Richie Havens -

By: Dominick A. Miserandino



Richie Havens made his music mark with his soulful singing style in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1960s. For more than 30 years he's been delivering a message of brotherhood and personal freedom, and he's till going strong with his latest release Nobody Left to Crown. TheCelebrityCafe.com's Dominick Miserandino spoke with Richie about staying young on stage and going through changes.

DM: How is the tour going so far?

RH: I play every weekend all year round for the past 29 years in a row. And some times it's four days a week instead of 3.

DM: Do you ever get exhausted?

RH: No.

DM: Never.

RH: Not yet.

DM: 29 years is a long time to be touring.

RH: Yeah, but it seems like only yesterday.

DM: Do you feel it keeps you young and going?

RH: I think what I do, the way I do it, yeah. I only know the first and last song I'm going to sing when I get up on the stage, so I've put myself on the line every night I play. And that's what it's about. It's not about me playing the things I think the audience would like to hear.

DM: So have you ever surprised yourself with what you played one night?

RH: I surprise myself every night. I mean there are so many songs, you know, and when they pop up it's like a pop-up ad on a computer.

DM: Did you ever play something completely wacky like "Yellow Submarine" or something that you're not necessarily known for but that the audience screams out?

RH: I have done covers and those sort of happen to be the load post of what I'm feeling at the time and so the ones that I cover really are like they belong in this group over here and there are others we probably won't do for another five years, so we put that in another box. So I'm open, you know, so that's the way it works.

DM: Are there songs that you've played basically every night for the past 29 years?

RH: "Watchtower," actually. I've been singing that song since the beginning. Usually that's my opening song.

DM: Are you sick of "Watchtower" by now?

RH: No. I hear and feel every bit of where I came out of it; every drop of Greenwich Village is still there.

DM: Speaking of Greenwich Village, someone recently told me we are in time period like that of the 1960s.

RH: We certainly are. When my guitar player has his own band is he starts playing downtown in some place I've never heard of and he says it part of a rebuilding of the Village down on the east side. There's like eight blocks of music; it's like New Orleans down there. It blew my mind because I grew up in that area and so I wonder how did this get by me? You walk down the street and there people on the sidewalks with their drinks in their hands and there's thousands of them, when this section used to be a sweathouse of manufacturing. There's all these bars down there, all these restaurants from around the world, and you go door to door and there's a different band. It's like 1968 when I first started going to the Village, and it's exactly the same.

DM: Politically are we in that era too?

RH: Absolutely. It's just an incredible change.

DM: Do you find your type of music in a sort of revival of move to action?

RH: You're right. The most interesting thing about that is why we don't hear it, and here's the reason: it's all localized. The guys don't have to leave town to find someone in New York with a message. All these young guys just have to go on the Internet and send their music anywhere they want. All of that had made the change of consciousness, but wonderfully change of consciousness of where I live.

DM: Is change New York-centric or for the country?

RH: For the country. The localness of it is spreading word of what amount of problems we carry in our state. And that's the atmosphere. It's searching for themselves locally and being nourished by all that is happening locally in the music. When I was in Greenwich Village there were maybe eight great poets that hung out down there and all of the singer-songwriters would singing and writing their own songs. So you now have the same thing geared to what's happening in every town. So when you ask, "Who's the hoot n nanny?", you can say there are a million hoot n nannies because there's thing called open mic.

Talk to other readers about this story.