Sunday morning coming down

Singer/songwriter Richie Havens died in 2013 at the age of 72. This coming January 21 is the anniversary of his birth. His music has meant a lot to me. Until Albert O observed Richie’s birthday with a few cuts on WUMB’s Highway 61 Revisited yesterday morning, I hadn’t heard his voice for a long time. While I limit myself to 10 videos that emphasize his early career — the years I know best and the records I wore out — try to remember.

Havens grew up in Brooklyn singing with a choir in church and with doo wop groups on street corners. He crossed the river to figure out how to make a go of it in Greenwich Village as a performer. He recorded two albums on Douglas Records before he signed a contract with Verve Forecast in 1967. He seemed to materialize out of nowhere that year with Mixed Bag, a beautiful album of folk covers and original compositions. The album was full of striking performances, but none more so than Havens’s interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman.” By the way, I may need to take a break from what is meant to be an occasional series until we celebrate Bob’s birthday next May with our traditional Bobfest.

I had the great good fortune of seeing Havens perform live at the hungry i in San Francisco in June 1968, the week before Enrico Banducci closed the club. Banducci was determined to go out with a bang. Mort Sahl was playing the room on one side of the club, Havens the room on the other. Havens played to a small audience accompanying himself on guitar and just poured it on. The obscure comedian Stanley Myron Handelman warmed up for Havens without drawing a laugh, although he deserved to. He was funny.

Reviewing Havens’s performance at the Troubadour in West Hollywood just before or after I saw him at the hungry i, Los Angeles Times staff writer Pete Johnson surrendered: “He sings in a lispy rasping voice which by all odds should be unappealing and flails the strings of his guitar with an energy which belies sensitivity, but the performance and the man remain inarguably beautiful.”

I flipped over Mixed Bag and loved the succeeding Verve albums, Something Else Again and the double album Richard P. Havens, 1983. I should add that Stonehenge and Alarm Clock weren’t too shabby either. They all followed up on the myriad strengths of Mixed Bag, combining original compositions and interpretive pyrotechnics.

Havens must have been good. The folk boom had long since passed, yet here was an unreconstructed folkie, black and in need of dentures to boot, who seemed not to have heard or to care. At Woodstock in 1969, I think it’s safe to say, he made an impression playing every song he knew (as the AP recalled) while the scheduled opening acts were still trying to find a way in. Below is his famously improvised performance of “Freedom”/”Motherless Child” before a crowd of 500,000 music lovers and others at the festival. With Martin Luther King Day coinciding with the inauguration of President Trump tomorrow, this could not be more moving or timely.

By the time the Woodstock concert film turned everyone on to Havens in 1970, I was a fan of long standing courtesy of Mixed Bag. His cover of Jesse Fuller’s “San Francisco Bay Blues” is the most engaging I’ve ever heard.

Richie followed up the next year with Something Else Again. I think I would have something to say about every track on the album. Richie’s own “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed” led it off and rung my chimes. “Wake up and be!”

“Sugarplums” is an unusual number. The writing is credited to John Court, but I think it must be shared with Bill Evans and Joe Zawinul for the melody to which Court put the lyrics. Warren Bernhardt is on piano and Jeremy Steig the flute. This is indeed something else again.

Richie’s “New City” perfectly expressed my feelings as a young man hoping to find my way in the world. Like so many of the recordings here, this song still stops me in my tracks.

Richie released the double album 1983 in 1968. Nineteen eighty-three seemed a long way off at the time, yet the title conveyed a warning. Next stop: 1984. “Just Above My Hobby Horse’s Head” (written with Mark Roth) does not escape the clichés of the day. However, Richie’s optimistic spirit seems to me to shine through. It was irrepressible. Warning: Richie’s sitar riffs may cause flashbacks.

Stonehenge was released in 1970. Richie’s “There’s a Hole In the Future” is my favorite track. He was still burning to get a positive message out.

Our friend Ed Morrissey holds that Richie recorded the best-ever cover of a Beatles song with “Here Comes The Sun,” the first track on Alarm Clock (1971). Ed opines that Richie “owned that song, in part by taking it to the roots of folk-rock.” I am sick of the Beatles’ recording, yet Havens’s cover still sounds fresh to me.

The New York Times obituary of Richie by Douglas Martin took note of Richie’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun,” but also conveyed Havens’s mastery of Dylan:

Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung.

“That’s how I first met Bob Dylan,” Mr. Havens said.

In case you have already forgotten, see also “Just Like a Woman” above.

A few years ago Hip-O Select released a remastered two-disc compilation of his first three albums on Verve: High Flyin’ Bird: The Verve Forecast Years. I checked my copy for the writing credit attributed to John Court on “Sugarplums.” Those three albums sounded better than ever and by my lights hold up remarkably well.

Richie continued to sound just like himself pretty much to the end. In the 2002 video below Richie sings Groove Armada’s “Hands of Time” backed by the gentlemen of Groove Armada themselves. This does not exactly comport with my Sunday morning theme, but it’s a worthy thought: “Seems to me you can’t turn back the hands of time.”

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