POP MUSIC REVIEW : Havens Arrives With ‘60s Voice, View

If you’ve lost track of Richie Havens since Woodstock, you can’t have been paying attention. Fact is, he currently is being heard as much as at anytime during his career: His voice is echoing through television ads on behalf of Amtrak (“there’s something about a train . . . “) and various corporate entities.

If it seems like a cop-out for one of the counterculture’s most socially conscious voices to be laboring for the Establishment now, Havens’ visit to the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Sunday demonstrated that his musical direction--like his voice--has changed little in 20-plus years. Still intimate as an old friend, he has lost none of his enthusiasm for his signature material--”Freedom,” “High Flyin’ Bird”--even as he adopts pop material to his hard-strumming style.

Opening solo, Havens said he was in the middle of the “Far-Out Tour,” as he called it, “that began in 1967.” Prefacing many of the selections with anecdotes or bits of common-sense political wisdom delivered in the hypnotically resonant tones of a good storyteller, he drew the audience in with almost-whispered phrases, and lines he repeated for emphasis.

His tales involving such farcical happenings as a face-making session in front of Richard Nixon, and a fellow folk musician who could detect record company people in the dark. He recalled the ‘50s as a special time when “everyone on the whole planet was dumb,” and at various points (possibly in reference to his current corporate ties?), he warned the younger members of the audience: “Don’t let them get you like they got us.”

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But he made his strongest statements in song. His format remains the same as ever--a long, chordal guitar introduction often interlaced with bouts of tuning, his voice entering on an easy glide, the rich, gravel-pocked tones still poignant and seductive. He seemed to float the lyric over his rhythmic strumming, at times letting the words come as far behind the beat as one could dare--a practice that had the effect of suspending the rhythms, while putting extra weight on his every word.

“Here Comes the Sun,” his most successful single, was the evening’s most delicate presentation; “What About Me,” Dino Valenti’s cry for a personal environmental accounting, came across in sometimes mournful, sometimes demanding tones. Havens gave Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” a simple ballad treatment, allowing its melody to speak for itself.

Havens always has had a talent for combining songs to complement or contrast their lyrics (his matching of “Freedom” and “Motherless Child” represented the counterculture’s political alienation better than any other song of its day). Sunday, bringing together Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” and Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” he illustrated the angel/seductress duality attached by our culture to women and made for the evening’s most moving moments.

Later in the show, he added a second guitarist and a keyboard player for depth, but they hardly were necessary: Havens’ thick, percussive guitar work was all the accompaniment that his voice needed.

By the time he closed with “Freedom/Motherless Child” (which Havens first put together on the Woodstock stage as he killed time waiting for the other groups to show), it was apparent that, at 51, McDonald’s jingles or not, he hasn’t lost any of his old passion. He closed the number with a Pete Townshend-style leap, then offered the young listeners a final tip (“remember, income tax is voluntary,” he said with a wink) before doing a reserved encore, “You Are So Beautiful.”

For Richie Havens, the revolution continues.