By Alex Biese
Metromix
May 12, 2009

"Pick up my guitar and I'll play, just like yesterday, then I'll get on my knees and pray, we won't get fooled again." Those incendiary words, written decades ago by Pete Townshend, were powerfully raised back to life by legendary performer Richie Havens on his cover of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again," which was recorded for his 2008 album "Nobody Left to Crown."

"You know, I've had that song in what I call my ‘cigar box' for many years," Havens recently said. "I've always loved it, and so I've always kept it in the forefront of what I'm (thinking is) necessary to make an album."

Havens, who has been releasing albums at a steady pace for over 40 years and was the first performer at the historic 1969 Woodstock Festival, reached a career milestone with "Nobody Left to Crown," which marks his 30th album, and he's showing so signs of slowing down.

"I'm sort of booked until the middle of 2010," he said with a laugh.

Havens, who will be performing on Saturday, May 16 at the Algonquin Arts Theater in Manasquan, recently spoke with Metromix Jersey Shore about his new album and his thoughts on Woodstock 40 years later.

With this album, was there a particular message or statement that you wanted to deliver?
Well, I think each song delivers what it has to offer. ... I try to get the real feelings there to be separate from each other, songs to be separate from each other and to address very pointed things and it's always been that way. I sort of have songs that I write, I accumulate them through the year, and I have songs that friends of mine give me to listen to, most of which are very good songs and change me.

The education that I first got from the folksingers that were down in Greenwich Village was that this is good information, and that's what we sell down there. They said, "We get on the stage, we talk about something that's happening" basically, and I think I sort of just kept that going because it happened to me, so I know that it works, in a lot of different ways.

On this album, you worked with Derek Trucks for "Lives in the Balance." How did that collaboration come together?
You know, it's interesting, because I have a video tape of Derek when he was 11 years old (laughs), so I've been watching that guy a long time, through his own music and his own feelings. I'm very happy that I could even get to work with him, which was great.

And can you tell me a bit about the significance of that particular song for you, the Jackson Browne one ("Lives in the Balance")?
Well again, there's a lot of information in that one (laughs). And, it doesn't seem to wane. There's always something we have to deal with and it's mostly the lives of people, the safety of people, the education of people to be as good of a citizen as they can possibly be, and that song is another one that I've recorded earlier and it bounces back right into this genre of information and the last album.

Jumping back a bit, this summer is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, and so if you don't mind I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about that.
Not at all.

Do you remember when you were first approached to play the festival?
Yeah, it was late July, around that time, the year before it happened in ‘69, so in '68 ... and I think when it gets to the Woodstock thing, it had been reported, and the press doesn't know this, but actually coming at it in a negative way actually produced more of it than the opposite, to make it go away, and that was the atmosphere we had to work in to just get a festival like that to just come together.

They thought they were going to get 70,000 people and be the biggest thing around. Well, it was 800,000 people over the weekend that felt that they too owned a part of these good feelings and good understandings and good people meeting other good people and families.

A lot of people don't know it, but about 20 percent of the people they had were grandparents and 20 percent were under 14 years and everything in between was the whole story. We had the college kids, the teenagers that got away from home and made it there, but I always say that the whole thing is if in fact they went ahead to go and try to get to something like that is (because) they felt something of themselves in it, and what we were really working on and talking about was really as tangible as it could get.

When you were there, when did the importance or the magnitude of the event first hit you?
Well you know, expecting 70,000 was really something, we were all wondering if it was going to work to get that many people in there. And so, when they started camping on the land, it was within three months and two weeks, people coming there and actually planting their tents, not exactly in the field until it got closer to the day of the opening of the festival, but there was a camp until the people came. Some went into the forest where the crafts were, the craftsmen, somewhat like a renaissance thing that they do, where everybody dresses up.

Oh, the renaissance fairs?
That was as close to the whole history book (laughs), just in the feeling of it. And so, there was 150,000, 160,000 people in the woods that never even saw the field -- the music could be heard for six miles. So, that's right back to where we started, which is why did it start so late? Well, we didn't have transportation to get there. And when we did, more trivia, if it wasn't for the press or the American armed forces that shipped over the equipment with the bands, if they weren't there, there wouldn't have been a Woodstock. That's very ironic, isn't it?

Now, have you had a chance to check out any of the newer festivals, like Bonnaroo?
Oh yeah, through the years I've been fortunate enough to play at every genre's festivals, which was really interesting for me, because I sing what I feel like singing and what I am made to sing, because it's really important and it just pops out to be heard.

And as you look at these new festivals, what do you feel the lasting impact of Woodstock was, and what message do you think it send?
I think it says that we've come a long way, and I think they probably don't try to get a capacity place to put them -- it's going to be three times as many people, and then we're liable to have a festival on the same three days in the whole country, which is totally possible, because I meet enough guys in the airport that go, "My mother wouldn't let me go." (laughs) Funny, it really is.

So Richie, what's next for you? Do you have another album in the works?
I'm working on it. I've collected a couple of songs of my own so far, and when that happens it's on its way. And I've got a nice cigar box to draw from when a title goes through my mind.