If you’ve ever seen the Woodstock movie, you’ll see him at the beginning of the concert blowing away an audience of half a million people; off the top of his head. Pushed back onstage over and over again to fill the void of missing bands, Richie Havens was responsible for creating instant music after he played every song he knew. Imagine looking out at an audience spans the horizon and then looking into yourself to pull something out. He started playing some chords and then built the song that represents the entire alternative generation of the sixties: “Freedom.” This bit of inspiration assured him a permanent place in the world of music, and perhaps history.
In an era awash with divisiveness, war and bad vibes (now, as well as then), his mere presence is mysteriously healing. Richie Havens is one of those rare people whose energies fill a concert hall before he says a word or bangs a pick against the strings. People describe his concerts as a spiritual experience.
Presently older than many people who keep their teeth in a jar, his profound energy is evident in his new CD. Grace of the Sun is possibly the best effort he’s ever put forward; a compelling disk that carries a powerful message of togetherness and good will that easily transcends our petty differences.
The Crier spoke to Richie Havens recently.
TVP: One of those random but perhaps synchronistic moments happened on the way here. Bob Dylan was doing his first live interview in 20 years.
Richie Havens: Too Much!
TVP: He pointed out that for a long time some his most profound music was completely dead to him for a number of years. That doesn’t seem to have been a problem for you.
You’ve been carrying your vibe at 200 percent for the last 40 years. How?
RH: I’m convinced that it’s been a continuum. It’s one thread that I’ve managed to keep weaving into the present. That thread is sharing what was given to me by others. It’s the people who inspired me to do what I’ve been doing, that carry me along.
TVP: You expend more energy in five minutes than most people do all day.
RH: I don’t notice it because it doesn’t feel like I have that much energy when I walk in the door. It’s always the audience.
TVP: You ever get the feeling that you send out energy and get it back.
RH: Absolutely. When I first started in the Village. I learned that personally. I even gave it a metaphor: it’s like breathing. I walk on the stage, they applaud, and they exhale. When I sit on the stool and start playing I’m exhaling the energy and I’m inhaling. This breathing process goes through the set. They give it to me. I always know the first and last song I’m going to sing. Whatever’s in between the audience has made me do.
TVP: Lets take half a million people and give you the opportunity- really the need- for complete spontaneity The song Freedom appears out of nowhere. Did you feel almost possessed by the spirit around you?
RH: Completely. It started nine months before Woodstock happened. The guys who were trying to do it kept looking for a town to do it in. They always came back saying they had a town to do it in. Two weeks later the press would be writing about that town changing their mind and saying no. This went on for nine months. What the press didn’t realize is that they were building an audience, because every time an announcement went out that the location was refused, more people found out about it. By the time they got to the last town, Woodstock, which said no, there was two weeks to go before it actually happened. Due to the press, the farmer Max Yasger heard of their dilemma and came to them.
The forum was actually created for what happened because of the way we were being radicalized by the press each time they announced another shutdown.
Then there wasn’t going to be a Woodstock, for about five hours. There was no way to get to the stage. All of the other bands were at the hotels, with no way to get to the field, by car or truck or anything because of all the people
They found a farmer who had that small bubble helicopter and the promoters knocked on my door. I had the least stuff, so they could take me over and put me on stage. That’s how I got over there. Flying over those people, I looked down and thought "If this picture hits the newspaper tomorrow, we’ve won. We would be now above ground, un-relegated to the underground.
TVP It was almost a birthing process.
RH: Exactly. And it was. God knows they only expected 70,000 people.
TVP: Do you ever wonder about the two sides of the legacy of Woodstock?
RH: Every divine happening lacks managerial oversight. It just happened. People came to be together and hear music.
All of the West Coast bands who were there, 90% of them had never played on the East Coast. Something happened there that was very special for the audience as the musicians.
TVP: I, while not really trying, conducted a social experiment by going to Woodstock 99, which was hedonism at its worst, and then heading over to Bethel, the site of the original Woodstock. It could not possibly have been more different.
RH: For 26 years, those concerts had been going on at that field for free. The locals were able to go there and have their own concert. Anywhere from 10,000 to 45,000 people would show up. The vibration of that place, and the happening aspect of that concert was carried on for 26 years before the second official Woodstock happened.
TVP: To many people who are associated with the social movements of the sixties, It’s been perceived as sort of a psychic battery that’s been charging down for the last 35 years.
RH: That’s the view of the press. They haven’t had over half a million people on the first day of any concert since.
TVP: You’ve taken that energy and somehow continually renewed it.
RH: I’ve been carrying what I’m doing from the very beginning. I spent seven years in Greenwich Village on stage every night for seven days a week, playing thirteen sets a night, passing the basket like everyone else that was sown there. Few of us were were getting paid a salary by anyone.There was s steal drum band who were the big stars at the Village clubs, and they were getting paid $125 a week-the whole band! You could live, at least.
The point I’m trying to make is that from that point on, I’ve been able to do exactly what I’m doing- sharing songs that changed me personally.
TVP: You have preceded the independent music trend by thirty years.
RH: Yes. In 1970 I had my first label. It was only because there was a promotion guy at MGM who was trying to renegotiate my contract for a $15,000 advance.This was my third album coming up. I had to meet with him to set up a bunch of interviews. This was the first time I’d been in the building, even though they’d been doing my albums for three years. I got up there and the guys. He said that I was one of the few people actually making money for the record company and that I should ask them for my own label. I had no idea what to do with my own label. He convinced me that it was possible. I figured out that I could get several people that I knew wouldn’t get picked up anywhere else onto the label. We ended up with a 700,000 contract, in 1970.
TVP At this point, the only other band to have done that was the Beatles, I believe.
RH: That’s right. I started the label recording my albums, and I ended up recording three other groups, and it worked for them as well. I just learned to do what I did for myself. I’d take the bands into the studio, do the music, record it, and take it to the next step.
TVP: So, again, it just happened.
RH: And if it hadn’t I wouldn’t be here right now. I played all the time whether I had an album to support or not. I outlasted five presidents at MGM and they rebuilt the company around me and a couple of other artists. I’ve been very fortunate to have people looking out for my albums when they come along.
TVP:: You are an activist who transcends politics, and a musician who transcends show business.
RH: Yes. I realized that I was out of show business when I stopped singing Doo Wap with my friends in Brooklyn. When I heard the music coming out of Greenwich Village I was then in the communications business. That’s what I’ve been in since then, music that has a meaning; that has a message that anyone can tap into.
TVP: I can also point out that many people perceive you as a spiritual leader while transcending religion.
RH: A lot of people say that the experience they have at the shows is very spiritual. I had a grandmother who made me go to church as a kid. It set me on a path of what I call comparative religion studies, which I did for like 17 years on my own, trying to find the roots of where religion came from, what the purposes were, and to find out in the end that they were all the same. I accepted that all religions perceptually were the same. They all point to the same direction: we are all working on becoming human beings.
TVP: I was curious about your new album The Grace of the Sun.. Did you intentionally release that under the sign of Leo?
RH: No, but it is a good thing. When it comes back to me in hindsight, there’s something terribly magical about it.
TVP: The album is shot through with solar images, even the structure of the music is somehow solar.
RH: It really is, and I didn’t realize that. The songs that I wrote came to me practically instantly a few weeks before I finished the album. I don’t sit down to write anything. I stopped doing that when I first hit the Village, people ware singing with a global perspective and the global aspect of our oneness. That changed my life. I decided that I was never going to try to write like that, I didn’t. A title would hit me in a taxi cab, and because of the title, I would understand what the song was. I’d go home and write the song down. The songs came out whole, they came out with a total understanding of what had to be said.
TVP There’s a profoundly organic sense to the album as a whole. Even the covers feel like a natural part of the album.
RH: People said they’d heard All Along the Watchtower somewhere before, what is it? I’d say that it was a Bob Dylan song. They’d say that when they heard it, it didn’t sound like Bob Dylan.
I tell them I sing it to the best of my ability with the emotion that it gave me when I first heard it by the original artist, rather than the interpretation that Jimi Hendrix did.
TVP: This alum is more contemplative than much of your work, but if anything it’s more energetic than anything you’ve done.
RH: This album was done spontaneously because we always believed that recordings should be performances. My best albums have always been when I have been able to produce them myself. Everyone on the record was in the room when the tape was rolling.
That was almost a live format.
TVP: So it was almost live.
RH: That’s always the best way. You always get the natural and normal dynamics of a whole band.
TVP: I’ve heard that you have a project called the Natural Guard. Can you tell me a little about it?
RH: The natural guard actually came out of another children’s project I had with a friend who was a Navy Seal. He once told me that he didn't trust grown ups at all. He could only trust in children. Having confided that to me I understood what an innocent person he was. His father had put him into that Navy at the age of fourteen to get him off the streets. He was the youngest Seal ever trained- but they didn’t know that. Because of that training he was able to see what needed to be done, but also because of that training he was going to stay with a challenge and bring it to a conclusion.
One day I asked him what he really wanted to do with his life. He said that he wanted to have a museum for children, where they could come and touch things from the ocean, and lean how to teach people how not to destroy the waters they live around. We built this museum mostly with stuff from that he had gathered from around the world.It was called the North Wind Undersea Institute. He brought this stuff down, antique bottles, a cannon he had found. We must have had 200 sets of shark teeth from a lot of different species. We able to put together some very interesting exhibits.He thought that children should know that pollution of the water was killing off all this life. The museum became a place where we got 30,000 kids a year to come through for about six years.
These kids would all come in with their classes and we did an exhibit called “The Right to Live.” It was on whales. Little did we know, that we had created the first historical analysis of Yankee whaling. We traveled to all the whaling towns around and we found out that none of them had any historical museums or displays about about the whales, only the whalers- the culture of the people who were whaling. We tried to find information on the whales. My friend had me paint pictures of all the different whales for the display, but that we would hang an empty frame for the extinct species with a label indicating the date of extinction. The kids would say “Where’s that whale?” and their parents would have to tell them.
He made a black coffin in the shape of whale, and he had tombstones around in for all the extinct whales.
In the classes at the museum we asked the children what an environment was. They always said that rain forests were an example of an environment, and they didn’t live in one because they live in a city! We had to tell them that anywhere they lived was an environment. They had parks and squirrels and birds right in their own towns.That was a way of giving them a viewpoint of their own community. That’s what the Natural Guard came from. We had to extend that out to kids anywhere: seeing your own community as an endangered environment.
TVP: With that comes a responsibility for your own environment.
RH: That’s right. And consider yourself as the most endangered animal in it. The Natural guard was one of the first three environmental justice organizations. We actually got the Points of Light Award from Hillary Clinton. because these kids change their own environment. They find out what’s wrong with it and come up with an idea to change that.
Our job was to get non-profit chapters running and find children who wanted to join Natural Guard. The second day we opened the door we had fifteen kids walk in the door, and they never left for six years. We ended up with fifteen chapters around the New Haven area.
These kids created such a furor of change that everybody had to sit up and take notice. The support that came from that was essential for donations and for help. We wanted the support to come from the communities and not from the government. The places that count on government grants are lucky to last a year..
An eight year old kid might ask if we can grow a garden to feed the homeless. They actually did it. They grew three gardens and grew food in the middle of New Haven Connecticut, which I never thought was possible. They supplied the soup kitchens that summer. They did that for six years. They found out that lead poisoning was a problem there and designed a coloring book to raise awareness. That coloring book ended up going out to all the schools in the state.
Out of sixteen kids in the first group, eleven of them went to college. These are kids living with single parents in communities where kids shoot kids. One of them is in Harvard studying to become an environmental lawyer.
TVP:What is your advice to musicians starting out now
RH: Only sing songs you love because they actually impart knowledge to you. Sing songs that you love because you’ll sing them the best.