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| These shows sounded like a blast... |
The Hit
I’d heard “The City of New Orleans” before last week - but, of course, everyone has - only I never knew it was Arlo Guthrie singing it. As it happens, he did and he didn’t (then again, so did Bob Denver (hold that thought), The Highwaymen, Judy Collins, and Willie Nelson solo).
A young folk singer Guthrie knew named Steve Goodman actually wrote it. Goodman was a friend of Guthrie’s - and, as he noted in Part 2 of an interview* with American Songwriter, one he esteemed highly - a good guitar player and “an awesome picker” to boot. (* here are links to Part 1 and Part 3 of that interview; again, you’ll learn more about Arlo Guthrie by reading those three than you will be reading this, different missions, etc.). By 1972 and given his birth-right, Guthrie had name recognition while Goodman did not, so Guthrie decided to put that to work to boost Goodman. After gushing a little more about Goodman’s character and personality, Guthrie recalls:
“That’s what made me take his demo, and put it on my piano with a lead sheet, and work through it, and it was because I loved Goodman himself.”
The happy, wistful ode to rail travel (highly recommended, btw) in which professional/family histories of rail-workers mingle with the strange, sudden friendliness that just sort of happens when you take the same, ponderous ride with a bunch of people. The time ticks away at a clip that matches coming into and leaving a rail station, steady, patient, and feeling like it’ll never stop, while warm and cozy vocals and instruments beam over it; I caught the trebles in the chorus only later in the week and they’re just gorgeous.
It wasn’t a massive hit for Guthrie - No. 4 on Billboard’s Easy Listening charts, No. 18 on the big Billboard - but it was the only one he ever recorded. And Wikipedia’s history of the song tells a colder version of how it came to Guthrie:
“While at the Quiet Knight bar in Chicago, Goodman saw Arlo Guthrie, and asked to be allowed to play a song for him. Guthrie grudgingly agreed, on the condition that if Goodman bought him a beer, Guthrie would listen to him play for as long as it took to drink the beer.”
Maybe Goodman and Guthrie grew close later. Despite Goodman’s early demise (1984, age 36; leukemia), they had a dozen years to get to know one another.
The Rest of the Story
Arlo Guthrie came from and played with folk royalty, of course. He was born in 1947 to folk legend, Woody Guthrie, and a dancer named Marjorie Matzia Guthrie. The Guthries raised their kids in the Coney Island neighborhood, but relocated to Massachusetts somewhere in there. Huntington’s Disease stalked the family - the disease claimed Woody, plus two of Arlo’s older sisters (leaving him as the oldest) - but most of the big family reached late adulthood and nearly all of them continued in music. In fact, Arlo’s sister, Nora, committed herself to plumbing through all pads and papers Woody scribbled on throughout his life with an eye to unearthing the hundreds of songs and parts of songs he started or wrote. (Part 3 of the American Songwriter series gives good details on this.)
Though he recently retired, Arlo spent his entire life in music - and that presents a wee departure from the norm in this series and a challenge. Once his career started (see below), it…just sort of continued until it stopped (in 2019, if I recall). Nothing terrible nor terribly exciting happened over the entire period; his one piddling controversy was a “beef” with John Denver claiming writing credits to “The City of New Orleans,” but even that was just a misunderstanding that took all of one conversation to clean up. He briefly became a Republican - this was in 2008 - and he had one good thing to say about Donald Trump (that he wasn’t taking campaign contributions), but Guthrie supported George McGovern in 1984 as a “featured celebrity,” so his politics are, at worst, normal with idiosyncratic tendencies. As such, the story of his career doesn’t involve much more than who he played with, when and where.
Still, it’s worth talking about where it all started (from an Under the Radar interview):
“And no one was more surprised than me when I was rejected for that service because of my littering arrest, helping out my old friend Alice. That was absurd to me! So, I added the story to the little chorus I had written and it just morphed into becoming a recording. And the recording became a film and the film turned me into a movie star!”
Arlo Guthrie stepped as far as he could out of his father’s shadow with 1967’s shaggy-dog song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Running just over 18 minutes, he based it on the true story of his 1965 Thanksgiving, where he got arrested for illegally dumping garbage: said arrest and charges saved him from his second greatest fear, getting shipped off the Vietnam; turns out, going to college just to hold on the exemption was the only thing he liked less. Guthrie relates the story as a monologue over picked guitar rife with digressions and bone-dry humor (apart from the bit in the draft office, where he very successfully changes the tone). Antithetical as it is to radio airplay - Guthrie had always intended it for live audiences - radio stations across the country have a tradition of playing “Alice Restaurant Massacree” every Thanksgiving. That’s how I heard it for the first time years ago and, honestly, it’s one of those things you can’t explain second-hand. It’s a song/experience you just have to hear in order to appreciate it.
The rest of Arlo Guthrie’s career happened one step removed from the brightest spotlight, but he still enjoyed a long, steady career. He released over a dozen studio albums (I only had time for a handful and, 1979’s Outlasting the Blues aside, stuck to the early catalog), starred in a handful of movies (Alice’s Restaurant for one (just to note it, Alice Brock didn’t care for the way the movie portrayed her), but also Renaldo and Clara (1978), Baby’s Storytime (1989) and Roadside Prophets (1992)), and has likely played with every major contemporary American folk artist, and I assume most of the minor ones.
One person he worked with very often was Pete Seeger and, because there’s something unique and charming about their approach to performing, I thought I’d end on that. Arlo got to know Seeger as a friend and collaborator with Woody Guthrie. Seeger came from Puritan and took it to heart - e.g., the whole clean, sober and frugal thing - which contrasted with Arlo’s toe-hold in the youth counter-culture. When Seeger and Arlo performed together, they never arranged shows into opening act and headliner, but would instead alternate short sets of four songs throughout the evening. Arlo explained the thought process (from Part 1 of American Songwriter):
“We didn’t have openers and closers. We weren’t swapping one song for another. We both sort of agreed that it took at least three or four songs for a person to have the time to make a point, whether it’s an emotional point, or a political point, or a musical point.”
Guthrie recalls how the generational/sobriety gap created a friendly tension between the two during the shows - i.e., sometimes one statement or the other one artist made prompted a retort from the other. Guthrie had a minor hit called, “Coming into Los Angeles” that Seeger never liked - he objected to the drug talk and argued it lacked “social significance - so he’d follow it up with a song called “Garbage,” which doubled as commentary on Arlo’s most recent “point.”
A detail or two aside - e.g., how a counter-culture DJ named Bob Fass helped make “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” famous by playing it repeatedly one night, or Guthrie’s famous performance of the same at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 - that’s it for the history.
About the Sampler
With all that material to get through in so little time, the sampler wound up being a rushed semi-conscious mash-up of material from the following: Alice’s Restaurant (title track and “The Motorcycle Song”); Running Down the Road (1969, “Coming into Los Angeles”; that's his performance of it Woodstock, btw); Washington County (1970, “Introduction” and “Fence Post Blues”); Hobo’s Lullaby (1972, “Anytime,” “Lighting Bar Blues,” and “1913 Massacre”); Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (1973, “Miss the Mississippi and You” and “Week on the Rag”); Arlo Guthrie (“Nostalgia Rag,” “Hard Times” and, a cover of one of Woody’s songs, “Deportees”); Amigo (1976, “Walking Song” and, a song that a group of students working on a project made the official folk song of Massachusetts, “Massachusetts”); and Outlasting the Blues (1979, “Prologue" and “Drowning Man”).
Having gone into this chapter about 90% blind, I regret not having the time to really sit with Arlo Guthrie’s material. I’ve always struggled with folk on some level, for one, but this little tour took me another step toward getting over it. It’s adjacent to a lot of the music love and on multiple levels (thematically, instrumentation, pacing, arrangement, analog sound/recording, etc.). All that’s a longer way of admitting I like what I hear a little more every time I listen to it - the full albums, in particular - and that’s before really taking in the lyrics, nearly all of which really reward closer listening…
…that’s just to adjust expectations for the March 2021 playlist.
I’d heard “The City of New Orleans” before last week - but, of course, everyone has - only I never knew it was Arlo Guthrie singing it. As it happens, he did and he didn’t (then again, so did Bob Denver (hold that thought), The Highwaymen, Judy Collins, and Willie Nelson solo).
A young folk singer Guthrie knew named Steve Goodman actually wrote it. Goodman was a friend of Guthrie’s - and, as he noted in Part 2 of an interview* with American Songwriter, one he esteemed highly - a good guitar player and “an awesome picker” to boot. (* here are links to Part 1 and Part 3 of that interview; again, you’ll learn more about Arlo Guthrie by reading those three than you will be reading this, different missions, etc.). By 1972 and given his birth-right, Guthrie had name recognition while Goodman did not, so Guthrie decided to put that to work to boost Goodman. After gushing a little more about Goodman’s character and personality, Guthrie recalls:
“That’s what made me take his demo, and put it on my piano with a lead sheet, and work through it, and it was because I loved Goodman himself.”
The happy, wistful ode to rail travel (highly recommended, btw) in which professional/family histories of rail-workers mingle with the strange, sudden friendliness that just sort of happens when you take the same, ponderous ride with a bunch of people. The time ticks away at a clip that matches coming into and leaving a rail station, steady, patient, and feeling like it’ll never stop, while warm and cozy vocals and instruments beam over it; I caught the trebles in the chorus only later in the week and they’re just gorgeous.
It wasn’t a massive hit for Guthrie - No. 4 on Billboard’s Easy Listening charts, No. 18 on the big Billboard - but it was the only one he ever recorded. And Wikipedia’s history of the song tells a colder version of how it came to Guthrie:
“While at the Quiet Knight bar in Chicago, Goodman saw Arlo Guthrie, and asked to be allowed to play a song for him. Guthrie grudgingly agreed, on the condition that if Goodman bought him a beer, Guthrie would listen to him play for as long as it took to drink the beer.”
Maybe Goodman and Guthrie grew close later. Despite Goodman’s early demise (1984, age 36; leukemia), they had a dozen years to get to know one another.
The Rest of the Story
Arlo Guthrie came from and played with folk royalty, of course. He was born in 1947 to folk legend, Woody Guthrie, and a dancer named Marjorie Matzia Guthrie. The Guthries raised their kids in the Coney Island neighborhood, but relocated to Massachusetts somewhere in there. Huntington’s Disease stalked the family - the disease claimed Woody, plus two of Arlo’s older sisters (leaving him as the oldest) - but most of the big family reached late adulthood and nearly all of them continued in music. In fact, Arlo’s sister, Nora, committed herself to plumbing through all pads and papers Woody scribbled on throughout his life with an eye to unearthing the hundreds of songs and parts of songs he started or wrote. (Part 3 of the American Songwriter series gives good details on this.)
Though he recently retired, Arlo spent his entire life in music - and that presents a wee departure from the norm in this series and a challenge. Once his career started (see below), it…just sort of continued until it stopped (in 2019, if I recall). Nothing terrible nor terribly exciting happened over the entire period; his one piddling controversy was a “beef” with John Denver claiming writing credits to “The City of New Orleans,” but even that was just a misunderstanding that took all of one conversation to clean up. He briefly became a Republican - this was in 2008 - and he had one good thing to say about Donald Trump (that he wasn’t taking campaign contributions), but Guthrie supported George McGovern in 1984 as a “featured celebrity,” so his politics are, at worst, normal with idiosyncratic tendencies. As such, the story of his career doesn’t involve much more than who he played with, when and where.
Still, it’s worth talking about where it all started (from an Under the Radar interview):
“And no one was more surprised than me when I was rejected for that service because of my littering arrest, helping out my old friend Alice. That was absurd to me! So, I added the story to the little chorus I had written and it just morphed into becoming a recording. And the recording became a film and the film turned me into a movie star!”
Arlo Guthrie stepped as far as he could out of his father’s shadow with 1967’s shaggy-dog song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Running just over 18 minutes, he based it on the true story of his 1965 Thanksgiving, where he got arrested for illegally dumping garbage: said arrest and charges saved him from his second greatest fear, getting shipped off the Vietnam; turns out, going to college just to hold on the exemption was the only thing he liked less. Guthrie relates the story as a monologue over picked guitar rife with digressions and bone-dry humor (apart from the bit in the draft office, where he very successfully changes the tone). Antithetical as it is to radio airplay - Guthrie had always intended it for live audiences - radio stations across the country have a tradition of playing “Alice Restaurant Massacree” every Thanksgiving. That’s how I heard it for the first time years ago and, honestly, it’s one of those things you can’t explain second-hand. It’s a song/experience you just have to hear in order to appreciate it.
The rest of Arlo Guthrie’s career happened one step removed from the brightest spotlight, but he still enjoyed a long, steady career. He released over a dozen studio albums (I only had time for a handful and, 1979’s Outlasting the Blues aside, stuck to the early catalog), starred in a handful of movies (Alice’s Restaurant for one (just to note it, Alice Brock didn’t care for the way the movie portrayed her), but also Renaldo and Clara (1978), Baby’s Storytime (1989) and Roadside Prophets (1992)), and has likely played with every major contemporary American folk artist, and I assume most of the minor ones.
One person he worked with very often was Pete Seeger and, because there’s something unique and charming about their approach to performing, I thought I’d end on that. Arlo got to know Seeger as a friend and collaborator with Woody Guthrie. Seeger came from Puritan and took it to heart - e.g., the whole clean, sober and frugal thing - which contrasted with Arlo’s toe-hold in the youth counter-culture. When Seeger and Arlo performed together, they never arranged shows into opening act and headliner, but would instead alternate short sets of four songs throughout the evening. Arlo explained the thought process (from Part 1 of American Songwriter):
“We didn’t have openers and closers. We weren’t swapping one song for another. We both sort of agreed that it took at least three or four songs for a person to have the time to make a point, whether it’s an emotional point, or a political point, or a musical point.”
Guthrie recalls how the generational/sobriety gap created a friendly tension between the two during the shows - i.e., sometimes one statement or the other one artist made prompted a retort from the other. Guthrie had a minor hit called, “Coming into Los Angeles” that Seeger never liked - he objected to the drug talk and argued it lacked “social significance - so he’d follow it up with a song called “Garbage,” which doubled as commentary on Arlo’s most recent “point.”
A detail or two aside - e.g., how a counter-culture DJ named Bob Fass helped make “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” famous by playing it repeatedly one night, or Guthrie’s famous performance of the same at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 - that’s it for the history.
About the Sampler
With all that material to get through in so little time, the sampler wound up being a rushed semi-conscious mash-up of material from the following: Alice’s Restaurant (title track and “The Motorcycle Song”); Running Down the Road (1969, “Coming into Los Angeles”; that's his performance of it Woodstock, btw); Washington County (1970, “Introduction” and “Fence Post Blues”); Hobo’s Lullaby (1972, “Anytime,” “Lighting Bar Blues,” and “1913 Massacre”); Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (1973, “Miss the Mississippi and You” and “Week on the Rag”); Arlo Guthrie (“Nostalgia Rag,” “Hard Times” and, a cover of one of Woody’s songs, “Deportees”); Amigo (1976, “Walking Song” and, a song that a group of students working on a project made the official folk song of Massachusetts, “Massachusetts”); and Outlasting the Blues (1979, “Prologue" and “Drowning Man”).
Having gone into this chapter about 90% blind, I regret not having the time to really sit with Arlo Guthrie’s material. I’ve always struggled with folk on some level, for one, but this little tour took me another step toward getting over it. It’s adjacent to a lot of the music love and on multiple levels (thematically, instrumentation, pacing, arrangement, analog sound/recording, etc.). All that’s a longer way of admitting I like what I hear a little more every time I listen to it - the full albums, in particular - and that’s before really taking in the lyrics, nearly all of which really reward closer listening…
…that’s just to adjust expectations for the March 2021 playlist.
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