BY STEVEN ROSEN

Richie Havens at 67 has evolved into the Perfect Master of the Woodstock Generation. Balding with a long gray and white beard, wearing an immaculately crisp pinstripe tunic, holding his ring-laden hands in prayer as he bows to his adoring audience, he seems closer in appeal to a Sri Chinmoy or even Dalai Lama than other veteran folksingers. His presence exudes wisdom.

And his performance has that same kind of spiritual intensity and immediacy. Seated at a stool, furiously strumming an open-tuned acoustic guitar and choosing chording that often highlights a song's inherent melancholy, he repeats words or phrases in his plaintive baritone voice with eyes closed.

In the show last Sunday in Covington, Ky., he could do an old blues number - "Motherless Child," which he famously recast as "Freedom" at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Sometimes he'd do a 1970s pop-rock hit, like Gary Wright's "Love Is Alive."

But the effect was the same. They both sounded like mantras; he's like a seer. As a result, Havens is making his transition to old age not as a nostalgia act, but as someone who seems to have been waiting for it so his musical impact can fully blossom.

With the impact he has on audiences, Havens probably doesn't need new material. Yet on his latest tour, which took him to the crowded, 460-seat Carnegie Theater here just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, he's introducing some of the strong songs (his own compositions as well as covers) from Nobody Left to Crown,  his first album of new recordings in four years. It is also his return to Verve Forecast, the label he started with in 1967.

Havens didn't let the audience know, however, what was new or not - he just plays. He really ought to offer more in the way of introduction, since the new material is striking, explaining his sadness and dismay about the world's - and this nation's - ongoing thirst for war and murder. His own "Say It Isn't So," which has the quality of a drifting-blues lament, ended with his remorseful repetition of "I can't believe it."

"One More Day," which Trevor Horn and others wrote for Sinead O'Connor to sing in the film "Veronica Guerin," about a murdered journalist, was both mournful and consoling. And he wove the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" from his new album into an angry push-and-pull medley with Dylan's "Maggie's Farm." Jackson Browne's "Lives in the Balance," which is on the new album but also has been previously recorded by Havens, was set up with evocatively urgent flamenco-guitar flourishes

On "Fooled Again," Havens' accompanists - steel-body guitar player Walter Parks and cellist Stephanie Winters - neatly, eerily recreated the sound of "Fooled"'s synthesizer part on The Who's version. Their playing in general informed and anchored Havens' songs.

If Havens conveys a "holy man" presence when he sings, he's somewhat of a goofball when he talks. Several long, strange monologues - one about Pluto being declassified as a planet, the other about how Superman connects the human race- seemed strained to get to a point.

Because of the way he starts so many songs with mid-tempo, downbeat chording and playing, I imagined from the intro that the encore was going to emerge as Fred Neil's "The Dolphins," a perfect song for Havens' current mood. (He has recorded it previously.) I was disappointed when it turned into "You Are So Beautiful," the 1970s hit for Joe Cocker.

But with Parks and Winters tastefully supporting him, he did strip it of its schmaltz. And when he merged it with Sam Cooke's "You Send Me," recalling his own early days as a Brooklyn street-corner singer, the encore turned inspired.

As is Havens, at this point in his long and rewarding career.

[Photo Credit: Jean-Marc Lubrano]