Friday to
Saturday,
August 15–16
Richie Havens
5–5:45 PM
The festival began in chaos—a crush
of scruffy youth, vehicular caravans
jamming the roads, the stage still
unfi nished, equipment not yet up and
running. Organizers ferried perform-
ers to the performance space via a single
helicopter, and many arrived late—fi rst
and foremost the Los Angeles rock band
Sweetwater, which was scheduled to
open the event. Organizer Michael
Lang hastily asked singer Tim Hardin
to step into the breach, but Hardin took
a pass and the task fell to another folk
singer, 28-year-old Richie Havens—
who was fifth on the schedule and
still missing his bassist, who’d yet to
arrive. One of few African American
exponents of the genre, the Brooklyn-
born Havens had risen to some promi-
nence in the clubs and cafés of early ’60s
Greenwich Village. He was a distinctive,
singular performer, with an earthily
husky voice and an intensely rhythmic
guitar style. Garbed in an orange striped
dashiki, Havens took the stage shortly
after five p.m., along with bandmates
Daniel Ben Zebulon on drums and Paul“Deano” Williams on guitar.
It proved to be a star-making set,
an eclectic fusion of folk, blues, and
rock including “From the Prison,”
“Get Together,” “I’m a Stranger Here,”
“High Flying Bird,” and “I Can’t Make
It Anymore.” Havens also covered
the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from
My Friends,” and sang “Handsome
Johnny,” which he had co-written with
actor Louis Gossett Jr.
The crowd, as they say, went wild.
“After a half hour, I said goodbye and
tried to get off but they gestured for me
to keep going,” Havens recalled years
later. He obliged with a medley of the
Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields” and “Hey
Jude.” He tried again to exit, but still the