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by Seth Rogovoy
PITTSFIELD, Mass., Sept. 20, 1996 -- It's been over a quarter of a century since Woodstock and the end of the Sixties, but if you closed your eyes on Thursday night at the Richie Havens concert, you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that Flower Power still rules.
At his show in the Koussevitzky Theatre at Berkshire Community College, Havens belied the passage of time. Few if any artists have remained so steadfast to a vision and style as has Havens, who has found a way to maintain his unique approach, so grounded in that earlier era, without seeming false or relying on nostalgia.
Havens has seemingly made the transition to the '90s without himself noticing that anything much has changed. He has made virtually no concessions to new trends in music, other than adding a few, very Sixties-ish songs from the '80s to his repertoire. More than that, Havens has found a way to maintain gracefully his hippie-priest-like presence. While he may have lost some hair on the top of his head, his beard still flows as does his robe, and what was once hippie-talk now comes across for the most part as positive-minded, new-age banter.
Havens began his show, co-sponsored by BCC and Birch Tree Concerts, noting that he has been touring non-stop since December 1967. "We're out there, it's unbelievable," he said, apropos of nothing and everything. Mostly, he did what he has always done. He was a Bob Dylan jukebox, transforming fiery Dylan anthems like "All Along the Watchtower" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" into soulful prayers. He delivered other songs by '60s icons such as Van Morrison ("Tupelo Honey") and the Beatles ("Here Comes the Sun") in his classic, trademark style, wherein he sets up a highly percussive foundation of strumming, atop which he reconstructs his material in a semi-improvisatory fashion, paying little heed to a song's original melody, rhythm or chord structure. Instead, he turns it into a uniquely styled soul song, investing it with his own passion and sometimes -- as with Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" and Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" -- more profundity than the originals.
Havens peppered his concert with stories and sermons that tied in with his songs. He spoke in his gentle, whispery voice of his roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene and his travels around the world and the lessons he drew from them. Sometimes his tales lent added significance to his material, as when he set "Here Comes the Sun" in the context of the hope for the future that lies within children. Other times the connection was less clear, as in an odd rant about there being no law behind the income tax, which seemed more like militia- speak than hippie-talk. He also pushed the envelope of seriousness with a bizarre rap that tied the number 12 to all sorts of historical and natural phenomenon -- including the Apostles, the months in the year and the number of inches in a foot -- winding it up with a song about astrology.
The program was also marred by poor sound. For some reason Havens chose to sing into a microphone pointed up and over his head and to play a guitar that wasn't directly fed into the p.a. system. As a result, the sound was thin and tinny, a stark contrast to the couple of tunes he sang while holding the mike in his hand. On these numbers, his booming baritone was as resonant as ever, and he seemed like a real singer.
But with updated choices like Jackson Browne's "Lives In the Balance" and Sting's "They Dance Alone," Havens proved that he still has an uncanny knack for choosing the right songs to cover, and in his hands these songs seemed written expressly for him. In the end, Havens proved himself to be a quintessentially American classic, albeit a quirky one in a genre of his own making.
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