It’s the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this week, which has been the perfect excuse for another wave of Woodstock retrospectives, rehashes, and other cash-in opportunities that I am sure none of the half-million people who trashed Max Yasgur’s farm ever would have believed at the time. After all, it was about peace and love, man, not selling out. It took the hippies about 10-12 years after Woodstock to give up peace and love and discover the joys of greed and materialism. Aaaaaannyway, now the Grooviest Generation are all graybeards, and about half of them have turned into those scary wack-job Birther/Death Panel/Teabagger people who keep turning up at the Democrats’ “town hall” events. Yet, there’s still a sizable segment who remain true to the idealism that fueled their youth, and quite a large subset of that group who live right here in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area. Indeed, many of them never left, having simply left their dorms at MIT and Harvard and moved into other neighborhoods of Cambridge et environs.
On Wednesday evening, Bridget and I found ourselves in the midst of a small gathering of said graybeards and their old ladies (who are now indeed old ladies) at the Regent Theatre in Arlington to watch a performance by one of the best-remembered legends of Woodstock, Richie Havens (note: that link automatically launches streaming audio, so turn down your speaker volume if necessary).
If you aren’t familiar with Havens’ performance, here is the scene from the Woodstock documentary where he opened the show and electrified the crowd with what has become his trademark song “Freedom”:
Havens never really evolved into a huge star, but he definitely developed a loyal following and a steady career. Like a lot of folk artists from the 1960s, a lot of his early music was political, but he’s also become well-known as a cover artist, performing his own versions of songs by people like Bob Dylan and the Beatles. His instantly-recognizable raspy voice and powerful guitar strumming make his music powerful and intense. He has even found his way into singing commercial jingles — his voice sang the original “The Fabric of Our Lives” theme for cotton products, and a Maxwell House coffee commercial in the 1980s.
The Regent Theatre is a venue that offers an eclectic calendar of performers and events, which, over the last few years has turned out to be one of our personal favorite sources for live entertainment. We’ve seen everything from a sing-along showing of “The Wizard of Oz” to vaudville-style jugglers to a local kodo drumming group at the Regent. I’m on their e-mail list, so I got word of the concert about a month ago and ordered tickets the same day. It’s a small house — only about 500 seats — and I felt sure that a well-known performer like Richie Havens would sell out the house quickly.
I wasn’t wrong. There were almost no empty seats in the house. As we were walking from our car to the theater, there was a man standing outside the nearby Starbucks who was trying to unload a pair of extra tickets he had, and, though it took him a while, he did find takers. My early purchase snagged us seats in the sixth row, and Bridget, who sat in the aisle seat, had a perfect unobstructed view of the stage. Because the house is so small, there really aren’t any bad seats, but some seats are indeed more equal than others, if you know what I mean.
Bridget and I weren’t the only people in the audience under 60, but suffice it to say the crowd looked more like a chapter meeting of the local AARP than the half-naked, mud-drenched hippie throng of 1969. Old guys with tie-dye t-shirts, Docker shorts, Birkenstocks (with white socks), and long gray ponytails were being interviewed by a young TV reporter from NECN to see if they had actually been at Woodstock. For the first time in a while (probably since we went to see Arlo Guthrie at Club Passim a couple of years ago), I felt decidedly less geezerish than I do most days.
I wish I could tell you that the show itself blew me away, but I can’t. Havens and the guitar player who accompanied him spent an enormous amount of their time of stage tuning their guitars before and after each song and sometimes even during the songs. That ate up a lot of the 90 minutes they spent on stage, as did his storytelling. I suppose it’s a combination of age and all those amazing drugs they had in the 1960s, but Havens is somewhat less than coherent when he talks. His opening tale about how he met Bob Dylan for the first time in Greenwich Village went off pretty well, but everything after that was pretty much rambling, half-finished sentences and long pauses. Again, the overall impact was in how much time it stole away from the music, and at times I felt like shouting “shut up and play!”.
When they did get around to the music, it was exactly what I hoped for. A clever combination of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” was the best number. He probably only sang eight or ten in the whole show, closing with “Freedom”; his voice is not as powerful as it was 40 years ago, but he sang it with just as much passion and intensity as he did on that festival stage. I’m sure that it helped at least some of those elders in the audience close their eyes and flashback to the heady days of the Summer of ’69 (before it was a Bryan Adams song). For me, the whole Woodstock 40th anniversary thing is a bit sad in the sense of all of the opportunities missed by the generation that swore it would change the world for the better, only to sell out for the worse.
In the final analysis, Bridget and I agreed that we were very glad to have seen Richie Havens play, despite the shortcomings. I don’t know that I’d make an effort to see him perform live again; as with a few other musical acts we’ve seen over the years, sometimes it’s better to be satisfied with the controlled elements of recordings than the variability of live performance. In fact, I’ll probably go and create a Richie Havens “channel” on Pandora and listen to it over my Sunday morning coffee.
