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entertaining u newspaper: your monthly guide to entertainment
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by jon bosworth
jaxvillain@yahoo.com
“To all the young kids that think the future is in outer space, guess what – this is outer space. This crowd is as out there as any crowd.”
What was once the pool to the historic Hotel Alcazar was swimming with bald heads and long gray hair. Havens’ brand of flower power folk reeks of an optimistic era of old. The whole room reeked of that era. It was a mixture of patchouli, pot breath and wine. Although there was a strange sort of pretentiousness from the baby boomers that made up the bulk of the house, Havens’ haunting and hopeful love songs were cheery and welcoming.
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Richie Havens opened his set with a song he introduced as being written by a good friend. That song was ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Dylan apparently preferred Havens’ rendition of the song. Havens’ accompanying guitarist looked like actor Gary Oldman with a villainous waxed and curled mustache. He played ambient upstrokes and added a gentle electric backdrop to Havens’ unique strumming rhythms. Halfway through the set they were joined by a woman on cello, adding a bellowing symphonic touch that helped the sounds they were making saturate the room.
Like a swami with his dark bald head, long white beard and flowing sari, Havens seems to be a happy old hippie and his songs certainly spoke to his generation. The old hippies closed their eyes as he sang and rolled their necks, swaying as they clutched their designer purses wrapped in their colorful Patagonia sweaters. In their minds they were drifting to a time when all you needed to slip into that “outer space” that Havens spoke of was the sound of a gentle acoustic guitar, a sweet voice, and some far-out ideas like peace, love and poetry. When had they traded that in for designer purases?
In addition to his Woodstock-era devotees, he also pulled an impressive number of young hipsters. Havens told heartfelt stories about his Greenwich Village days as though we were one enormous family sitting around a fire in a backyard. The crowd was reverent – and that was fitting in this ancient room.
The timbre of Havens’ voice isn’t the pained voice of a bluesman, it is more akin to Curtis Mayfield, but void of the anger that punctuated Mayfield’s repertoire. And that is a striking difference. Havens’ songs seem to bubble up from some deep peaceful happiness.
Unless you purchased tickets to the seats on the first floor or were lucky enough to score a seat near the railing on the second floor, seeing Richie Havens wasn’t always possible at The Alcazar, but the cavernous space held the bellowing tones of his songs in like a deep breath. The feathery tinge of his voice chimed cheerily down every spine in earshot.
“The youngest fans request my oldest songs,” Havens said, explaining the interesting harmony between old and new at the Alcazar last Thursday.
In that wood and coquina building, one of the oldest structures in the oldest city, a legend of his time sang timeless songs to a room of music lovers from many different musical eras. Those that heard Havens back in his prime got to enjoy his songs sitting next to their children, many of which were hearing him for the first time. It was the cacophony of the vibrant energy of youth and the unspoken wisdom of age coming together in that gorgeous room that made the night a magical event, and by the end the pretentiousness has dissolved like smoke into the air and the designer purses were left to the cocuina floor as everyone came to their feet to applaud this one man that can still connect 2008 to the forty years that preceded it.
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