R.I.P., Richie Havens

Richie Havens, who died of a sudden heart attack this morning at age 72, sounded like nobody else, and his Mixed Bag album in particular will always conjure up strong memories for me. “High Flyin’ Bird,” “I Can’t Make It Anymore,” “San Francisco Bay Blues,” Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” the Fugs’ “Morning Morning,” and a few others all got the inimitable Havens treatment on that album. Havens did some excellent work later on but those are the songs I’ll remember most, perhaps because they appeared at a certain time in my life. I’ll miss him.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.