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The not-a-biography of Richie Havens
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Sept. 13, 1999 |
His philosophy, which he goes into at some length, is what you might call "standard deviation." Smoking grass is OK, using heroin is not. The American police are generally a bad lot, and the police where he grew up in the slums of Brooklyn were awful, but the soldiers at Woodstock who brought in (and took out) the performers in their helicopters were wonderful. Southern Blacks have been mistreated over the years, War is Bad, and the War in Vietnam was Very Very Bad. Whales and porpoises are good, the environment needs to be protected and autistic kids know more than you think they do. And Havens has to be grateful for all the nice things that have happened to him - like making a living off music, making the records he wants to and meeting John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone, among others. "They Can't Hide Us Anymore" contains an extensive list of Havens' 23 records, his backup men and his 14 soundtracks, but it doesn't tell us beans about his soul. It gives us his Recommended Reading List, which includes Kahlil Gibran, Abbie Hoffman and Dwight D. Eisenhower's final take on the military-industrial complex --- but there isn't a single insight into his own personal complex so we can figure out what makes him tick.
His path has been exciting. After all, he came out of one of the most desperate slums in America, and was smack dab in the middle of the music and social revolution of the '60s. His story certainly could have been as powerful as that of Malcolm X, or James Baldwin or Richard Wright. Instead, what we get is, "My father was a hard worker who made Formica tables. He was a pretty good musician too, a piano player with a feel for jazz." That's it for dear old dad. Havens tells us his mother worked "until I was 19." We should know a bit more about her, too, right? And we find out about his wife and his daughters in the "Acknowledgments" section, but that's it. Does he do anything when he's with his family outside of reminiscing about all the famous people he's known, and all the deals he's signed? There are 14 pages given over to a discography, but there's only half a page for his two brothers who are disabled. He spends 25 pages to give us the words to his songs, but says practically nothing about these two who grew up poor, like him, but now live out their lives in wheelchairs. Oops. They do get one thing from their famous brother. They get patronized. "We need to open our minds," he intones, "and not be so quick to shut off opportunities for the so-called handicapped to socialize with the rest of us, without fear." Now what the hell does that mean? Maybe Havens just isn't a word person. He certainly is a mess when it comes to the lyric muse, if we are to judge by his songs: What good are all those documents? those well-kept worthless scrolls; It puts us in mind of Lolita's favorite song, as reported by Humbert Humbert: And the carmen, and the starmen, and the barmen, and the starmen, and the barmen, and the carmen ...
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