Living in the moment

>>Intuition and originality (and a lucky break
at Woodstock) have made a folk-music
legend of Richie Havens

STRUMMING AT THE BECOMING: Richie Havens

By JOHNSON CUMMINS

Having rubbed shoulders with the legends of the Greenwich Village café scene of the early ’60s, and a perennial favourite of the finicky Bob Dylan for years, Richie Havens is easily a folk icon. Originally drawn to Greenwich Village by the beat poets, Havens started out as a spoken word artist but was thrust into music after going to see folk musician Fred Neil—and drowning him out by singing along from the audience. “He just gave me this guitar and said, ‘Here, take this and learn how to play it,’” says the soft-spoken Havens over the phone from his home in Jersey City. “When he did that, he really changed my life forever.”

When Havens returned to the scene with his newly acquired guitar in tow, he began electrifying any event he played at, be it a spoken word, folk, jazz or blues show, with his uniquely unorthodox approach. The tempo would be kept with the constant stomping of his left foot, while his thumb would act as a percussive device, banging against the strings as he played open tunings with his left thumb draped over the topside of the fretboard. Even more noticeable was his rich baritone voice, which shook the timbers and rang out with truth and honesty.

Havens’ greatest talent, though, was his complete surrender to the music, evidenced by his dismissal of set lists. “I never play guitar unless I’m playing a show, and I usually only know what the first song and the last song are going to be. Outside of that, I don’t really know what I’m going to do, so it’s really the audience who are choosing the songs. It’s almost like I go into a trance and I can play songs I haven’t played in like seven years, and all of the words and everything will just all come back like I had just played it last week.”

From day one, Havens has always relied on his expert sense of improvisation. His most famous improvised song is probably “Motherless Child,” documented in the film Woodstock. Havens was slotted in the incredibly daunting position of first performer at the festival. With Woodstock six hours behind schedule, Havens truly made his career that day, putting in an exhaustive, four-encore set that of course set the bar incredibly high for the rest of the fest.

“When I flew over the crowd at Woodstock in this glass-floor helicopter, I was freaking out. The only reason I went on first is because they couldn’t get anybody to the stage and I was the only guy who didn’t have big amplifiers, so I could get in the helicopter with my two guitars, conga drums and two accompanists. I wasn’t really that nervous when I was on stage because I could always count on the audience to give me the vibe on what to do next. When I got on the stage, I just realized this was the freedom my generation had always been trying to get. We thought we would get it as far back as ’59 but I just sat on the stage and said, ‘Here it is, this is it.’ It was the great becoming.”

At the Oscar Peterson
Concert Hall on Saturday,
April 26, 8 p.m., $42