Richie Havens Interview

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.

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".

Modern Guitars Magazine met Richie backstage just before he recently charmed the audience at the Barns at Wolf Trap with his talent and sense of humor. During the show, everyone sat mesmerized when he offered up "Here Comes the Sun" and later as he drummed on his guitar to accompany his new song "Grace of the Sun". The crowd found him to be everything they expected. And much more.

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

Here comes...Richie Havens.

[Don't miss the full-length mp3 download at the end of the interview, "By the Grace of the Sun", the title track from Richie Haven's lastest CD.]

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.

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

RH: 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.

You have been blessed with a great sense of music.

RH: 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 awhile -- 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.

Your early musical influences?

RH: 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.

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

RH: 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.

So you weren't a musician at the time?

RH: 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.

Village musical influences?

RH: 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!

[See Richie Havens' tutorial on his guitar playing techniques]

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.

Tell us about "Mixed Bag" and your off-center beat.

RH: 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.

Tell us more about Greenwich Village in the early years.

RH: Like I mentioned, Freddy Neil and Dino Valente, these guys influenced me. And some later influences also became "early" influences, like Nina Simone. She strongly influenced me with the way she interpreted songs. She told me to play the song any way I could if the song means something to me and not to worry that I can't play the guitar right. I actually got to play with her and it was incredible.

She's one of my favorites [Richie stops and begins to sing I love you Porgy]. And of course, Ray Charles too, for the sincerity in the way he played a song. That's how he portrayed what moved him.

There were others, not so much for how they played, but for their concerns for the world, the planet. That was part of my education as a Greenwich Village poet. Noel (Paul) Stookey made me get up on stage and do it. I remember when they first started it was Peter, Noel and Mary and because they needed to be recognized it was changed to Peter, Paul and Mary -- a very Biblical hook that Al Grossman inspired. They got "Blowin' in the Wind" out to people. Bob Dylan wrote it, but at the time couldn't get it out to lots of people. Bob was a poet too who got to sing his poetry. That's how I thought of him. And he wrote such inclusive poetry and the characters just sang out -- he knew them. He did it well by adding something to what we used to call a love song, but completely different in his reverence for "the female".

In "Just Like a Woman", nobody had ever shown up like Bob to teach us how to sing about a woman that way. It had been, [sings] The sky is blue and I love you, very simplistic and blandly romanticized. With Bob it was, as a woman she does this and she does that, but she also "breaks just like a little girl". He did it really well -- added a new dimension to it that made "her" more understandable.

Here's a little story about Bob, whom I love. I've always had this feeling that he wanted to be a rock star. Well, he's finally made that and I'm so happy he's been around long enough to do the things he wanted to do. When I knew him in 1965, the folk crowd booed him off stage and he was shattered. But at the same time it kind of forced him to become part of that new constituency that opened up for him and he knew that the kids would understand what he was doing. It was amazing, and now he gets to play those leads and I get to listen to him in a different new way! It's amazing -- I saw it coming, but it took so long. He's now doing the "newer him"!

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

RH: 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.

You play Guild guitars exclusively?

RH: 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.

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].

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

RH: 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.

What are your other talents, besides painting?

RH: I play sitar. I love the instrument and I learned it a long time ago. Back in 1958. A friend of mine who had a great jazz collection told me to listen to anything and everything. I came upon this red transparent record, an import from Deutsche Grammophone. They recorded music very naturally with sixteen microphones and their records are very collectible among audiophiles.

Well, I played and played that record. It was Indian music with some great sitar. This was before I played guitar and went to the Village.

A couple of years later, I'm walking around the Village and I go past an Indian restaurant and in the window is this instrument. I knew immediately that it had to be a sitar because the album cover had a picture. I vowed to myself that the first bit of money I made would go toward buying one and in 1963 I did. When I went to record my second album I used the sitar.

As things would have it, I later went out to California, really wanting to see San Francisco, my favorite city on the west coast. I took my sitar with me and I jammed a bit with some friends. I didn't have a clue what I was doing with the sitar. I didn't understand the instrument at all.

Afterwards, I decide I'm going to take the sitar over to a hill near the university and play some music up there. I finish playing and march down the hill and what do I run in to? Another guy carrying his sitar. He asked if I played and if I went to the sitar school. He took me to the school and I spent a week going to it two-and-a-half hours a day and learned the scales and how to tune and re-tune it. You see, the sitar has scales that are used for three different sets of ragas - morning, noon and night. When I got back to New York I listened to the earlier baloney I'd played and went back to record with it. I now have two sitars.

This was well before George Harrison, Donovan and Shawn Phillips played the sitar. Shawn Phillips is a good friend of mine and I remember him hitting New York with the biggest, thickest Texan accent --what a wild guy, with a long head of hair. He's another good songwriter and player who played twelve-string.

Another guy I really want to mention is John Martyn, a dear friend of mine. I love him and his music. I covered one of his great songs. [Richie begins to sing, I don't want to know about evil, only want to know about love.]

Other talents? I had an acting role in "Greased Lightning" with Richard Pryor. Mostly music though and my my songs can be heard in a lot of movies like "Coming Home", "Wired", "Navy Seals", "Collateral" and of course the movie, "Woodstock".

Who have you influenced?

RH: I met Tim Buckley in the Village and he got that strumming from me. He saw me and spent a lot of time watching how I played. I only know of two people who I influenced and those are Buckley and Tim Hardin.

When I met Tim Hardin he was sort of a picker, a Travis picker, and he also sang some traditional songs and wrote some of his own folk songs. One day, because of the major and minor tunings I play, he came up to me and asked what chord I was playing. I didn't know what it was and told him to figure it out and he did. After that he always played major 7ths and minor 7ths [sings You took me like the misty roses...]. He later did a lot of really great jazz. He did his own thing, his own writing, but he was influenced by the sounds I was getting out of the guitar.

There was another guy named Jimi who I didn't necessarily influence, but who asked me about the chords I used in Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watch Tower". Remember, I wasn't doing standard tunings. Well, I showed him and later he did what's now the definitive version of the song that's loved by all of us.

You have contributed to many causes. Any favorites?

RH: Yes, children. Working with children is my most cherished work. Awhile ago, I co-founded a children's ecological museum called the, Northwind Undersea Institute that nurtured another named The Natural Guard.

The Natural Guard is a way of helping kids learn that they can have a hands-on role in affecting the environment. Children study the land, water, and air in their own communities and see how they can make positive changes by something as simple as planting a garden in an abandoned lot. What's wonderful about these projects is the number of kids that they have inspired to go to college.

Right now I'm working with a friend of mine on his new invention that helps children learn how to read. It works! It's been successful with pre-schoolers, even three-year-olds. And it's based on how kids watch videos over and over again and their ability to recite them word for word. That's a hearing thing, not reading, so if they have a talent to hear and remember, they should have a talent to see and remember. That's what the invention is based on and we call it "action captions". It has the ability to attach to any film or video ever made and turn them into teaching tools. So a child can watch, "Little Mermaid", for example, and see every word that comes out of her mouth.

My friend and I are working on this right now and have a website called Sharing World at sharingworld.com. It has taken two years to get the system right and we recently shot a pilot project that turned out well. People are just starting to understand its power and libraries are buying it so kids can come by and learn from it.

In the pilot, I play a Mr. Wizard kind of fellow and there's a castle where words are made. Kids need to search for the magic word and the group of kids need one another to be successful. It's similar to the Wizard of Oz in a way. They deal with me as a real person and then they wake up in a castle, very dream like. There's also Benny the Blackboard who helps them out. In the end, kids find that through collaboration, working together, they can succeed. It is conflict resolution plus! It's a very good thing and I'm proud to be part of it.

How's the new generation in responding to your music?

RH: With this new generation, kids automatically understand what I'm doing. It's really a blessing. There's no learning curve with them, they get it like it's in their DNA. The new generation really is the greatest the world has ever known. It sounds like a worn out cliche, but it's true that they are the future.

We, on the other hand, were absolutely naive and didn't know anything. We believed everything we were told and were idealists, but a lot of what we saw happening was so un-American that we recognized it.

I imagine that every song that was written in the '60s was written for now. It's amazing how true that is -- can't be denied. When we were kids, the plan was to go to work, get money, get back home to feed the family and get up and go to work again the next morning. If they told us that they just wanted to control us [laughs], we just might have let them. But, we saw the contradiction.

This new generation is a great one and we should be watching and especially listening to them.

Your latest CD, "Grace of the Sun", has been very well received. Any favorite tracks?

RH: That's a hard one because I like them all, but for favorites I'd have to say the album title song, "Grace of the Sun", plus "Woodstock", and "Pulling up the Stone".

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MP3 download (Zip file)

"By the Grace of the Sun" by Richie Havens

[Sound file offered with the permission of publisher and copyright owner. All rights reserved.]

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Related links

Richie Havens online: www.richiehavens.com
Official Richie Havens merchandise: www.stormyforest.com
Sharing World: www.sharingworld.com
Wolf Trap: www.wolf-trap.org
Photographer Elliott Landy: www.landyvision.com

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