He wrote one of the most famous protest songs in history, he is the son of a folk legend and was at the heart of Woodstock – but Arlo Guthrie says he is just one link in a generation of songwriters
ACCORDING TO ARLO Guthrie, the son of US folk luminary Woody Guthrie, he was hoping to be lazy for most of his life. His hippie plans didn’t exactly work out like that, however: he and his extended family of offspring singer-songwriters are on the road for about 10 months each year – they play gigs for money and various not-for-profit events that balance their needs and their wish to give something back to the community.
Despite Guthrie’s best intentions, he found himself working far more than he ideally wanted to, particularly after the international success of his 1967 debut album, Alice’s Restaurant, the cornerstone of which is the lengthy, rambling narrative-ballad, Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (which recounted his arrest by the authorities for dropping litter and how, due to this criminal act, he was subsequently deemed unfit for service in Vietnam). The album track inspired the 1969 movie, via which director/co-writer Arthur Penn chronicled the end of the hippie era in a sequence of well-visualised vignettes detailing the US getting to grips with the Woodstock generation, and vice versa.
Between the album, the movie and his appearance at Woodstock, the template for Guthrie’s hippy persona was fashioned. It is, some 40 years later – Guthrie still sports long hair, although now it is silver-grey – a perceptual tag that he finds difficult to shake off. “Yeah, I’m not so sure the perception has totally disappeared,” says the 61-year old singer, “which is fine by me. I never had any regrets about the 1960s, because I thought they were a wonderful time. You can’t be doing the same things when you get older, however, so over the years I made some transitions, and one of the biggest was taking responsibility for showing up on time, and simply being a professional as opposed to just goofing off.”
What were the most important transitions he has made over the past 40 years? “Well, initially, I was Woody’s kid, and there were a lot of people who came to see what Woody’s kid would do. At some point, I began having my own kids, and now I find myself being in the same position that my dad was in: the father of a singer-songwriter. My position in life has changed, not because of the kinds of songs I wrote, or because of the kinds of shows we did, but due to a natural shift that happens, the kinds of shifts that affect everything else.
“Were the transitions thought out or organic? Maybe they were a mixture of both, I don’t really know. They worked out better than I had thought, though. All of my kids play music, some of them are really good, and I get a chance to play with them from time to time; I never imagined that would happen, but I’m thrilled, because that’s what my father wanted to do, so I get a chance to live vicariously, almost, for him and my mom.”
Guthrie says he never felt as if there was a burden of expectation on his shoulders. Getting into music was more by accident, he implies, than by design. It was a bonus in every way that he hit it big from the very beginning with Alice’s Restaurant: “It was a big deal, a big hit and it sold millions, which was something my dad never dreamed about doing. So from the get-go, I was at least somewhere alongside of him and not just trailing behind. Actually, I loved trailing behind my dad – if you’re going to trail anyone it might as well be someone you admire. And to have my dad to admire was a wonderful thing. I had great fun for years singing some of his songs.
“But now that I’ve got my kids it has turned around the other way. I’m proud of my kids, and I think my dad would be proud of me. It’s not as if you’re following in someone’s footsteps. It’s just you begin to see that each generation picks up from where the previous generation stopped.
“I see my life as a long chain of events – my dad, Pete Seeger, the songs of Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee – and to see my own kids pick up on some of these songs, as well as my own ideals and values, well, that’s been a treasure for me.”
AS THE YEARS PASS so anniversaries crop up. This year sees Woodstock celebrate its 40th. Guthrie seems to view the event now as he did back then: a great time, a historic moment. “It’s very rare to be in a historic moment and actually know it,” he says. “Most historic moments are viewed and analysed in hindsight, and most are tragedies – wars, famines, floods, diseases, disasters, and so on. Woodstock was a historic moment as well as a party.” Guthrie will brook no argument from the cynics on the subject. The event (attended by almost half a million people, and which took place at Max Yasgur’s 660-acre dairy farm in White Lake, near Bethel, New York State, from August 15th to 17th, 1969) came to symbolise the arrival of youth culture of the period and, for some, became the apogee of the hippie movement.
According to Guthrie – whose rallying cry at Woodstock amounted to “The New York State Freeway’s closed, man. Far out!” – you have to place Woodstock into perspective. “At the time,” he explains, “any gathering of more than 50 people on the street was cause for a call to action from the authorities – it was a riot or trouble of some kind. It took place in the same year as the largest march on Washington DC, it was the height of the civil-rights movement, and it was also an important year in the awareness of the environmental movement. We tend to view them all separately, as if different people attended them. But the truth is it was always the same people who showed up at event after event. So it was great to have a celebration with all of those who had participated, if not in body then in spirit, at all of these events which characterised the 1960s.”
Woodstock, says Guthrie, was more than just a concert and more than just hippies: “It was a lot of people who cared deeply about the world and what was going on.”
Does he see the same level of awareness around these days, or has it dissipated as lifestyles have changed? No and yes. “It certainly is different and it certainly has dissipated, and mostly because the internet has formed a global verbal community. We didn’t have any of that in the 1960s, and most of the concerns of all of these people were, at the time, considered to be somewhat outside the mainstream.
“These days, it’s mainstream to be thinking about wars, civil and human rights, the environment and the economy. All of the things that were considered back in the 1960s as extra-cultural have now become the norm.”
Arlo Guthrie plays: Cyprus Avenue, Cork tonight; Whelan’s, Dublin tomorrow; Róisín Dubh, Galway on Tuesday; Dolan’s, Limerick on Wednesday; Grant’s Hotel, Roscrea, Co Tipperary on Friday; Royal Theatre, Castlebar, Co Mayo on January 24th; McGrory’s, Culdaff, Co Donegal on January 25th; and the Menagerie, Belfast on January 26th. www.arlo.net
