Pat Donohue: A Force to Be Reckoned With

Imagine a dystopian near-future in which such huge rents have been torn in the American social fabric that even the Twin Cities are threatening to rip asunder.

Minneapolis and St. Paul would sit there, side by side at the brink, preparing to lob mortar shells back and forth across the Mississippi River at each other, just like Belfast, Bosnia and Beirut, only colder.

With bloodshed imminent, the sanest heads on both sides would enter tense, 11th-hour negotiations and arrive at the only possible way out: We’ll settle this thing with a guitar-picking contest.

Minneapolis would look to its western suburb of Wayzata and, amid much gloating, bring forth a champion: Leo Kottke, the good-natured Goliath of the steel-string acoustic, a monstrous player, famous and dominant in his field since the ‘70s.

To preserve its liberty, property and honor, St. Paul, the underdog, would call upon a native son. Pat Donohue.

The rank-and-file Minneapolitans would laugh at this little-known upstart, just like the Philistines of old. “Who’s he?” they’d cackle. “What--those losers are putting up a talk-show host against Leo the lionhearted? We’ll have ‘em municipally cleansed by sundown.”

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But if you looked at Leo, you might see him shaking.

Let’s abandon our grim little fantasy and point to a more pleasant here-and-now, in which the vaunted Kottke respects the heck out of his fellow Minnesotan, and maybe even fears him just a little.

At least that’s the implication of the typically dry-humored assessment Kottke wrote for the CD booklet of Donohue’s current album, “Two Hand Band”:

About Pat Donohue . . . I first heard him on the radio and got upset. Then I heard him in concert somewhere and got more upset. He thinks harmonically, improvises beautifully and writes. Disgusting. Enjoy this record, but if you’re a guitar player, it’s going to haunt you.

Listen to the album, and it becomes clear that Kottke has not overestimated Donohue’s ability.

The all-instrumental collection, which could be described as jazz-influenced folk, or folk-ified jazz, features Donohue’s arrangements of songs by Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others.

The album’s subtitle, “Jazz Classics & Selected Tunes for Solo Fingerpicked Guitar,” is telling. If Donohue (who plays Friday at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments) did not guarantee that this was a solo guitar record, you’d swear that he was using overdubs, or an uncredited ghost accompanist.

His playing is rich with active, nimble bass lines that would in themselves seem to give a guitarist plenty to do. Laid against them are complex chord work and elaborate, deftly executed single-note runs. It’s about as much harmonious sound as can be produced by two hands, wood and strings.

As a capper, on a concluding version of the Booker T. & the MG’s classic “Green Onions,” the 40-year-old picker somehow gets his guitar to emulate the throbbing, whirring sounds that Booker T. Jones produced with his Hammond B3 organ on the original hit.

Like Kottke, Donohue can step out of his instrumental-whiz guise and turn into a more-than-competent singer-songwriter. His 1991 album, “Life Stories,” featured his pleasant singing and catchy, literate songwriting, along with guitar work that, though toned down to work within a vocal framework, was dazzling nonetheless.

So why is Donohue without a recording deal (“Life Stories” and “Two Hand Band” both appear on his custom label, Blue Sky Records) and still but a speck in the expanding market for acoustic music?

Donohue thinks that, in terms of getting radio exposure, he may be paying for his own eclecticism. The influences he cites include such long-dead country-blues musicians as Blind Blake and Robert Johnson, seminal jazz guitar figures Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery, a whole roster of jazz pianists, including Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton, and, on the country side, Chet Atkins.

“It’s difficult, because people don’t know how to pigeonhole what I do,” the easygoing Donohue said, sitting in the basement of his St. Paul home, and not minding too much that his 6-year-old daughter, Daisy, and a playmate were crashing around on the same drum set that had been Donohue’s first instrument when he was a kid.

Donohue also issued two late-’80s releases on Red House Records, a tiny St. Paul folk label. “The styles on the two Red House records are very diverse, and I think it caused a lot of confusion” among acoustic-format disc jockeys. “ ‘Two Hand Band” is my most focused, but it’s just a quarter or a third of what I do.”

Donohue says that even with its unified concept of applying folk-based finger-picking to the jazz heritage, the album has had a hard time fitting into today’s severely segmented radio formats (a problem that the similarly eclectic Kottke didn’t have to face when he emerged more than 20 years ago).

“Sometimes (radio programmers) think it’s too jazzy to be folk, and of course the jazz people think it’s too folkie. But I don’t feel like making a contrived record to reach a certain corner of the buying public.”

Donohue isn’t entirely without high-profile radio exposure. Another fellow Minnesotan, Garrison Keillor, has been a fan since the mid-’80s and lately has featured Donohue regularly on “Prairie Home Companion.”

Donohue is considering a more bluesy direction for his next record, but he isn’t sure.

“I’d like to get on a schedule of doing about one (album) a year. But I don’t have a whole album’s worth of one particular style, and I’m not anxious to send out another mishmash album of a lot of different styles. I have to come to terms with my identity, narrow down what I record, just to find a niche. My problem is I like them all too much.”

In concert, Donohue says, his diversity turns from a liability into an asset.

“Live, it’s never a problem. It works really well, because people get off on the variety. I have one rule on stage these days: play whatever in the world I most feel like playing at that moment. At least I have a good time.”

The Beatles and other ‘60s rockers first inspired Donohue, who at the age of 10 cajoled a drum kit out of his dad. At 12, he stayed home sick from school one day and began amusing himself with his older sister’s guitar.

Donohue kept on playing guitar, but he remained focused on drums as he began to play in high-school rock bands. A band mate got him interested in the blues of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and by 17 Donohue had become obsessed with the guitar.

“I was very lucky to see some of the old-timers that aren’t around anymore,” he said. “The University of Minnesota had summer concerts in the early ‘70s, and I got to see Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Joe Williams, Jesse Fuller.”

“I was not shy about going up to them and trying to befriend them and find out what I could about blues and playing. By and large, they were very accommodating. Big Joe Williams invited me to his hotel room, and we wound up playing guitar together,” he said.

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With his tastes expanding to jazz, country and ragtime, Donohue spent his 20s obsessed with the guitar.

“I’d play all the time. I still go through periods of that. But now that I’m married and have a family, it’s not convenient. I play every day, as much as possible. Sometimes it’s four or six hours, sometimes it’s 15 minutes. I bend it around how the rest of my life works out.”

During that decade of guitar obsession, Donohue says, “I was good at copping things (from guitarists he admired), but I had nothing that was Pat Donohue.

“In my early 30s, that all came together,” he said. “I don’t know if I could pinpoint it, because it was such a gradual thing. In my 20s, I was playing good music, but still in a learning mode. When I started writing in my late 20s and 30s, I realized I could have a musical voice of my own.”

Donohue has built enough of an audience to be on the road about a third of the year, in short stretches that minimize disruption to family life. He estimates his average concert draw at 100.

“That’s not an impressive figure, but at this level it’s enough to keep going,” said the guitarist, whose wife, Susan, is a free-lance writer. “I don’t have aspirations of superstardom. I would like to get notoriety to the point where I could go into any house and have a full house, be it 50 seats or 200 or 500.”

While building his performing career, Donohue divided his time between music and working in the family business, a brick distributorship.

“I tried to do both, but last year I managed to extract myself from (the business),” he said. “Until recently, I never let myself think I was going to be able to (remain) a musician. I thought, ‘This will end and I’ll have to get a job.’ But here I am, 40, and I’m still doing it, so I’ve resigned myself--and it feels good.”’

From Kottke’s humorously skewed point of view, that could be a threatening prospect. If inter-city disputes were settled with guitars, St. Paul would be armed and nuclear.

* Pat Donohue plays Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Shade Tree Stringed Instruments, 28062-D Forbes Road, Laguna Niguel. $14. (714) 364-5270.