It was while sitting in a second run theatre in the east end of Toronto, Ontario that I first saw Richie Havens perform. In 1977 I was sixteen and the Woodstock Music Festival had taken place eight years earlier, but the movie of the event extended its life for people like me who had no interest in the pop culture of the mid seventies. In the days before punk hit Canada the music and the politics of the late sixties seemed far more alive then anything our own time had to offer.
Which explains why on that Friday night there were about forty of us sitting spread out through the Roxy Cinema, squinting through the haze produced by the smoke from about that many nickel bags of Mexican pot at a so-so print of Woodstock: Three Days Of Peace And Music. Hearing the soundtrack on my brother's cheap stereo at home hadn't prepared me for seeing the force of nature that was Richie Havens playing guitar and singing on the screen. With the camera shooting him in a tight close-up, Richie filled the screen, and you could see individual rivulets of sweat running down his face as he curled his body around the guitar he was strumming and poured out his soul into a microphone.
Although there were many other firsts in terms of seeing people perform that night, Richie Havens' performance was the one that left the most indelible impression on me. The intensity that he played with and the incredible passion that was being transmitted by this one man to the thousands of people in the audience on screen, and to us in the old and tacky theatre helped make him far more memorable than some of his more famous contemporaries.
It's 2008 now and I own a DVD copy of the director's cut of Woodstock as a memento of my own youth, and as a historical record of the event itself. While some of the musicians have become history, and some of the music sounds dated, Richie Havens has not been swallowed up by time, and as can be told by listening to his latest release on the Verve Forecast label, Nobody Left To Crown, his music is as powerful and relevant as it ever was.
There aren't too many people left from the Woodstock era with the moral authority to be singing about the state of the world anymore. They've either left the world, or been co-opted by the very establishment they were supposedly so intent upon changing. Musically many of them have become vapid and are content to play out their remaining years as near caricatures of their former selves. So the performer who has adhered to his ideals for the last forty years and continues to express them through his music like Richie Havens does is a rarity.
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