1998

Arlo Guthrie

Norwood Concert Hall

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

You can get anything you want-  at Alice’s Restaurant. Just walk right in. It’s around the back, just half a mile from the railway track. When I first read, in1967, in Sing Out, the folkie equivalent of Burke’s Peerage, that Arlo Guthrie, the son of the legendary Woody Guthrie, had just created a sensation at the Newport Folk Festival with a twenty minute song called Alice’s Restaurant, I was intrigued. When the album was released a few months later, I bought it on sight and proceeded to play it to long-suffering friends and acquaintances with as much enthusiasm as if I had written it myself.

By 1967, folk music, and its subsidiary, protest music, was in some disrepair. Times They Are A-Changing had become Blonde on Blonde, Donovan was on acid and Percy Faith and his Orchestra had probably just done a cover ofWhere Have all the Flowers Gone ?. There was Barry McGuire, of course, singing P.F. Sloan’s kitschy Eve of Destruction. And the demented spectre -back in 1964- of Pete Seeger at Newport, restrained by pacifists from putting an axe through the cables when Dylan played his first electric concert.

Arlo Guthrie, with his zany, unlikely album, brought an olive branch between the generations. Raised in a radical household in Brooklyn he was the son of famous parents. Woody, by the mid-1950s stricken with Huntingdon’s Chorea, had almost single-handedly written the soundtrack for the Great Depression. His mother had danced for Martha Graham. Leadbelly used to visit his house, so did the Weavers,  Josh White, Cisco Houston and Rambling Jack Elliot. Arlo’s family was mobbed up with the sort of people that made Senator Joe McCarthy froth at the mouth. Commo-nists, and Jewish people who believed in inalienable freedoms.

But Arlo was also a kid of the sixties. Alice’s Restaurant was like a Loving Spoonful jug band song, even if it took him nearly twenty minutes to get to the point. And its catchy little tune started to drive you a bit crazy. Unless, of course, you’d had some reefer, and then it didn’t sound too bad at all. So, here was a way to keep the discussion going, without preaching, without hitting people over the head. 1967 was a bad year in Indo-China and a year later Richard Nixon was coming back from the swamp to be elected President. Things were serious, but Arlo Guthrie also made them fun.

And, amazingly, thirty years on, he still has the gift. Now his unfashionably long curls are as grey as a badger and his son Abe, assisting on electric keyboard, is probably already older than his dad when he hit the big time, but Arlo Guthrie can still make an audience laugh and think at the same time.

After a likeable set from Jodie Martin, including a winsome reading of Subterranean Homesick Blues, the Guthries, pere and fils, take the stage for two hours of the old, the very old and some of the new. Chilling of the Evening for openers, almost waltz tempo with some tasty 12 string playing from Arlo. Then there’s time for some chat. Arlo is, after all, a raconteur, with a folksy, understated style which sits well with an Australian audience. He likes to tell stories- particularly if they are against himself. It’s his most distinctive tactic. Psychologically he is a Gandhian. Meanwhile, Abe, who’s no doubt heard it all before, smiles quietly and, probably, dreams of forming a garage band with the  runaway scions of other fifty-something hippies.

While not high profile for a while, Arlo has had a steady output- more than twenty albums on his Rising Son label, a thriving website – Arlonet, and a number of philanthropic activities with the Guthrie Centre and the Guthrie Foundation both based- wouldn’t you just know it? – at that old Trinitarian church in Stockport, Massachusetts where the massacree happened in the first place. Among other projects he has recreated the Alice’s Restaurant album – right down to the cover art. Except now the candlelit diner in the bowler hat is distinctly middle-aged.

Characteristically , Arlo recalls that the same day Alice, which was recorded in one take before a live audience, was released, the Beatles launched Sgt Pepper. Laughing out loud, he marvels at the comparative sophistication of fab four. Then – can you believe this ? -when he put out his remake CD a year or two back, the Beatles gezumped him again, this time with the Anthology releases.

The playlist is a mixture. Percy’s Song from Basement Dylan, a Woody classic- 1913 Massacre, The Motorcycle Song , with its infamously execrable rhymes- “I don’t want a pickle/I just want to ride my motor-sickle” Then, in a  sensational display of fingerpicking on his Martin 6-string, Arlo unlocks the mysteries of Big Bill Broonzy with Key to the Highway.

After interval Guthrie performs his magnum opus- all eighteen minutes twenty of it. Except, that it keeps getting longer. Especially when he pauses to tell another yarn. About Chip Carter, Jimmy’s boy, telling him that when the Carters moved in to the White House there was some of the Nixon LP collection still there and amongst it was a copy of Alice’s Restaurant. Weird don’t you think ? Arlo ponders the daddy of all conspiracy theories – that one of the key erasures on the Watergate Tapes was exactly eighteen minutes and twenty seconds long.

The new material is strong but less distinctive. The Vet lament, When a Soldier Makes it Home, reflects a new rapprochement in the post anti-war movement, Wake Up Dead, on an AIDS theme, is all the more moving by being admirably short on sentimentality. Paying tribute to Steve Goodman, Arlo cranks up his 12-string for City of New Orleans and concludes with a long story about being a Guthrie, his mother’s visit to China and a lateral reading of This Land is Your Land.

He mordantly notes that Woody, every day of his life an anti-establishment man, has now become a postage stamp- and not just an ordinary one either. Like, airmail, man. Arlo lives comfortably in a famous shadow, just as the amiable young Abe presently does. If Woody was still around now he’d be doing all kinds of stuff, muses Arlo. He’d probably be down at the docks, singing a song or two.

Closing with the Leadbelly crooner, Irene Goodnight, the Guthries give us a further benediction from the American populist canon. It might be said that Arlo is a lovable relic of a lost cause. But I’m not so sure. There is a steel in that good-humour, and a quiet certainty that the golden rule might still be a good one. Whatever it is, Arlo Guthrie can still get you to take a stroll around an idea before you jump on it. And that’s an art that’s always in short supply.

Coming Up in May

6- 30 May. Master Class. Terrence McNally’s close encounter with Maria Callas. Directed by Rodney Fisher. Featuring Amanda Muggleton. Playhouse.

6- 9 May. The Flight.  Restless Dance Company. The Space.

13 May. Steve James. Texas blues wizard. Governor Hindmarsh.

The Adelaide Review, No.176, May, 1998, p.28.