In between several ''commercials" for his latest products, Donovan told stories eliciting smiles from most of his audience. His voice, which has lost the soft lilt that launched a thousand twee, indie-pop bands, now conveys the wizened knowledge of someone who's led a fascinating life that, as he said, ''no one's going to believe."
Problem is, if you weren't around for the '60s, most of this trip down memory lane was lost on you. He dedicated a song to fallen '60s guitar heroes Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix and reminisced fondly about the good old days with Jim Morrison and Joan Baez. His sentences trailed off with the groovy cadence of Austin Powers, as if to imply ''isn't this all just far out, man?" It was, but it also did nothing to suggest that Donovan sees himself as culturally relevant to younger generations.
Perhaps no one thinks of Donovan as a nostalgia act more than Donovan himself. After singing ''Yellow is the colour of my true love's hair," the first verse of his seminal 1965 hit, ''Colours," he asked, ''Remember this?" Of course, we did.
Backed by an ace four-piece band, Donovan surveyed most of his early career, peppered with a few songs from his latest album, ''Beat Cafe." For every sublime '60s hit (''Jennifer Juniper" and ''Mellow Yellow," which morphed into an inevitable singalong), there was an interesting '70s rarity (''Divine Daze of Deathless Delight") that drew a fevered ''yes!" from someone in the crowd.
If time hasn't been kind to his aesthetic, his lyrics at least still ring true with evergreen vitality. ''Young Girl Blues," a gossamer ode to a young woman who left the high life for a quieter existence, was beautiful with the minimum of jazz accompaniment and Donovan's stark voice, which transcended time.
But then it was back to the '60s. Before singing Buffy Saint-Marie's ''Universal Soldier," he explained that the antiwar anthem ''means the same thing now as it did then."
And so does Donovan.
