Richie Havens - Easy
Let's move the month along -- before WW3 breaks out and we're all turned to soup for some hideous babyfucker's brainlessly unconstitutional imperial delusions -- with a milestone birthday of a guy who dedicated his whole existence to trying to make such an outcome not happen.
He's long gone now, and I'm sure he'd be appalled at what has become of things since he left us in 2013.
Of course he's most notorious as the dude in the orange kaftan that opened the stereotypically iconic Woodstock fair in the also-overly-romanticized summer of 1969.
Initially kind of tossed to half a million Hippie wolves as an acoustic stopgap whilst the organizers finished assembling the electronics for the bands, he ended up turning in one of the central performances of not just that concert, but of the whole era.
Of course, nothing could be more legendary to the culture -- not even a billion Woodstocks! -- than his voiceover work in 1980s commercials. How else would you know that the best part of waking up is Folger's in your cup, silly? His Amtrak song was the jam too.
He started doing music and poetry in Greenwich Village -- is there a better place to do music and poetry in the 1950s and 1960s? -- and upon returning to NYC in the mid Sixties after a spell away he got signed and started recording a series of eclectic and forceful albums featuring his distinctive, growl-gravel voice, which resembled that of one you might attribute to an ancient African griot.
By the time of Woodstock he had released a few LPs and was considered a rising star, but the film of the festival in 1970 blew him up to the galactic, This Poor Guy Has Gone Alone To The Supermarket For The Last Time Without An Autograph Pen level.
Almost as much a gold standard interpreter of songs as a songwriter in his own right, it was his incandescent improvisation on the folk spiritual Motherless Child at Woodstock -- with its repeated incantation of the word freedom -- that turned him into a household name.
In addition to the spectacular musical career that followed -- and all the commercials -- he also acted, in films and television. He's likely the only Woodstock performer ever to have been in a Todd Haynes film.
Born in 1941, he'd have been 85 today, so in his honor let's see what he was up to on West Fourth Street in downtown Manhattan 48 Februaries ago.
Richie Havens
Bottom Line
New York City, New York USA
2.16.1978
01 introduction & RH speaks
02 Fire & Rain
03 Nobody Left to Crown
04 Tupelo Honey/Just Like a Woman
05 What About Me
06 Easy
07 No More, No More
08 I Was Educated By Myself
09 No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed
10 tuning & intro by RH
11 Shalom Salam Aleikoum
12 I'm Not In Love
13 RH talk: In the Middle
14 Zodiac/Freedom
15 I Don't Need Nobody
16 Stranger In a Strange Land
17 Long Train Runnin'
Total time: 1:53:31
disc break goes after Track 09
Richie Havens - vocals, guitar & piano
Paul Williams - guitar
Darryle Johnson - guitar & vocals
Tony Broussard- bass & vocals
Sam Henry - keyboards & vocals
Herman Ernest - drums & percussion
320/48k audio streamed from Wolfgang's Vault
spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a preFM source
converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked, denoised and remastered by EN, January 2026
735 MB FLAC/direct link
735 MB FLAC/direct link
As an aside, this looks like it'll be the last of my little thefts from Wolfgang's Vault, as they've finally, after all these years and lawsuits, taken down the music streaming aspect of that site altogether.
The only reason I was able to do this one is that I had captured it almost a year ago, and didn't get to work on it until recently.
So maybe it was a good idea to gaffle as many classic shows off of there as I did, given that now we may never get to hear them any other way.
Be all that as it may, if that's the last of those from there we went out on the best of all possible notes, with almost two hours of prime proof of what made Richie Havens the towering figure -- and no-papers-carrying advocate of Freedom -- he'll always be. This, no matter what depredations the brainlessly imperial and brazenly pedophilic might impel upon us.--J.
1.21.1941 - 4.22.2013