HOLD YOUR NOTES: “I don’t really record a record. I perform it. So I don’t have to sing a tune 20 times because of some producer’s ear.”
It’s a stirring piece of footage: near the beginning of Michael Wadleigh’s film of the 1969 Woodstock festival, a bearded man in an orange robe walks up, already furiously strumming his guitar as he nears the center-stage stool. It isn’t dark yet, and chaos surrounds him as people are still pouring in and staff are frantic. He sits down and plows through a riveting version of the anti-war screed “Handsome Johnny,” his thumb-over-the-neck strumming working up an intense head of steam. Although the song ends, he keeps chugging, slowly building another manic foundation. This time, he opens his mouth and repeats one word, over and over: “Freedom.” The song is completely improvised, and every time I see this clip, I’m overcome by the way Richie Havens allows the music to overtake him, even amid all the distractions. What was it like to step on stage and walk off the cliff into the unknown?
“I’d been put on the spot before, but that time I put myself on the spot, you know?” says Havens in his instantly recognizable baritone. “When I go on stage, I usually know the first and last songs that I’m gonna do, but the rest is open space! I tune my guitar between songs, a song comes to me, and I’ll sing that. I follow the music to the stage.”
Havens, who comes to the MFA this Sunday, has been following his muse since he was a child. He started out singing in various doo-wop groups in Brooklyn in the ’50s, only to gravitate to the burgeoning countercultural Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s, a move that would lead to his opening slot at Woodstock. “I was 19 when I started [singing doo-wop]. And you know, doo-wop was show business, right? But little did we really know that among the love songs, there were songs of protest, like the songs I’d hear years later. For instance, Frankie Lymon sang ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’ — good question, right? But he also sang this song: ‘No no no no no, I’m not a juvenile delinquent!’ Now how about that in the 1950s?”
Still, it was an eye-opening experience for Havens when a trip to Greenwich Village in 1961 revealed a completely new world of poetry, music, and meaning. “The older guys in the neighborhood [in Brooklyn], they were all calling us ‘beatniks.’ Me and my partners were all like, ‘What the hell is a beatnik?’ We’re still singing doo-wop on the corner, right? So then my friend comes to me two or three days later and says, ‘See that guy over there, with that hat — he’s a beatnik! And there’s more in the Village!’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay, let’s go see who “we” are!’ So we went over there and we found the poets. So those older guys, they were trying to be inflammatory, but they were helping us out — it was the best thing that ever happened to us!”
When Havens made it to the Village and started hearing the pre-Dylan folk of Fred Neil, Dino Valenti, and Tom Paxton, he knew what he wanted to do. “The songs that those guys sang, they moved me so much that I wanted to sing them. But I wasn’t the front guy in all of my doo-wop groups. I was the baritone, I was the choreographer, I was the stay-in-key guy, because I had a deep voice. But I would sit in the coffeehouses and clubs, night after night, and hear songs like ‘Tear Down the Walls’ and ‘The Dolphin Song’ and ‘To Be a Man.’ One night, Fred Neil comes up to me and says, ‘Richie, you’ve been sitting here for six months singing my damn songs from the audience — take this guitar home and learn how to play them yourself!’ So he hands me a guitar, which I took home. I sat down with this guitar, tuned it up to a major chord, and I just started playing it. I learned a bunch of these songs in three days, and I went back and I played all of the songs for Freddie, and he flipped out and said, ‘If I’d known I’d be giving you my damned job!’ “
Havens got his start as a performer in the Village at the legendary Cafe Wha?, where he joined a tight-knit community of like-minded artists and musicians, or “poets” as he likes to think of them. “The guy who ran Cafe Wha?, Manny Roth, he was the first guy to start paying folk singers to play, $25 a week, which was a lot of money back then! He had this little kid, his sister’s kid, this boy around four or five years old, and there were a bunch of times where Manny would come down to the club and say, ‘Hey Richie, would you watch the kid, I’ll be back in half an hour,’ and then he’d disappear for three hours! And this kid, he wound up, decades later, being in this really popular rock band, I can’t remember what they were called. But that kid, his name was David Lee Roth. I halfway brought him up!”
Richie eventually gained notoriety in folk circles, and that led first to his signing to Verve records in 1967 and ultimately to his career-defining Woodstock gig. But more important, he found in the Greenwich scene a way to reach an audience desperate for a message of communion. “Back then, we weren’t really competitive, because everyone involved was learning — whether we were singers, musicians, comedians even. The songs that we sung in the late ’60s tended to become prophetic by the mid ’70s, when you saw a lot of people speaking out and realizing that the songs were talking about right now.”
Havens’s latest album, Nobody Left To Crown (Verve Forecast), offers his usual mix of well-positioned covers and impassioned originals. The title track (which appeared on his ’77 A&M album Mirage in a somewhat different form) is a biting tune that he once introduced live with the explanation that “a guy pissed me off one day and I wrote this song; his name was Richard Nixon.” Like pretty much everything Havens does, the song is more hopeful and upbeat than you might expect from its political frankness — and he can still let loose the vocal and guitar-strumming maelstrom that the world was introduced to in ’69. “I don’t really record a record — I perform it. So I don’t have to sing a tune 20 times because of some producer’s ear. I know what I’m doing when I sing a song, so that’s the way it happens.”
When Richie was up on that Woodstock stage, figuring out how to wrap his set while he was strumming his guitar, “I had to really make a connection. I thought about the spontaneity of arriving at this place that most of us only had in mind. It was the greatest happening — that’s what we called them in those days, which meant in a way that they were divinely produced — and I thought about seeing all of the people from the helicopter I had to take to get to the stage, and how all I could think was, ‘Wow, we finally made it!’ and ‘That’s it, they can’t hide us anymore!’ And then I knew what to sing!”
RICHIE HAVENS | Museum of Fine Arts’ Remis Auditorium, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston | December 20 at 7:30 pm | $30 | 617.369.3306 or www.mfa.org
