Beat Café Donovan Appleseed Records, 2004   Buy it online   Reviewed by Gianmarc Manzione	After a 40 year run as the master of Mellow, not much has changed on Planet Donovan. The wisdom is still as abundant as the weed; poets in berets still blow saxes in the coffeehouse at night, and flowers still don heads of bushy hair in the audience. The man himself may be a little older now, but that doesn't mean that he's not coming on: If I was your lover I'd take you to the sky If you are feeling low I will make you high Let me be your lover baby I will be your beau This is not exactly the language of a man taking his social security check to the bank on the way to the golf course. In fact, Beat Café is an album that delivers the urgency and freshness one might expect from the debut album of a 20-something nobody, no less a nearly 60-year old flower-child of the original Woodstock generation. Hushed and haunted, Beat Café plays like a long, seductive whisper from somewhere within the listener's consciousness -- a knowing and familiar voice spreading the rumor that utopia is not something that happens in the external world, but rather within the self. It is a sunrise of the soul; a placid and breezy terrain the mind brings you to when the gates of its imagination are unlocked. "Gonna do all the things I've never done before, gonna get myself together somehow," Donovan sings on the downright wicked "The Question." Many of these new tunes expand upon the kind of optimism with which Donovan managed to pit himself against that brooding, bitter and more famous American counterpart, Bob Dylan. Unlike Donovan's last album -- the spare but alluring Sutras produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings in 1996 -- Beat Café explodes into a varied and distinctive musical brew. Danny Thompson's bass playing is worthy of Apollo's crown, and the legendary Jim Keltner turns in a surprisingly hip performance on drums and percussion, managing to keep up with Donovan as he slips in and out of beat after groovy beat. Whereas Rubin seemed to make a Rick Rubin record of Sutras -- mired as it was in his minimalist approach -- John Chelew allows for the making of a Donovan record this time around. Chelew, whose resume includes work with John Hiatt and Richard Thompson, proves a more sympathetic cohort throughout this musically fascinating project, even lending a hand on keyboards throughout the set. The atmosphere is much more relaxed and suggests that the artist was allowed to breathe freely during these sessions. The only resemblance between this latest album and Sutras is the mystic airiness of Donovan's lyrics, an eastern spiritualism cloaked in the psychedelic lexicon Donovan continues to employ. "You yin my yang/I'll yang your yin," he directs on "Yin My Yang." For an album as overtly conscious of its heritage as this one, it seems almost obligatory that Donovan would nod to Oar, Alexander "Skip" Spence's masterpiece of psychedelic folk/rock from 1969. "I could use me some yin for my yang," Spence sings on his "Dixie Peach Promenade (yin for yang)," "that would make everything alright." Spence's work is not only a direct echo of Donovan's "Yin My Yang," but of the entire universe Beat Café evokes -- from its "beatnik café" where "the reefer blow" to the time and place where "there'll be music in the air/flowers in your hair/life without a care." But where the nostalgic lyrics retread familiar territory, the music reinvents an artist in his fifth decade as a performer. The beautifully brittle "Shambala" closes the album with a moving dream of yearning, escape and resignation: Take me home back to Shambala where peaceful rivers flow Take me home back to Shambala Where seeds of love they sow The appropriately titled "Whirlwind" -- a song that wins the "coolest groove of the year" award -- is dark and sly enough to suffice as the soundtrack for a landfalling hurricane. Most startling, though, is Donovan's impassioned cover of the folk standard, "The Cuckoo" which, amid so many interpretations of the well-traveled song, ranks as one of the most commanding and memorable. Really, though, only Donovan's own smooth voice manages to outdo Danny Thompson's pervasive double bass, which thumps and groans through every minute of the album, lending a jazzy depth to the distinctly international sound Donovan achieves here. Thompson raises "The Question" into a kind of frenetic street march through "the darkest hour of night," while abrupt solos on "Love floats" or the instant classic, "Poorman's Sunshine," fuse these songs with the spontaneity of a particularly inspired demo. It bears mentioning that Donovan tosses some killer guitar licks of his own into the mix, most notably on the deliciously fiendish title track. After following up a prolific period of creativity in the 70s with two decades of piercing silence, the release of a new Donovan album is unlikely enough. That the man would emerge out of nowhere with the coolest album of the year nearly 40 years after his debut is nothing short of astonishing. Beat Café is further proof that something incredible happened in the decade of assassinations, flowers and weather factions. The story is still far from over. | October 2004   Gianmarc Manzione received an MFA in poetry from New School University in May 2004. Three poems from his first collection, This Brevity, will appear in issue #173 of The Paris Review. He is also a writer for Bowlers Journal, the oldest sports magazine in the country.