I have a few thousand songs on my iPod, which play as I fall asleep at night. I will sometimes waken to a song that I must climb from my bed to identify, but in the weeks before the publication of this column, I often woke to more familiar offerings from Richie Havens. One daylight time, I casually watched a movie that had in its soundtrack a song with the lyrics, “I saw you.” I had only heard that song sung by Richie Havens, and was reminded of 1969 and that one time on Max Yasgur’s farm.
In August 1969, I was a newlywed and a psychiatric attendant at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. The hospital was a teaching institution for the University of Pittsburgh, but none of the patients there were rolling on training wheels. I had been working at the hospital since I was 19, and had some experience in dealing with the occasional outbreak of low-level chaos. I worked from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., on a floor that was staffed by two attendants and an RN. One Wednesday night, after having made rounds to check on the sleeping patients, one of my coworkers made a passing comment about the previous weekend.
“I was at Woodstock,” the man said. This statement astounded all who heard it, for we agreed that the speaker was a dry and humorless man. The legend of Woodstock was newly minted, but some of the shenanigans of the weekend had leaked into the news. This man was an unlikely candidate for music and mud wallowing, and certainly not the consumption of herbs and hallucinogens.
In the 1980s, I was an art director in the advertising department at L.S. Ayres. I traveled to New York for product and fashion photo shoots and it was there that I met a photographer who had worked with Richie Havens. I am still in touch with this man through social media, and when Havens died in 2013, he posted some of the images he had taken of the singer. In 1969, Richie Havens was unknown to me.
The year 1969 was pivotal for the United States and for me. The Beatles released the album “Revolver,” and a single, “Yellow Submarine”; Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president; Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded an album (never released); James Earl Ray pled guilty to the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Neil Armstrong put the first foot on the moon; Hurricane Camille swept 255 people off the Gulf Coast and Arlo Guthrie released “Alice’s Restaurant.” In a footnote, I got married and began my career in advertising with Gimbel’s department store. But the most abiding memories of the year ‚ for music fans — were those “Three Days of Peace and Music” at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York.
In 1969 I was rolling out the beta version of the life I had imagined; I don’t think that I might have lived the year differently had I known of Richie Havens or heard of that music festival in upstate New York. But the year was more than the music, as evidenced by the performance of anti-war (in Vietnam) songs by some of the performers.
I don’t know how many songs I have by Richie Havens, but each of them plays a greater role than musical delivery. They remind me of the days when I teetered on the edge of wonder, and dove into the possibilities of joy.
August 15th, 2014 was the 45th anniversary of that great romp on 600 acres of a dairy farmer’s land and Richie Havens’ delivery of “Freedom.”