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From www.castlebar.ie Film, Video, Music, Theatre I was born the month before Woodstock. I guess that still makes me somewhat of the Woodstock generation, even though I sometime wonder if I was perhaps born maybe ten years or so too late. In any case, I’ve always been a fan of that great slice of the 60’s and everything that seemed good about a peace and love Americana that can be found in Woodstock: The Movie. To students of the movie, Richie Havens is a wonderful acoustic guitarist, who makes an appearance between Crosby Still and Nash (and the bad acid alert!) and Joan Baez, singing Handsome Johnny, along with his powerful unforgettable performance ‘Freedom’. Therefore, unashamedly, on this premise alone, I was enticed along to a wonderful little venue in county Galway to see the legendary Richie perform in person. Campbell’s of Cloughanover, or to give it its alternative trendy and tangible title “The Blue Moon Music Club”, is the epitome of the word intimate when it comes to live music venues. Willie Campbell inherited his family pub a mile outside Headford on the road to Galway and set out, in what some would regard as a crazy dream, to establish it as one of the West of Ireland’s premier live music locations. The brazenness and guts of Willie has resulted in a host of top acts from Dervish to Kila and from Georgie Fame to Richie Havens gracing the small, but significant, stage in the back room of the pub, where upcoming gigs are promoted by a website (http://www.campbellstavern.com/), e-mail shots and the usual postering and word of mouth. With this in mind it’s hardly surprising that most of the gigs in the circa 200 capacity venue are sellouts. And so, on a Friday night in March 2003, I trekked 45 miles from Castlebar, to a little village outside Headford, to grasp something of the essence of what happened in a village in upstate New York over thirty years ago. Richie isn’t all that changed in thirty years. A little older admittedly, a little less hair and a beard liberally peppered with grey. His presence however still retains that spell which he cast over 250,000 odd revellers in Matt Yasgur's farm and for all the world, with his trademark long shirt, he’s like a Black mystic guru. Not only does Richie play a mean acoustic guitar, he also interweaves his songs with comical little intros and reflections on life. Even kicking off, he posed a series of questions on where he’d come from and where he might be going and managed to even include some possible references to the music industry itself when he answered all the rhetoric with Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’. From there, from a man who is preserved in celluloid as one of the symbols of the 60’s, he went on instead to reflect on what it was like growing up in the 50’s and pondered that perhaps we may well have come full circle, from knowing very little then about anything, right back to the same point. He beautifully combined Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’ and George Harrison’s ‘Here comes the sun’ into a tribute to women and went on to talk about aliens and the inspiration they offer him, especially when his aliens turned out to be children. The interesting thing about Richie Haven’s is that he didn’t seem to sing all that many songs, yet all of them are monumental in their performance, so that they almost stretch into one long symphony interspaced with comical interludes of narrative (even his ongoing tune ups sound like part of the song!). We had more Dylan ‘All along the watchtower’ along with some of his own compositions and, towards the end, he gave us that, for which we all know him best, powering out ‘Freedom’ with all the force of the performance in Woodstock. For an encore he came back and gave a pure gospel acapella – no guitar, Just Richie Haven’s fine pure soulful voice. As he left the stage to his second standing ovation, the sweat stains that soaked the entire torso of his shirt had almost reached the hem below his knees – testament to the energy that he had poured into his near two hours before us. I may not have made Woodstock, but thirty years on I’m still searching for the elusive dream and tonight I grasped another fragment of it. © Copyright 2003 by www.castlebar.ie and the author |