Richie Havens Keeps 'Freedom' Alive

   Mention Richie Havens by name and an image locked in by time — the late ‘60s — and celluloid — the “Woodstock” film — most likely emerges. List his ideals, accomplishments and methodology and he sounds like a role model for the current generation: He has played at every significant musical festival in the world; founded his own label and generated hit records; protested and improper war; and made the environment a cause long before his peers.
He’s a fan of the written word, a believer in connecting the dots between generations who tips his hat repeatedly to everyone from Allen Ginsberg and Fred Neil, who encouraged him to learn guitar, up through Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, whose music he admires. After chatting with him for an hour, and getting a keen sense that he is tapped into the communicative powers of music within a community and not just the ones he came of age in, Havens beams with an undeterred and enchanting spirit. He likes to raise questions to make a listener think and laugh simultaneously: "How is it," he queries in a riff on Superman, "truth and justice and the American way are two different things?"
Havens’ 27th album, “Nobody Left To Crown,” was released in Europe in February and a summer release date in the U.S., Canada and Japan is expected to be announced soon by Verve Records. At 67, he still performs most weekends and has dates booked for the next 12 months. His shows are improvised affairs: “I know the first song and the last song. It’s what I’m feeling and no matter what comes up, (the band) can mosey into where I’m going to go. The cellist may sit out the first verse and then brings a burst of energy into the room.”
Havens made a solo appearance at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival to perform “Freedom” for Sean Penn, head of the Cannes jury, a fan of Havens and the song he became associated with after the release of the “Woodstock” movie. (The performance can be seen here).
“I have had to sing it at every single show since the movie came out,” Havens said in a midday interview in his hotel room on the French Riviera. “Forty years is coming up. The interesting thing is how it is a building block — every year a new group of high school and college students discover the movie and a whole generation discovers this things. They get the story watching this movie and attach themselves to something they missed that interests them.”
The enduring appeal of Havens’ shining moments — “Freedom” at Woodstock and his interpretations of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” and Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” — have evolved into history lessons, documents of inspired interpretation and performance. Havens, and this holds true for Nina Simone, fused practically every musical style they came in contact with to create their own unique sound. Haven, a Brooklyn native, sang gospel and doo-wop until he moved to Greenwich Village where he drew portraits and recited poetry until singer-songwriters Fred Neil and Dino Valenti encouraged to learn the guitar and joining the growing “folk scare” of the early 1960s.
“We were the ones who went to every major festival — and got asked to come back,” he notes.
Those fests included a string of landmark events: the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, ‘67 Monterey Jazz Festival, Miami Pop in ‘68, Isle of Wight Festival and, in 1970, the first Glastonbury Festival.
The festivals, he says, “were a very interesting exchange — people from the West and people from the East discovering each others’ performers.”
He offered thoughts on a host of subjects — the intricacies of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” making albums, his earliest inspirations and the one song he won’t play.
(Olivia Hemaratanatorn took the great photos)

“The poetry is what I’m drawn to in any song. Usually songs would go by on the radio and I’d learn them in two listenings. ‘Hard’ Rain took me eight days to learn, four or five hours a day. This was different. Turns out something in the verses was connecting to me. It dawned on me I was looking at scenes – there’s not one sentence that relates to the sentence before it. It’s a movie. I had to take a (mental) picture of each line. After performing ‘Hard Rain’ (in the early 1960s) I didn’t know what to do next. It was tough to make a transition to any other song.”
Beyond “Hard Rain,” Havens pinpoints Neil’s “Tear Down the Walls,” a 1964 tune the composer of “Everybody’s Talkin’” wrote with Vince Martin, as crucial to his development. It spurred to create a distinct approach on the guitar — “I hit six strings on every chord” — and amalgamate his background into a unique style, balancing covers and originals on the 14 albums he made between 1967 and 1980.
His 2004 disc “Grace of the Sun” included eight originals, Neil’s “Red Flowers’ and Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”; the new album has a similar number of originals plus interpretation of number by Pete Townshend and Jackson Browne. (He was one of the treats in Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There," performing "Tombstone Blues" with Marcus Carl Franklin and Tyrone Benskin).
“A record comes to me as a title,” he says, getting a bit metaphysical. “The title can either be an album or a song. I take the first line and then see what comes out. That helps me put together whether it is a song or a title. That’s kind of what I would call the job of songwriting ; that’s the work of it.
“Usually when it’s title for the (album) each song is a piece in the umbrella; the title is the handle and I’m being told what’s attached. Any song I write I hold onto. They don’t go away - they attach to the back end of the last album. Songs written (or adapted)  for the previous album are the first suggestions for the next album. The last three albums I was able to write a lot of songs and see them as connected. Plus songs by people who write well.
“I have been sharing songs that have changed me personally since 1963. It is the same now as it has always been. I don’t go outside the borders of a song (by another writer). You felt it. It was emotional and you slugged it back. Lots of kids haven’t had that (recently), but I’m finding (a desire) for that again. It’s local. It’s about not leaving town, it’s about (drawing) people who are passing through. There is so much talent out there – people singing from the heart, from a place where passion is kept alive.”
As for that song he won’t play, it’s his anti-war anthem “Handsome Johnny.”
“I have 50 songs in the well. There’s no ‘Handsome Johnny’ – I would have to add six wars and I won’t do that.”