Q&A with Richie Havens
A Guild conversation with a legend still going strong ...
 Havens and friend.
Photo by Michael WeintrobAfter nearly five decades of performing and recording, Richie Havens has yet to slow down. His voice and his guitar playing remain intensely powerful and deeply soulful, while his performances remain both intimate and mesmerizing. |
A Brooklyn native, Havens rose to prominence in New York’s fertile Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early 1960s. He opened the 1969 Woodstock festival with a legendary three-hour performance culminating in an improvised rendition of classic spiritual “Motherless Child” in which he repeated the word “freedom” over and over, creating an anthem for a generation in the process.
A string of popular albums ensued and his fiery live performances continued to dazzle audiences worldwide. He was one of the very few artists invited to play back-to-back television appearances on the Tonight Show because of overwhelming audience response, and he performed at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton.
Known as a creative and thoughtful songwriter and interpreter, Havens has always wielded his Guild acoustic guitar using a powerful and distinctive combination of superb rhythmic ability, open tunings and an unconventional thumb-fretting style to achieve a sound that is uniquely his own.
More than two dozen albums and years of non-stop touring later, Havens is as busy as ever, and through it all there has never been such a devotee of Guild guitars. Once and forever a D-40 player, Havens’ Guild guitars––including his own signature model––are as integral as his own unmistakable singing voice.
Guild sat down with Havens during a recent tour stop to talk about his guitars and his career, the impending 40th anniversary of Woodstock, 2008 album Nobody Left to Crown and more. All in all, a delightful and wide-ranging conversation about a legendary career still going strong …
GN: You’ve been playing songs to packed houses now for four decades. What inspires you to perform and how has that evolved through the years?
RH: I think it has more to do with my education. When I left Brooklyn, I was singing doo-wop when I landed in Manhattan. When I landed in Greenwich Village, I heard a completely different song. I heard a song written by guys that wrote about things that really mattered, which was a big difference!
So I was kind of educated for about a year. I read poetry and did portraits down in the Village from the end of ’59 through 1960. I got to hear all of these great writers, great players, and great songs, which was the most important thing! So the continuation of that is still what’s going on in my trek (laughs)! To get to the spot where there are so many of us doing it—writing songs—the world automatically changes.
GN: And that’s what you’re still pushing for?
RH: I see it here. I’m fortunate enough to get around that way all year ’round. I’ve been on stage every weekend for 29 years. You get to see the changes. The first seven years, I was out five or six days a week, and I loved it. I thought I was having a great time, and I also thought, “I’m having a little too much fun (laughs)! There are things in my life that I’d like to accomplish, so maybe I’ll play just on weekends.” And that was 29 years ago.
And so I do see the changes in the whole of this nation’s people, whether it’s left, right or upside down. But I do see the changes, and the changes are really, incredibly huge in terms of “pro peace” in the whole world—not just here. Because we know we still need it here (laughs)!
But, it’s become global, I would say, really in the last 10 years, on a real level. Because you have kids. And I still say it to this day—“I haven’t had a great conversation with anyone over 4 feet tall.” The change is here already. They just happen to be 4 feet tall. Boy I tell you, they’re here to clean up the planet. However, they also know who did it (laughs)! So they’re on our case in many cases. It’s a big awareness time. The more we have of the “right wing” or whatever, the more human beings are being created on the other side of that. Not just voters, but human beings. And they are graduating into a more comfortable “human being” position as we go. It keeps me going.
New great songs keep me going. If they do something for me, then I think they deserve to kind of hang around. That’s why I do songs that I didn’t write, as well as ones I do. Because in that song, I got educated myself.
 Busy as ever: Richie Havens onstage.
Photo courtesy Madison House Publicity
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GN: How did you develop your technique, and how has it changed since the ’60s?
RH: The reason that happened so quickly … Freddie Neil was the first guy in Greenwich Village that I heard songs coming from that really changed my way of thinking and my life. I couldn’t deny it; this is really true, what I’m hearing. Even though I never heard it in Brooklyn (laughs)! I did hear it outside of Brooklyn. There seems to be a disconnect between where I came from and where I went, in terms of basic information. I used to sit in the audience and sing along with Freddie and all the guys whose songs changed me. I actually learned them in the process of sitting down and listening to them. And so one day Freddie came up to me and said, “Hey man, listen, you’ve been singing along with me for six and a half months. Borrow this guitar. Go learn how to play the damn thing and sing ’em yourself!” So he hands me the guitar, and I went home.
I couldn’t tune it because I didn’t know how. So I tuned it to a chord. Coming from doo-wop, I was the harmony guy. I kept everybody in key. Of course, I also pulled out my hair a few times (laughs)! But that was something that I had in me. My father was an “ear” piano player. Whatever he listened to, he could just play it. He learned, as a kid, the instrument by itself. As an adult, he could just hear it and play it. That was the thing about knowing your instrument, which I didn’t catch on to early on. But, getting this guitar, I can definitely get the three chords out of it I need to sing at least four of these songs. I’ll deal with the other two once I get there (laughs)!
And so I tuned it to a D chord. It not only gave me the ability to sing those songs, but it actually “provoked” me to write what I cared about. I did actually get to sing these songs on stage. That was the first seven years on stage, before I made an album in Greenwich Village, which was fantastic. We had enough teachers there. We all did! Bob (Dylan) had enough teachers. All of us had enough teachers to inspire us. It was fantastic!
GN: Do you still use that tuning?
RH: Yeah. It’s the only way I play. I tried learning the “straight” way, but my fingers are so large that when I put them down I hit two strings at once (laughs)! I might as well just keep hitting them all at once with my thumb (laughs)!
GN: In what ways does your signature Guild model help you play the way you do?
RH: The fact that it is what it used to be. It’s a D-40, in a sense. It’s something that I’ve always treasured. My thing with Guild is that I realized that, as a strummer, I change very few strings to create the colors I need. To make a minor (chord), I just change one string.
But you’ve got to hear it. For me, Guild is the only guitar that I’ve found that has equal volume on every string. That’s the most important thing to me, as a strummer. It really serves me to be able to embellish the straight chords that I do play, in many ways. And then all of the suspensions that I’ve found in just making great mistakes and hitting the wrong thing (laughs)—“Wow, that’s a good sound! Maybe I can write something in that. Where can that go? What would be the next chord after that sound?”
I just sort of allowed the instrument to teach me how to do it. Also, after writing 10 doo-wop songs a day before I left Brooklyn, I wasn’t going to ever write again, ever! Not with guys around who could write like they do! These guys are really writers. I’m just a teenager writing songs about teenage angst, like every other teenager, y’know (laughs)?
God, these guys are totally brilliant. And they were, to the extent that what they said became very prophetic. The things they spoke about; the visions they saw changing. I tell everybody now, “Listen folks, the reason we feel the way we do is because we’re right back to the beginning all over again. This is now 1959.”
But do you know what that means? It means that 1960 is right around the corner—again! And that is what’s going to happen.
GN: And all that comes with it, the good and the bad.
RH: That’s right!
GN: How did you come up with the design of your Guild signature model?
RH: The only design for me was that I got the same guitar that I used to play (laughs)! They had some of the older guys that worked there by hand reproduce the inside the way it used to be. There were some changes that they corrected and put back together again. That was really appreciated by me, because there was a certain sound; the way the struts (bracing) were made inside, the whole thing. It’s something you get very used to, when it changes, you know. They managed to give me back the guitar I always played the first 20 years of my career
GN: Do you still have your original Guild?
RH: Oh, I have about 18 Guild guitars here. I even have Guild electric guitars from 1968 and 1970. They started giving them to me in 1968 after seeing me on TV with one of their guitars with a big hole in it (laughs)! They came running—“Oh, don’t use that on TV; use this, thank you very much!”
GN: How often does that happen now?
RH: I used to go through a guitar in half a year when I started out, and I never knew the reason. I knew I wasn’t actually pushing it that hard. What it turned out to be was the cheap sound equipment. The microphones in those coffeehouses cost $4 to $6, so you had to beat the guitar up to reach the microphone. I broke a lot of strings when I first started out, and I’d run past the basket so I could buy more for the next set. That’s the way it used to be all day. We used to do three coffeehouses a night—14 sets a night for seven years. It was fantastic! It really was great. It was a very exciting trek. We knew each other, but we knew each other in what you could really call “in passing.” He’s going to the coffeehouse I just left and I’m going to the one he just left, and we’re going, “Hey man, how are you doing?” That’s just how we did it (laughs)!
GN: Was there healthy competition there?
RH: I never felt a competition there. I felt a sharing of techniques. A lot of guys were learning how to Travis pick, and Dave Van Ronk would teach you all the stuff he knew if you were really interested. He was a nice acoustic blues guy. I found it to be “sharing” instead of a competition.
GN: Did it make you play better or push you to write better material?
RH: It inspired me to learn more songs. And once I learned the song, that’s the way I sang it. That’s the way I sang it. That’s the way it came out of me. And sometimes it was a little faster than the guy who wrote it, and sometimes it’ll be slower. A song could be half the speed of something that someone else wrote, because that was the way I got the message from the original song. I sang the song the only way I could.
 Havens, 2006.
Photo courtesy Madison House Publicity
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GN: Not unlike Hendrix’s version of “All Along The Watchtower.”
RH: That’s right! And that’s the only way I could’ve really sung that song. That was his version of my version. I wrote it down for him.
GN: That must've really been something …
RH: It was wild. I actually got Jimi to go to Greenwich Village before he was “Jimi Hendrix.”
GN: Back when he was “Jimmy James”?
RH: Back before that. That was the band he had first when I told him to get his behind down to Greenwich Village and get his own band, and it turned out to be “Jimmy James and the Blue Flames.” We had this jam group; I had made my first album and my manager thought I was crazy hanging out with about four or five other guys just jamming, playing and having a good time. He wanted me to get ready to go out on the road. We actually auditioned for this ballroom-size place in New York, uptown, called the Cheetah. They actually had cheetah upholstery in the booths, you know what I mean? They had this wagon wheel in the ceiling that was, like, 30 feet across, and the spokes had different colored lights on them. So if you played an A chord, the red lights would light up. It was really great. The more the chords changed, the more “dance-y” it became. We auditioned and actually got to open the place! We were there for two weeks with another band from Long Island who played all Beatles songs, and they did them very well. And after the two weeks was over, I went, “Wow, I’ve got a new place I can go party (laughs)!” It was a dance place. There was live dance music. The music never stopped. What happened would be, we would play the last song and the group coming on would play that song, and we would walk off. So the music never stopped. It was a really great way to do it.
So I go back the first week I’m off, and I realize that I’m looking to have a lot more fun because here I am with 24 people in a place that holds 3,000 (laughs)! I’m there a little bit early. I go, “Oh boy, you’re gonna party too hard (laughs)!” I went over to the bar, and turned around just to see a belt looking at me, and it was Wilt the Stilt (NBA great Wilt Chamberlain). He looks down on me and says, “Hey man, what’s happenin’?” And I thought, “Oh man, holy Christ, it’s Wilt the Stilt!” My mouth was on the floor. So we actually started talking and then the band goes on. I hear this guitar player, and as we’re singing I keep hearing these licks. And I turn around to see this guy holding (the guitar) up to his face. And I said to myself, “Nah, where’s the other guitar player?” And there wasn’t any. So now I’m back to, “No, he’s not biting the strings—he’d be electrocuted.”
So I found myself on the empty dance floor, down in front of the stage, trying to look up under the guitar to see what the hell he was doing. When he came offstage, I chased him backstage and said, “Hey man. Wow! How the hell were you biting the guitar?” He goes, “Man, that’s just an old blues trick. It’s just a trick.” I asked how long had he been playing with these guys, and he said, “Just today.” I said, “What?” He told me that he got the gig through the union. Here I am a union member, and I didn’t even know I could go up there and say, “Get me a gig.” For three years I’ve been a member. I said, “You’re kidding me, they give gigs down there?” I only went there for recording checks. That was it. They told me which window to go to and they paid me my recording check, and that was it. That was all I knew about them. I knew a lot of musicians were standing around, but they were looking for gigs.
And so what happened was, I asked how long he had been in town, and he said about three days. I asked where he was staying and he said up on 90-something-street. I said, “No no, no. You know something man? You don’t even have to go to the union to get a job. You can make your own band. You got to go down to Greenwich Village. Go to the Café Wha?, ask for Manny Roth and tell him that I told you to come down.” And the next thing I know, two and a half weeks later, one of my friends comes down to the Café Au Go Go, where I’m working, and says, “Man, you have to hear this band. This guy is incredible!” And I went down there and it was Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. That’s how it started. That’s how it all began, man!
He loved Dylan’s stuff. I had been singing “Watchtower” for, like, two and a half years before he got there—maybe three and a half years. I got it from Dylan. We had the same manager. I met him in the Village before we both had that guy as a manager. We knew each other that way. Jimi came to me one day and said, “Would you write that song down for me man? I really like that song.” So I wrote it down for him, and the next thing I know is that he recorded it (laughs)! I said, “Oh man, he beat me to it!”
He was a trip. That guy was magic! He had too much talent and too much pressure. His “background” guys—lawyers, managers and producers—kept pounding on him to be the “Jimi Hendrix” they created, so to speak. He was trying to fight his way out of that the last time I saw him, at the Isle of Wight.
GN: What do you remember about that concert?
RH: At that particular point, so many things were coming to bear in terms of the syndrome that happens when you get something going that audiences are latching on to. You’re now under a different kind of microscope. It’s more or less the fact that a lot of people are opting to create themselves rather than letting record companies create them. Big changes. I can’t even imagine that I had a label under MGM in 1970. It was Frankie Valli and I at that time. We were the only two people that ended up owning our own masters out of all the people that were around. My lawyer negotiated that into the fifth contract that I was having with MGM. We were there so long. I survived five presidents and two companies. It was only me and (Casablanca Records founder) Neil Bogart on 6th Ave. and 55th St. They had three floors at the top of this building. He and I had our own little offices and there wasn’t anyone else there. It was amazing!
To be on that edge; to be able to experiment … it had a lot to do with the stuff that came out of me at that time, because, it was really a time of adventurous collaboration and experimental sounds. I tell people that I went to the University of Greenwich Village Streets (laughs)!
GN: You’re an honorary professor there!
RH: I am a professor there (laughs)!
GN: Much has been written about you opening Woodstock. What hasn’t been written about it?
RH: One thing is the truth of how many people were there at the end of the three days. When I flew over there, it was the first day. The concert that day was already four and a half hours late, if not five hours late, because they couldn’t get anybody to the field. If they didn’t find the farmer down the road with the little bubble helicopter, I wouldn’t have even been over there. The guy lands in the Holiday Inn driveway. I hear the knock on the door after sitting there for seven hours in the hotel room waiting. You see, they booked two hotels about seven miles away from the field—a Howard Johnson’s and a Holiday Inn. They had all the musicians there and they were going to transport the musicians and their equipment to the field by a back road, but that was already blocked up.
When I flew over there, the news was reporting 250,000 people. It was actually 560,000 people when I hit the ground. And it grew to 800,000 or more over the three days. There were 250,000 to 300,000 people in the woods who never even saw the field. When you look at the picture and see the people standing up at the top of the hill, what you don’t see is a road at the top of the hill. The last person you see at the top of the hill is actually standing on the tip of the road. On the other side of the road is a field as big as the one we were in, filled with people who couldn’t even see the stage. But you could hear the music for six miles. They had 100-foot scaffolds with Voice of the Theatre speakers on each one. Man, people heard that music five or six miles away.
GN: Do you remember how you felt before going onstage?
RH: Yeah. I was so glad to be taken over there, because here I was waiting to get over there to see what it was going to be like. It was so much more than I expected. If we had 250,000 people, that would have been the breakthrough, because they were only expecting 60,000—they only had tickets for 60,000 people. So, when the first day it’s 250,000—because they always lower the numbers—it was 560,000 people, sitting and looking at the stage. And it all grew because everyone started walking. When we left there the next day, we had to be in Indiana for a gig. We didn’t think we were going to get there because they closed the highway down. When we got down to the road, there were no barriers, and for 36 miles on the other side of the road there were parked cars. They were there from the first day until the last day.
And then I was off to Bloomington, Ind. And, to tell you how fast news travels, the school sent a helicopter to pick me up (laughs)! I was dying! It was the second helicopter ride in two days since my first helicopter ride—one right after the other (laughs)! It was incredible! It was actually my third one, because I had to take one back to the Holiday Inn in a Huey. And what people don’t know is that if it weren’t for the Army, there would not have been a Woodstock concert. They came and they brought every band over—back and forth—until it ended. It was great!
GN: What other memories, besides Isle of Wight and Woodstock, top your list when looking back at all you’ve accomplished?
RH: The thing to me is that everything I’ve done, I realize, was a first, and I have repeated myself. I have been back to the same place twice, maybe six or maybe eight times over the years. And for me, I feel it’s a privilege to be allowed to do what I’m doing. Because I realized a long time ago that the stage does not belong to the artist—it belongs to the audience. If they’re not sitting out there, you’re not on it. That’s really the way it is. I respect that and they allow me to do it still (laughs)!
GN: What are you working on now, and what can you fans expect from you for the remainder of the year?
RH: I’m booked to the end of 2007 and they can expect to see me; that’s for sure (laughs)! I will be there. I’m also working on my 30th album. I’m trying to get that out, which will probably be done in July.
GN: Think about that …
RH: I know, man. I can’t even believe it. I couldn’t tell you what songs are on what record, either (laughs)!
GN: Are you running out of album titles?
RH: No (laughs). All those names came to me out of the blue. I never even sat down to write a song until the name came, and it gave me some option into knowing where I was going; where I was heading. And so I left myself open, and all of a sudden I’m noodling on something that I haven’t played before. The next thing I know, some words fall out of my mouth, I write them down, and in about 10 more minutes the song is done. If I don’t sing it onstage tonight, it never gets to the stage.
Visit Richie Havens online at www.richiehavens.com.
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