Richie Havens Interview: Woodstock, Dylan and Greenwich Village

By: Rick Landers

August 15-18, 1969. Bethel, New York. Approximately 500,000 music lovers assemble at Max Yasgur’s farm for the festival of festivals – Woodstock. Guitar solos from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Carlos Santana and Alvin Lee electrify the air.

Though mega watts and Marshall stacks will leave their mark, the robed and bearded man who opens the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair strumming an acoustic guitar plugs into equally powerful currents: sincerity and conviction. Richie Havens’ performance of “Freedom”, based on the classic spiritual, “Motherless Child”, sets the tone for both the festival and a generation.

And Havens would go on to create more than one timeless interpretation of a classic song.

“Little darlin’, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darlin’, it seems like years since it’s been clear.
Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun.
It’s alright.

His rendition of “Here Comes the Sun” will forever assure us that it is indeed, alright.

Since his early days on the streets as a doo-wop singer, Richie Havens has kept us spellbound with his rare “mixed bag” of talents. He has gracefully interpreted the songs of some of the greatest musicians of our time, written many timeless originals, authored a book about the Woodstock era, continues to paint with a sensitive artistic touch, contributed his time and talents to making the world a better place, and nurtured projects to support childrens’ causes that will reach future generations.

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In 2003, the National Music Council bestowed its American Eagle Award upon Richie Havens for his contributions to American music and for offering the world, “a rare and inspiring voice of eloquence, integrity and social responsibility”.

As author, singer, songwriter, actor, record label owner, artist and humanitarian, Havens embodies an admirable sense of compassion and universality.

Here comes…Richie Havens.

******

Beginnings

Rick Landers: How much has the world of music changed since the days when you sang doo-wop on the sidewalks of Bedford-Stuyvesant?

Richie Havens: Nothing has really changed. We had bootleg albums in the ’60s and today we have Internet file sharing. They just found a better way to do it — get music for free. What’s great about today is an artist has an opportunity to go direct to their audience without dealing with a middleman. People can go directly to the web for CDs, DVDs and downloads. I think that’s the best thing that’s happened, that people’s music is being flashed around the world.

And the new guys and women have a lot to say. In my local area, there’s a lot of great music coming down the pipeline. I think it’s the fourth wave coming at us. Young people are very clear about how they feel and how they see the world. They’re the victims now [Laughs] from their perspective. It’s their turn and they are very powerful and they’re communicating with each other in real time.

With our generation we had to create our own voice because we were the last “don’t speak until spoken to” generation. So, we came up with what I like to call the “original generational primal scream” – rock ‘n’ roll. It was a voice for all of us. To me, it was a part of the new world offering. We were the new generation that got a voice that previous generations never had and we were from all over the world — we were living together in a diverse world. Our parents worked hard enough to get us into the cities and created the middle class. At least communities were much more diverse than those of our parents and grandparents.

I had Irish, Italian and other friends and because of this mixing within neighborhoods, ours was an American generation that understood the non-difference between us. I’d go visit my Irish friend, Danny Dugan, and his mother would be yelling at him just like my mom did with me! We both had the same chain of command! And we could actually see the generational links because our grandmothers would yell at our parents — my grandmother was the real boss. I saw that we all lived in a similar world.

Moving to Manhattan

Rick: Did your singing and guitar playing influence you to move to the bigger city of Manhattan?

Richie Havens: My singing opened up some doors within Bed-Stuy. I moved to Greenwich Village later. Manhattan was ten thousand miles away in our minds, even though it was only really four miles from us. Most guys stuck around their own neighborhood and didn’t leave it. We had this indigenous “gated” community where you just didn’t walk around in to other neighborhoods. The gate was a turf thing. As a singer, I was lucky.

At 16, I was one of the McCrea Gospel Singers, a neighborhood doo-wop group and we competed with other groups in other neighborhoods so we had a passport to move around without getting hassled. It took a long time before I really left my neighborhood and it was my need for a job and my poetry that got me to the Village.

Rick: You have been blessed with a great sense of music.

Richie Havens: Thank you. My father was an “ear” piano player since he was a kid. He could hear a song and play it. My mother sang, but mostly when she was doing the dishes. She had a really nice voice, but my father had that gift of a great ear. I think I inherited his ability to hear. My brothers and I would sing that Three Stooges tune [sings] bah, bah, bah [laughs].

The first real group we had was called The Five Chances and later the McCrea Gospel Singers. I was 15 and the guy who sang lead, David McCrea, was 13. His parents would only allow him to sing with us if we all sang for his church — gospel music. So we did that for a while — at least a year-and-a-half. The churches had what they called, “the program” where the choirs would move from church to church and each church would pass the plate or basket and take up a collection.

Influences

Rick: Your early musical influences?

Richie Havens: I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she’d start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to “make believe” ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock.

My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote “Misty”, Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well. When I was a small child my grandma tried to make me a piano player and asked me what I wanted to be and I told her a “brain doctor”. Well, that amused her and she asked why. I told her that when people got sick it was in their brains and I maybe I could cut it out!

When I was about 6, my mother told me that story. She got me too, asking the same question and I told her I really wanted to meet everybody in the whole world. She couldn’t figure out what that meant, but you know, we all live on the same planet, the same world, and after World War II we lived in a brand new world, at least it sure felt like that. And I’m still meeting everyone in the world and they’re still being born – they’re friends I still need to meet!

For our generation there was a certain degree of separation — we were the wayward generation of the world. At the time, it was a beatnik world. Anyway, that’s all about my early influences — more parental than anything else.

Greenwich Village

Rick: How did you end up in Greenwich Village with the Dylan, Baez, and Ginsberg crowd?

Richie Havens: A friend and I were always different in that we considered ourselves poets. We were called “the beatniks” by some of our friends and he read somewhere that there were beatniks in Greenwich Village. We didn’t know what the word meant, but always thought it was derisive, and it was probably meant to be, but when we found out it meant poets we knew we had to get to the Village. So, instead of it being a negative, as was probably intended, it turned out to be a positive.

We were the weirdos, the poets. My friend was a real writer — very literate and wrote prose from an objective viewpoint kind of thing. Poetry was my whole life. So, we were described pretty accurately, we just didn’t know we were beatniks. This got us to the Village.

Rick: So you weren’t a musician at the time?

Richie Havens: Other than my doo-wop street and church singing, no. I was a poet at heart. I always knew that I would end up in Manhattan, which seemed like a world away, though not necessarily in the Village. I didn’t make it out to Manhattan until I was 16-years-old, but I worked with a florist and discovered the city. I knew I would eventually get there. We’d only seen skyline shots in every “B” movie we’d go see and say, “Oh, the city!”, like it was another planet.

It was two years after I arrived in Greenwich Village that I picked up a guitar. Actually, I went back and forth between home and the city, and occasionally flopped out there with musician friends who had flats – the Channels and Little Anthony and the Imperials. I tended to stay with them on weekends.

At first, I was an artist painting portraits, hanging around coffee shops listening to music. The songs really did change my life. Even today certain songs have a great deal of influence on me or educate me in some way. It’s a wonderful thing.

I read poetry there in some of the coffee houses and at the Gaslight I’d see Allen Ginsberg and other poets around 1959 and the Spring of 1960. So, I was painting portraits by day working with a street vendor, who had 5 painters working for him. I’d go from 11:00 in the morning until about 9:00 at night and then hang out at the coffee houses.

Rick: Village musical influences?

Richie Havens: Fred Neil and Dino Valente were strong influences on me. Dino was the first person I ever saw on stage who sang and played guitar by himself. There was Bob Gibson, Hamilton Camp, who was Bob Camp at the time, before he became the actor — people who were recognized only in the Village around Bleaker Street at the time.

The first songs I sang were Fred Neil songs — a great artist! I borrowed a guitar and tuned it to a chord that sounded right — I had no idea what I was doing. It turned out to be an E chord structure in the key of D and I could play with my thumb across the fingerboard and get several majors and minors out of it. I learned to play the songs I knew the words to and it didn’t take me long to get it right. Two days later I was on stage singing and I didn’t get off for 7 years!

I sang the songs I knew from the guys who wrote them and sang them from coffee house to coffee house and, like everybody else, couldn’t figure out why I left a job where I could make $300 a day doing portraits to passing the hat around — couldn’t figure that out, but the music won.

I started singing in the audience along with the guys on stage who wrote their own songs. So, I thought about borrowing a friend’s guitar. It was a handmade guitar that was really well crafted. Later, I went out and bought a guitar I could afford. That one cost about $14 or maybe $17. Then I wrote a few songs and kept going. An independent producer, Al Grossman, signed me in 1963. He put me in a rock band, but my songs didn’t work out.

First Album

Rick: Tell us about “Mixed Bag” and your off-center beat.

Richie Havens: I recorded my first album, “Mixed Bag”, in 1967 and it really was a mix of different music that I’d done in the Village. I was singing gospel and traditional folk songs — a mixed bag. When it came out, the album went nuts! It seems all the people who saw me in the Village coffee houses over the years discovered it and bought it. I was then signed up to a bunch of coffee houses for six or seven months.

What I learned was that I was really privileged and that the music I was doing was so weird people would remember me. As far as that off-center beat thing, I played so strangely that it stuck in peoples’ minds — a little off the beat. I still play the same, but now have an educated leg, like a metronome! I’m always stomping with the music and it fills in the spaces.

I have a different kind of beat I follow. I learned that from Fred Neil. And sometimes I find a song that I have to sing to others to show how intensely the song affected me and I think I’m playing it the way I hear it. It all seems to come together well.

Newport: Dylan Goes Electric

Rick: It would be great for our readers to hear from someone who was there about Dylan cranking up that Stratocaster at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

Richie Havens: Yes, it was tough when it happened, but in hindsight it’s a great story — especially the way Bob expanded his horizons afterwards.

1965 was the year Dylan and Donovan met and I won’t forget that. Donovan was being touted as the “new Bob Dylan” and Bob was like, “What’s this?” But they met and everything was cool. At first it was like, this guy’s going to take my job? It was a very strange and probably an awkward way for them to meet. But there was no animosity at all and it was very cool. Bob and Donovan got along so well, it was a nice thing to see — really nice — it worked out.

It was at that ’65 Newport Folk Festival, where I got to play, that Bob was booed off stage when he pulled out that electric guitar. The folk crowd went nuts.

I think Bob and his band played way too loud and that probably contributed to the crowd’s reaction. The feeling I had when he was booed was like the president just got shot or that something was being killed right in front of me. And it was not a good feeling. I was in about the fifth row. Had the guys turned down the volume they might have been better received. But from that moment on the volume stayed up!

Bob had blasphemed folk music [laughs] and that was the end. Interestingly, Bob came back on stage later playing acoustic and everything seemed to work fine. The crowd was more reverent about that. None of that ended up really mattering because “Like a Rolling Stone” came out and that was that. Dylan reached a new audience and I think that’s when he thought he’d “get there”.

It was very interesting that he wasn’t all that comfortable about getting on stage after that. It was like the press was trying pull him up just to bring him down and he didn’t want to be part of it. He didn’t’ want to feed that thing. “Message?” he’d say,”There ain’t no messages in my songs.” Of course, there were messages everywhere!

The press wanted to create and then take apart. Bob worked so hard to get to this place and enjoy it and the press started this, “So you think you’re really cool?” thing. Bob ended up surrounding himself with good friends. The Dylan I love was that acoustic guy in the early days — the power of that particular Bob. Still great today.

Guild Guitars

Rick: Tell us about your Guild D40 Richie Havens Signature Acoustic Guitar.

Richie Havens: Yes and I have endorsed Guilds for years. I find them to be the only guitars with equal volume across all strings. For strumming, they’re absolutely perfect. You don’t lose one sense of the chord, any aspect of the chord. With nothing mute or different on any one string you get a really full sound. For me, Gibson guitars are top heavy, so the harder you hit them the less bass you got out of them. Mainly because, I think, they were made as picking guitars.

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Martin guitars are just too good for me [laughs], too sensitive. They wouldn’t last on the plane with me, the way I treat guitars. They’re so sensitive they would curl up. I just need a utility guitar. The Guilds have always had these great truss rods. The guys with Martins always treasure them, like they were babies and play them real gently and then very gingerly put them away and close the cover [laughs].

Rick: There is a soulful directness to your music that is very centered or organic. It seems to immediately resonate with audiences.

Richie Havens: Thank you. I’ll tell you what that is. It’s the audience sharing with me first. I call it breathing. I learned about this in coffee houses. I came up with this metaphor that I get connected to audiences when I walk out on stage and the audience does this [claps his hands] – they’re exhaling [clapping] and I’m inhaling. Then, when I sit down on the stool and start to sing, I’m exhaling and they’re inhaling. We become a single entity.

I also help this happen to a degree by not having a set list to play. I do have my first song and my last song in mind, but everything else depends on the connection the audience and I have made. It’s not something you can figure out. Just play what you want to play – you have to play what you feel first, then you’ll automatically play what is called for by the atmosphere in that room.

First and foremost, I believe the stage belongs to the audience, not to the performer. You need to get away from the idea that “I’ll sing what I like and they’ll like it.” So I play what I feel and 9 out of 10 times they like what we do – together.