“Finally I had the song.
“So I took the three crumpled-up pieces of paper back to the Broadway Central and spent eight hours a day for three days learning the thirteen verses and working out my own arrangement.
“… I got to sing at what I would call my first ‘legitimate’ coffeehouse where people like Odetta and Pete Seeger got to play … The audience responded wildly with almost deafening applause. A few minutes later, standing in the dark behind the audience, a young man stepped up in front of me with tears coming down his face. He was moved.
“‘Oh, man,’ he said, choking on his emotion, ‘that … that … that was my favorite version of that song.’ I could barely say thank you before I had to get away from him too. I wasn’t used to this kind of reaction. ‘Way too heavy for me,’ I whispered under my breath, heading for the dressing room, which was downstairs.
“Dave Van Ronk was blocking my way, waiting for me.
“‘Hey, man, do you know who that was who came over to you just now?’
“I didn’t have a clue. ‘No, I don’t,’ I answered.
“‘He wrote the song you just sang,’ he said.
“‘No, he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Gene Michaels wrote that song.’ I was so sure.
“‘The hell he did! The guy you just met wrote that song,’ Van Ronk said firmly. And he was right; he was right.
“Hell of a way to meet Bob Dylan!
“For a whole month, I’d been telling everybody that somebody else wrote his song and then on my first night in a real coffeehouse, I get the chance to tell Dylan himself that somebody else wrote ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.’” (New York, 1963)
From “They Can’t Hide Us Anymore,” by Richie Havens with Steve Davidowitz
Havens, Richie, and Steven Davidowitz. They Can’t Hide Us Anymore. New York: Spike, 1999, 0380977184
http://www.worldcat.org/…/they-cant-hide…/oclc/41039921
As collated in the article ‘My first time with Dylan’.
‘Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Cher, Allen Ginsberg, Jimmy Buffett, Andy Warhol and others on their initial meetings with Bob Dylan.’
Compiled by Dana Cook for Salon (October 6, 2004).
http://www.salon.com/2004/10/06/dylan_6/
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From bobdylanroots.com:
http://www.bobdylanroots.com/havens.html
RICHIE HAVENS:
‘I remember going into Folk City and walking through the people peering over the partition at the performer on stage. It was Johnny Herald playing away — lots of fiddles and guitars. I usually didn’t linger too long in the bar area, so I went down the stairs to the basement where we shared a common closet.
‘I took my guitar out of the large bathtowel it lived in for protection and began tuning it. Casey Anderson stood outside in the cellar singing “Lily of the West” and Tex Konig stood looming in the wings with his guitar dwarfed by his gentle giant size. I was on next and had to pass through the horde of folksingers and up the stairs to the dark corner to wait my turn.
‘This was only the second time I played the room and it was really exciting for me because I was actually being heard by people who liked my music… well, not really my music, because it was a Bob Dylan song I was singing when I hit the stage. I didn’t even know it at the time — all I knew was that it was a great song and it truly expressed what I personally felt when I heard it (and I only sang songs that moved me personally).
‘And after singing a song that I learned from a friend (Gene Michaels) called “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, I remembered sitting in the living room of the dorm-like hotel suite he and I shared with a group of nuts from the midwest (who were called the Tanners — a folk trio that turned me on to M. C. Escher, who turned me on…).
‘Well, there I was in the living room trying to learn this new song, “A Hard Rain”. It took me three days — the hardest song I ever learned. Images, lots of them, of a truth so subliminally obvious that you had to live the song to sing the song (as with all Dylan songs). So, when I finished the song and headed downstairs to the crowded telephone booth-sized dressing room, a guy stopped me on the stairs to tell me it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung. I said, “Thanks”, and continued on down.
‘Tex, or someone down there, asked me if I knew that the guy talking to me on the stairs was BOB DYLAN, who wrote the song? Now it all came clear! I’d been singing the song for two years thinking that Gene Michaels wrote it! And, that’s how I first met Bob Dylan, in 1963.’
RICHIE HAVENS, liner notes for “Richie Havens Sings Beatles and Dylan,” RYKO RCD 20035, © 1986 Richie Havens.
Hear the complete album here:
http://grooveshark.com/…
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Photograph credit:
Richie Havens , Bob Dylan LA 1986, by David McGough
http://davidmcgough.com/photos.php?photo=2749…
A collection of some more photographs (mostly uncaptioned) of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens together, as well of some videos of Richie covering some more Dylan songs, can be seen at the following blog:
http://bob-no-news.blogspot.ca/…/richie-havens-1941…
