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A Conversation with Richie Havens (continued)
RH: So I did the song, and the album came out. It was another song that was a single. And the years go by. And I go to Europe, I walk into this discotheque, because the people who brought us over are taking us out. And the first thing I hear is "Going Back to My Roots."
PM: Wow.
RH: And I look up, and everybody's dancing their ass off. And I think, "Are you kidding me?" Now, at that point, I couldn't listen to myself. If somebody put on a record of me, I'd leave right in the middle of dinner. I wouldn't care. I mean, I don't listen to myself.
PM: Right.
RH: And so I kind of reacted, and just left.
[laughter]
RH: So, of course, they take us to another place, and damn if it wasn't playing again. Well, it turns out that everywhere I went that year in Europe, every place we went to that had dancing in it played that song.
PM: Wow.
RH: That song has been the number one discotheque song in Europe and Scandanavia for thirty years.
PM: Unbelievable.
RH: They're still playing it now. That's how mind boggling it is. They're still playing that same original song.
PM: The original cut.
RH: Yeah, yeah.
PM: Does that make a guy any dough, if it's a dance floor hit?
RH: In Europe, if they're playing any song anywhere they have to pay for the thing. So they do pay performance royalties for it. But interestingly enough, I didn't know that for 25 of those years.
[laughter]
RH: Nobody told me. What they do basically is, if you don't pick it up, their government just puts it in a pot for musicians.
PM: Is that what happened?
RH: Yeah, yeah. The first time I went to England, I actually had to re-record the entire album of Mixed Bag in order to get it played on the radio over there.
PM: Because?
RH: Because they had this thing between the unions of the countries called "needle time." That's what England called it, needle time. That meant there could only be a certain percentage of time given to foreign records.
PM: So you had to make it into a--
RH: A British record, you see.
PM: Wow.
RH: So they sent me into the studio with this British group who got paid by the radio station to re-record it.
PM: And how did the English Mixed Bag turn out?
RH: I wish I could get a copy of it, to tell you the honest truth.
PM: Really?
RH: I really wish I could get a copy of it, because we did the whole damn album. They listened to the original. These guys listened to it, and wrote out whatever charts they needed to write out, and played incredibly.
PM: And God knows, some of those session players may have turned out to be really famous dudes like Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page.
RH: Yeah, yeah. It's an amazing thing. It was really amazing. And I had to do that. And it lasted for at least two and a half years, because they kept playing that record over there. Mixed Bag was a pretty big record over there in that sense. So just being on the radio for that long over there was a big accomplishment.
PM: On Wishing Well there's a great cover of Gary Wright's hit, "Love is Alive."
RH: Oh, man. Now, I think that that song was probably one of the most--one of the greatest songs ever produced.
PM: But even as such, I'd never really given the song a second thought.
RH: I understand. I understand. See, this is what I mean by what I hear.
PM: Yeah.
RH: What they're singing to me. Being a lyric-first guy, I would imagine that would be a reason. But I get a lot of people who come up to me and say, "That song you sang, that third song, what was that?" And I'd tell them, and they'd say, "No. I have that record. It couldn't have been that song."
[laughter]
RH: Or they'll say, "That's a Bob Dylan song? I got that Bob Dylan record. What album is it on? I got that. I never heard that song." It's weird. In other words, it's like I'd rather buy the demo.
PM: Yeah, right.
RH: You know what I mean? Because that's what it is. When it gets beyond that, it becomes--
PM: A product.
RH: Yeah, a product. And it's glossy, in that sense. They're just--some of the dynamics are gone. A lot of the dynamics are gone of what the original sense was. But if they really got in there and got the chance to do the song the way they felt it should be done, and got it out there, then I could hear behind that.
PM: Yeah.
RH: And I could feel behind that. And I basically feel that I sing the intent of the writer.
PM: I certainly heard it on "Love is Alive." I suddenly realized what a great song it was.
RH: It is, isn't it? But it took me a long time to get to record it, because it had to actually fit in my concept of what the whole album was about. That's the way I collect them. The title of the album I already know. Usually it's not a song title. 99% of the time, it's not a song title, it's the title of the concept. And then all of the songs fit under that umbrella. So I finally got the chance to do it after all these years. [laughs] I finally got a concept and I went, "It fits in here." It's amazing. There's so many songs like that that I really love, and I won't do them until I find their partners, because in a context, that helps to bring it out for what it is.
PM: It's funny how a song being a hit can disguise what a good song it is.
RH: Exactly.
PM: I remember one time driving my car, and I heard that Foreigner song, "I Wanna Know What Love Is."
RH: Oh, yeah.
PM: And I pulled over, and I was torn up. And I laughed to myself "Oh, come on, tell me you're falling apart to a Foreigner song." But I'd heard it correctly for the first time, what a great song it was.
RH: Uh-huh, that's right. It's in there. These guys are really trying to do it the way it's supposed to be done, especially because it's their own band, it's their own senses. When you get a good band, then you've got something that's unique. Yeah, it's unique because basically you've got five guys who found each other. And they each have the correct part to add to what becomes the band that we like the most. And there's something very, very biological about it. They gravitated to each other for some reason.
PM: Yeah, and have gone through some shit to get there.
RH: Yeah, and had to fight for what they wanted to actually have come out. continue
