From Woodstock To Ridgefield

By John Voket

It’s 9:30 on a recent Wednesday morning, but the iconic folk star Richie Havens, the first performer to grace the rain swept stage at the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair, seems as perky and energetic as he was when he settled in for that historic set at 5:08 pm on August 15, 1969. Sounding no worse for wear after traveling millions of miles to perform thousands of concerts since that impromptu appearance catapulted Havens to instant international fame, he settled in for an exclusive half-hour chat with The Newtown Bee ahead of his appearance Saturday at the Ridgefield Playhouse.

While relatively few people had heard of the warm, gravely-voiced artist prior to that weekend of peace, love and music in Bethel, N.Y., Havens said he was a fixture on the street corners of Brooklyn in the late 1950s and early ‘60s when afternoon stick ball games gave way to singing a cappella do-wop with his friends. In the ensuing years, after he relocated to Greenwich Village, hundreds of unwitting tourists were also sketched by Havens who made a respectable living as a street corner artist before he started making it as a poet and musician on the local coffee house circuit.

I remember being galvanized as a 12-year-old watching Havens on a television re-run of the Woodstock movie, deciding in those fleeting few moments that if that guy could make that kind of impression with just a guitar and an old piano stool, I could certainly extract myself from the many kitchen table concerts and move out into the world of performing, too. It was strangely coincidental, that despite having numerous opportunities to see Havens play live over the ensuing quarter century, my first glimpse of him in the flesh was during his set at the 30th Woodstock Anniversary celebration, “A Day In The Garden,” in 1999 on the site of the original festival.

After Havens indulged my story with a chuckle, we settled in to discuss the days before, and the decades following Woodstock. I was careful not to dwell on the well-documented story of how he was literally pushed up onto the stage as the festival’s first performer when the three acts that were to precede him got trapped in traffic jams heading to the show.

Instead we talked about music, politics, his latest musical project, Nobody Left to Crown, and his nearly 50-year relationship with a curly-haired fellow named Bob Dylan.

Newtown Bee: By the time you hit the stage at Woodstock, you already had a significant amount of experience playing to a much harder crowd as a do-wop singer on the street corners of Brooklyn, reciting poetry and sketching people as a sidewalk artist. Talk to me about those early days when you discovered your voice, your artistic ability and the courage to just let happen right out there on the street.

Richie Havens: In those days not a lot of attention was being paid to the teenage music. In fact the music was more about telling you what kind of dance you should be dancing. A lot of people forget about that. It was kind of a homogenous nation of youth – that was my generation. And the same top 20 songs from coast to coast meant we were all connected in many ways we weren’t thinking about. It was a social movement.

We liked the songs and we were all a part of that same audience listening to those songs no matter where we were living. I used to call it “the great becoming,” because at 14, I realized America wasn’t finished yet. It was a great place to be because you could be part of what America was becoming, you could contribute to it.

NB: Did you feel you were part of that “becoming” because you gathered all your friends together on the stoop and started singing do-wop instead of going out and getting into trouble?

RH: Singing was something that came very easy for us, and through it you could hear the talent of five people coming together as one voice. I think I inherited the talent for music from my father who was a musician. He could sit down at a piano and play anything after hearing it.

I also had a music teacher, and what she would do is have us stay after class and she would sit at the piano and play these ten-finger chords and ask if anybody could sing the individual notes of the chord. I was the only one who could do it. Of course I think I originally learned about harmony from the Three Stooges…(singing) hello…hello…hello.

NB: Folk singers in the ‘60s were sort of looked upon as keeping tabs on the establishment and the government. Can you remember the first time you ever felt outraged or became convinced that the government of the people wasn’t exactly doing right by the people?

RH: Well I looked at the great becoming as part of a positive process. There were a few splits in the seams, but no matter how bad things were, I always justified that it was a necessary part of America becoming was it was intended to be.

It was more interesting to me to observe the way America was seen through the eyes of the world. When I first went over to England – now that was a country that was all finished with its becoming – I noticed things were very different there. There was an acceptance of African-Americans over there, and people really cared about the racial tension going on, and what happened to the so-called Negro of the time.

I remember one early Saturday morning I was walking along in Hyde Park, and I saw this little lady standing there looking up into the trees. She motioned for me to come over and she pointed at a nest full of baby birds with the mother and father bird flying back and forth, and she turns to me and says, “Are the Negroes doing better?” Then she says, “would you have coffee with me?” And I spent the next hour sitting with this 80-year-old lady, listening to her talk about World War II, and about how the African American soldiers saved so many British lives, and how they looked upon us as heroes. It was amazing to me, and I was glad to see that there were people who thought that way. That conversation was a universal lesson, and it was certainly part of my becoming.

NB: You put a very personal stamp on interpretations of a lot of other artists music, especially songs by that bushy-haired fellow, Bob Dylan. And your film career is also influenced by him to a degree. You starred in a film of his, Hearts of Fire, and more recently in a biopic about him, I’m Not There. Tell me about your relationship with Dylan as it has sustained through the years.

RH: I met Bob as a singer in 1963 not even knowing we would have the same manager, Bob Grossman. I admired him – to me he was a poet, a poet who could sing his poetry whether the people who liked it or not. He had his own way of dealing with phrasing, he could put two sentences of words into the place where only one sentence should be. It was almost like a jazz kind of singing.

And if you listen to him playing guitar, he won’t have the same strum in the same song. Each song that he wrote has its own special way to play it. But what got to me most were the lyrics. While I was incapable of playing most of his songs, a couple of the first songs I learned were “Blowin in The Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”

NB: You were quoted in a recent interview saying something like: Rock & Roll was designed to get parents to hear what kids have to say. If that is the case, how would you characterize the evolution of rap music?

RH: I call rap music rock and roll circa 2. It was a rebellious music back then in many subtle ways, and rap serves the same purpose, sketching your life out through words, poetry and music. It’s related to that early rock and roll, in how far the ripples have carried from the first drop of that stone back in the early ‘60s.

NB: When you talk about how far the ripples have gone, we should talk about your own drop of the stone, forming an organization called The Natural Guard.

RH: We stared out with 16 kids in that center in New Haven, and then it became 18 a few days later, and we lost none of them. Because we gave them the opportunity to change their own community. It wasn’t about coming into their school and making it another thing to do, we knew they didn’t want to be there in the first place. But here were all these kids that had ideas who wanted to share them. The first week I remember one coming to me and saying, “Mr Havens, can we grow a garden to feed the hungry people?” And I’ll tell you, these kids raised foods in three backyard gardens in New Haven and they brought what they grew to the neighborhood soup kitchens.

NB: You’ve been blessed being able to do so many things. But what is the one thing Richie Havens must accomplish before you can rest?

RH: There is a film I have been working on for almost 25 years. It’s not a totally scripted film, but allows the people on the screen an opportunity to express themselves. It’s about astrology. It’s my hope that once it is done, everybody who goes into that theater comes out having seen themselves on that screen. I come in contact with a lot of people, and I can tell you their sign. I found a way to prove astrology not only really exists, but that we are all under the influences of the big magnet of astrology.

NB: Well, I’m a Scorpio, and you know how Scorpios are. And I’ve proved astrology really exists because I’ll wait until tomorrow and read today’s horoscope and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t match up nearly exactly, every time.

RH: Well you can be in my movie then!

NB: You called me, so you’ve got my number. I’m happy to be there for you Richie.

Richie Havens will perform at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Saturday, January 19, as part of the Doyle Coffin Architecture Singer/Songwriter Series. Showtime is 8 pm, and Morley will play an opening set. Tickets are $50 and $55. For details on this and other upcoming shows, go to RidgefieldPlayhouse.com or call 203-438-5795.