He describes a similar situation with “The Great Mandala.” “I’d been trying to get that song from Peter Yarrow for like 20 years… it’s a song that’s always haunted me. It has an almost Brecht kind of thing to it—very staunch and very on the one. The lyrics just kill me… the amount of dictatorship on the planet and what’s happening to it and how it’s falling by the wayside at this point. That’s what I see. All of the things we were not told, we’ll find out within this year, no doubt about it.”

He wrote and recorded the title song live years ago, but saved the studio recording of it until now. “What if they gave an election and nobody came? What would we be doing? There’s nobody left to crown but us, for all of the things we’ve been through because of politics… for example, we learned this year that every law that was passed was passed in the middle of the night and no one knew it.”

For all of his political awareness, Havens has never been one to exercise his right to vote—until now. He went to the polls for the first time for the 2008 presidential primaries. “I found that it was now necessary to do that.”

Soon after the Woodstock experience, people all over the world started to request he play his own creation, “Freedom.” “And I’d say, ‘Freedom? Which freedom?’ And they’d say, ‘You know, “Motherless Child.”’ Holy smokes! Then it turns out to be in the movie and this is a big time change for me.” Havens had never seen himself perform until the Woodstock film came out months later. “It scared me to death, it was just so large. It wasn’t me, you know. It was a song. I became a mechanism to get that song out.”

The Woodstock Festival and the Isle of Wight shortly thereafter introduced Richie Havens to audiences on a massive scale as a dynamic acoustic performer and ambassador of socially conscious song and thought. He never tires of his responsibility as a ’60s generational spokesperson, though he’s an even bigger supporter of youth and the environment; in 1990, he helped to found the Natural Guard in New Haven, Connecticut, an organization where kids began to “guard the natural” in their own surroundings. From a community garden that fed the homeless to a lead poisoning awareness campaign, kids spotted the problems and created solutions that had a lasting impact on their community as well as their own lives. “It really was based on children using their own community as the endangered environment. The most put-upon group is children.” Children from three different chapters were recognized by then-Senator Al Gore for their environmental justice efforts.

If Havens has learned anything through his years of becoming, it’s that his work here isn’t yet done. “Don’t expect everything that happens to finish itself at once. It’s still happening, and it’ll reveal itself to you.” As he travels (he works three nights a week, down from his Village-era six), he finds that the local talent who open his shows seek his counsel on how to proceed with their careers. Advocating the digital DIY approach, he tells them, “Make your record, get someone to help you put it out, and go to the world directly. Get your feedback from the whole planet. That’s where you connect.”

Of course, that’s easy to say if you’re Richie Havens, the boy who told his grandmother he intended to meet everyone in the world some day and a man who believes music can change the world. But can it, really? “Absolutely,” he says. “And it will soon.”

Watch: Ri
chie Havens at Woodstock [at youtube.com]

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