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A Conversation with Richie Havens (continued)
PM: It's almost as if just because what happened in the late 60s didn't change the world for good, that it didn't change the world. Hey, it changed the world at that time--
RH: Oh, it changed the world for good. Interestingly enough, when the kids start talking about certain things, especially like Woodstock, they go, "Wow, that was the biggest concert in the country, huh, back then." Well, it was that. But I have to tell you that maybe 9% of the people who went on that stage were known by the audience.
PM: Really?
RH: Oh, yeah. The rest of them, including the musicians--I mean, most all of the West Coast musicians who played on that thing had come to the East Coast for the first time.
PM: No kidding.
RH: Even we'd never seen those people.
PM: Oh, I didn't know that.
RH: Oh, yeah. I mean, we'd never seen Santana. We'd never seen Sly and the Family Stone.
PM: Wow.
RH: We'd never seen the Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin and Big Brother, and Country Joe and the Fish. We'd never seen any of them.
PM: Oh, my God.
RH: And when you think about, it was Crosby, Stills & Nash's first gig that they ever did.
PM: That puts it all in such a different light.
RH: You know what I'm saying. So there's a lot more going on than the size of the audience. And then you talk about what they were singing about. And that's what they all came freely to be able to do. They sang what they believed in, and everybody got it. The audience didn't expect to see people they'd never seen before that blew their minds, and things like that. It was amazing, truly amazing.
PM: And how unique to be one of the people to really do one of the most amazing things at that festival.
RH: Yeah. It was worthwhile, I'll tell you that. It definitely was the change of the world, because a couple of months later they had the Isle of Wight in England, and it was their Woodstock. There were 600,000 people there.
PM: Wow. Is that more than Woodstock? That's more, I think.
RH: No, no, it wasn't, because Woodstock was actually 850,000 people.
PM: Yo.
RH: The first day, when it was 520, they said it was a quarter of a million in the newspaper, so they cut it in half.
PM: Wow.
RH: By the third day, 800,000 people showed up at that place. And I would say a whole third of them never even saw the stage. They were in the woods at the arts and crafts festival--
[laughter]
RH: --where they got stuff and had to leave their cars and the whole bit. And then I say to the kids that we did things wrong about Vietnam and all of this stuff that we didn't like. It wasn't Vietnam we didn't like, it was war, period.
PM: Right.
RH: And we were not, as we were portrayed, against the soldiers. We were against the government that sent them there for their own reasons.
PM: No different than what the Dixie Chicks said recently--
RH: That's right, exactly right. And they were right. And Natalie Maines stuck to her guns there: "Did I mean it, or do I feel that way? Yes, I do."
PM: Yeah.
RH: "Maybe I said it a little wrong, but know what? I still say it." That's what it's about. Then I say to them, "You may not know this, but if it wasn't for the United States Army, there wouldn't have been a Woodstock."
PM: How so?
RH: Because the Army brought Hueys to fly the bands back and forth.
PM: Wow.
RH: The performers couldn't get to the stage from where they had us meet, seven miles away.
PM: Another insider perspective.
RH: They couldn't get us there. The only reason I went over first was because they found a farmer down the road with a bubble helicopter.
PM: Crazy.
RH: And we packed two conga drums and three people and the driver in this bubble, and they took us over to the stage.
PM: And you were off to make history, and had no idea.
RH: Yeah, had no idea. I wasn't supposed to be first. I was supposed to be fifth. I ran for an hour with them chasing me, "Please go on." "What, are you nuts?"
PM: "Go on first? No!"
RH: Yeah, yeah. I said, "You've got to be out of your mind. Your concert is six hours late, and you want them to kill me? No, they're not going to kill me."
[laughter]
RH: "I'm not going to go up there and get stuff thrown at me..." [laughs] They chased me for an hour, for real.
PM: Damn.
RH: I hid.
[laughter]
RH: And then they finally said, "Would you please...nothing's going to happen." I said, "Listen, if something comes up on the stage, you owe me, Michael. You owe me, okay? You're going to have to pay my doctor bills and..."
[laughter] continue
