He Still Wears His Love Like Heaven : Pop music: Long-absent singer Donovan has been testing new material and reviving old hits at trendy Viper Room.

The smell of incense dusts the air. Books on magic and Eastern religion rest on tables. There’s a copy of Newsweek with the Beatles on the cover, and a familiar, tremulous voice issues from a pair of speakers: “One day when the secrets of the sun enlighten everyone, the universe will shine,” it lilts gently. “I hear the cosmos call.”

This rustic retreat could only be the lair of Donovan, the young Scotsman who blossomed from scruffy folk singer to psychedelic guru to metaphysical minstrel in the heady days of the mid-’60s.

But this is 1995, not 1966, and it’s Malibu, not the English countryside. As the world braces for another flurry of Beatles product, this fellow member of the British pop aristocracy has relocated temporarily from his home in Ireland to prepare a less trumpeted but hardly less unlikely return--it’s been 12 years since his last studio album, and these days of punk and grunge wouldn’t seem to provide a home for Donovan’s gentle reflections.

That helps account for the many “did I see right?” double-takes occurring for the past month on the Sunset Strip, where each Thursday the name of the long-absent singer has appeared on the marquee of the trendy Viper Room. Two more shows, this week and next, will wrap up what’s apparently been a successful experiment in testing his new material and reviving his old hits.

“A young person coming up and saying, ‘I absolutely love your music’ is very encouraging,” says Donovan, dropping a slice of lime into his glass of water in the kitchen of the Malibu house. “Then if they’ve come to a recent show and they say, ‘I love your music, and your new songs,’ that’s interesting too--that the new songs are being received with the same strength and concentration.

“I wondered whether the music that I make would be current again in the sense that a major record company would be interested in recording it. With space in between recordings reaching decades long, record companies wonder whether an artist is still current.”

For Rick Rubin, the maverick mogul and cutting-edge record producer who has signed Donovan to his American Recordings label, that wasn’t an issue.

“I’ve just always been a fan, since I was a kid,” Rubin says. “I loved the records he made in the ‘60s. The combination of the folkie elements and the pop elements and the spiritual stuff always was appealing to me.

“I can’t tell you that I think Donovan will be widely received and accepted today. I don’t know that. I just know that I think we can make a cool record together.”

Donovan (born Donovan Leitch) moved in the most exalted circles during rock’s Golden Age, yet today he’s most likely to seem a period piece, bound to a bygone era. His lasting image as the transcendental troubadour of the flower children tends to obscure the scope of his commercial success--nine U.S. Top 30 singles between 1965 and ‘69--and his prominence in the era’s upheavals.

“I felt so relevantly plugged into the times, on that explosion of consciousness that hit popular culture,” Donovan says softly, sitting in a chair on his rolling lawn. “I have to say, post-fame was difficult. Because it wasn’t just fame, it was super-fame of a kind that few have. It was attached to a generation’s dreams, and my own personal dreams were mixed up in it too.”

With the dying of the dream, Donovan continued touring and recording through the ‘70s. But, he says, “something was missing.” After 1983’s “Lady of the Stars” he withdrew, pursuing painting and photography, beginning an autobiography and focusing on his family--he and Linda, his wife of 25 years, have two grown children, Astrella and Oriole, as well as the adopted Julian Jones, Linda’s son by the late Brian Jones. (Donovan’s more famous offspring, fashion scene-maker Donovan Leitch Jr. and actress Ione Skye, are from a prior relationship.)

What brings Donovan back in the mid-’90s, as he nears his 50th birthday? The singer, who hopes to have his album out in the spring, has detected growing interest in his music among young musicians, and he cites the emergence of such acts as Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega and Beck, along with the “unplugged” phenomenon, as signs that folk music lives.

Folk resurgence or no, are people likely to embrace Donovan’s spiritual message? He uses his 1967 hit “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” to answer the question.

“The young student of Buddhism was whistling it, ‘cause he knew what I was getting at with the lyric,” he says. “The postman didn’t quite know what I was getting at with the lyric, but he was whistling it too. . . . Rick [Rubin] said at one point, about the new album, ‘One foot in the Bodhi Tree [book shop] and one foot in Tower Records. You’ve done that before.’ ”

* Donovan plays on Thursday and Nov. 9 at the Viper Room, 8852 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 9 p.m. $17. (310) 358-1880.