my tail a-wagging. Case in point: as eager as I have been to get my hands on that new Midlake album (which is every bit as excellent as I hoped, by the way), I've continued to spend more time with the older records that likely influenced its creation than I have that actual record itself. Still immersed in Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, the Pentangle and the like.

Which leads us down a slight detour to today's selections courtesy of Donovan. More than just a poor man's Bob Dylan, Scotland's Donovan Leitch released his fair share of folk and psych rock gems in the 60's and beyond. His justifiably ubiquitous Greatest Hits album, originally released in 1968, is wall to wall fantastic. But it doesn't just end there; you won't find many three album stretch runs better than 1966's Sunshine Superman, 1967's Mellow Yellow and 1968's The Hurdy Gurdy Man. I'm still discovering and delighting in the man's copious output.

The first time I heard "Colours" was via the aforementioned Greatest Hits album. It was an immediate favorite, but several years later, I was introduced to an alternate version via the film depiction of Brett Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction of all things. The film itself is a sort of trashy guilty pleasure, but the scene in which this was featured is a brilliant little piece of film making (and one that I imagine had a bit of influence on last year's big hit 500 Days of Summer; watch that scene here).

Anyways...back to "Colours". I become obsessed with this particular full-band reworking of the track. I love its lysergic pace and the melody-borrowing organ solo, played by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. But from where did this version come?

It turns out that when the record label went to compile the Greatest Hits record, they were not granted the rights to "Colours" or "Catch the Wind"! Subsequently, Donovan was forced to re-cut new versions of these songs. The original acoustic versions of these songs have since been restored to Greatest Hits. The re-workings can now be found on the 2005 reissue of The Hurdy Gurdy Man.

I have to admit to preferring the full band version. Give a listen to both. Which do you prefer?





As a bonus, here is the original b-side to "Colours", entitled "To Sing For You". This is the song that Donovan chooses to perform for Dylan in that classic scene from Don't Look Back.