Arlo Guthrie, Colorado Springs, Nov. 1980

This interview appeared in the Colorado Springs Sun, Nov. 21, 1980. The photos are by Scott Wright. I interviewed Arlo by phone the morning before the concert, then went to hear Tom Hayden speak on campus at Colorado College. Before the talk began, Arlo walked in and sat down behind me and we ended up talking for another 20 minutes or so. He's really a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. A few weeks after it appeared, I got a nice letter from Arlo's mother, Marjorie, which I thought was very cool.

Arlo Guthrie is a genuinely nice man.

After at least three other interviews and an energetic, substantial concert in the evening, he is standing backstage undergoing yet another cross-examination, this time by an earnest young student who wants to know if he thinks there will be an American war in the Persian Gulf.

He smiles his Arlo smile and takes a sip of beer, then begins an Arlo spiel in that same funny Arlo cadence so familiar from ''Alice's Restaurant" and "Reuben Clamzo." Is he serious? Does he really believe that we're contemplating a military annexation of Mexico to solve the energy crisis and the illegal alien problem in one fell swoop? The interviewer isn't certain, and jokes a little, but not too much ....

Twelve hours before, the cadence wasn't there. Maybe it only comes on after concerts. But when he was talking about his father and the hard-hitting biography, "Woody Guthrie: A Life," that has just hit the bookstores, his voice was lower, his tone serious, without the "ain'ts" and the "gonnas" that sprinkle his language in lighter moments. He has read Joe Klein's no-punches-pulled work.

"That's a really good book," he enthused with an almost salesman-like exuberance.

But wasn't it painful for the family?

Woody Guthrie's bout with Huntington's chorea is detailed without gloss or euphemism, from the sudden outbursts of violence to the daily continuing examples of behavior so bizarre that friends deserted him and rumors spread of alcoholism and advanced venereal disease, even after the nature of his illness was known. It must be very difficult to read about your father in this manner, when to most of the world he is still the happy, guitar-slinging little hobo.

"Well, one of the nice things about the book is that it makes up for that joke of a movie and some of the other things like that." In Arlo's world, it's better to be reminded of painful truth by Joe Klein than to endure the lies in David Carradine's fairytale," "Bound For Glory."

Both the title of Carradine's movie and the glorification of Woody Guthrie bring back a song in which Phil Ochs said of Woody;

Now they sing out his praises on every distant shore, 
But so few remember what he was fighting for.
Why sing the songs and forget about the aim?
He wrote them for a reason; why not sing them for the same?"

Ochs and the elder Guthrie had a kinship of their own: Both were topical singers in troubled times.

Woody Guthrie sang for the communist groups who were the organizers of labor unions in the '30s. His famous "This Land is Your Land" was written as a working man's version of "God Bless America," a version that would express love for the country without pretending that everyone in it had a good job and enough to eat.

Phil Ochs wrote civil rights and anti-war songs in the '60s and, together with Arlo Guthrie, was called as a witness at the trial of the Chicago Eight, though neither was allowed to testify.

The most chilling similarity, however, is that both balladeers became increasingly unstable towards the ends of their lives and lost most of their friends. Ochs committed suicide; Guthrie died in a hospital.

Arlo brought out an important point about Woody, however: "Phil was so interested, so driven to be attached to the anti-war movement, to the civil rights movement, that when it became less faddish, he was left without an identity. My old.man always retained his identity and brought it with him to the groups he was involved with, and it was who he was and what he thought of himself that was always getting him into trouble with them.
"It wasn't a case at all of trying to gain an identity by fitting in with a group. My father never fit into organized movements, he never fit in really with the communists."

Perhaps the communists' were too humorless, took too utilitarian an attitude towards life? 

 

"Not the people he was with," Arlo is quick to correct. "In fact, the only real criticism that has emerged about the book from my father's contemporaries is that Joe Klein was too hard on the Old Left, primarily because he was writing from a vantage point of 20 years of hindsight. He exaggerates somewhat and leaves the impression that they were really naive dupes.
"It's not that they had such a feel for communism so much as the personal involvement in those particular goals of social justice and so forth. Everything he says is true, every fact in there is right, but the facts he recites aren't counterbalanced by a feeling for the powerful personalities of the people involved. For them, it was a personal ideology, a desire to see a world where the rich guy wasn't always hitting the little guy over the head all the time."

So that whole group, so hard hit by the McCarthy hearings, weren't really communists after all?

"Well, to this day, if you ask Pete Seeger about his communist days, he invariably says, 'Well, you know, the American Indians are communist.” You can call it communism, but it's a lot more than simply a matter of the system in which the state relates to the individual. It's a way of life, no matter what you call yourself.
"All those people, you have to ask yourself, would they fit into a Communist system as it exists, say, in Russia? And you have to answer certainly not. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, those guys would be just as rebellious over there as they were over here. Which wouldn't work out for them.
"So when Phil Ochs and those people came along in the '60s, they realized this, but they didn't know what they should call themselves. They decided on 'New Left,' so you had the New Left and the Old Left, who were just as committed to the same things they'd been doing all along."

Arlo Guthrie is less dogmatically political in his art than either his father or more recent "topical" singers; but isn't afraid to sing from a soapbox on occasion, as he did last Thursday night: He assailed nuclear energy with a song that shares its tune with a multitude of old songs including one that was a campaign song for Harrison and Tyler in 1840. A traditional tune, certainly, but hardly a traditional topic.

"I consider myself a traditionalist with a small ‘t,’" he explained. “I have a big of disagreement with the capital 'T' Traditionalists who are only interested in ‘Traditional' music. I think good music becomes traditional, that it does come out of the air to isolated people, moving them, almost like the wind, you know, the wind that has always inspired people to write and sing. It's that common experience that a song may have with another song that is actually called Traditional.
"I'm not afraid to call 'Coming into Los Angeles' traditional, or something by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, because some of those songs become classics, like 'Yesterday.' A fellow came up to me after my last concert and said, 'How come you didn't do enough political songs? I thought you were going to come out here and get really angry at everybody. What happened to all those songs?'"

He paused to chuckle.

"Well, you know, what social value does 'Old Joe Clark' have? What was its social value at the time it was written? 'Old Joe Clark' was the disco of the 17th, 18th century. There's nothing anti-folk/traditional about doing fun songs.
"Folk music comes from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons, and some of it is funny and some of it is irrelevant and some, on the other hand, is deeply moving and really relevant.
"You can't get much deep meaning out of the words of 'Old Joe Clark,' but then, you can't dance to 'A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall,' either. I just try to incorporate what I think is real, incorporate that into the music I perform at a particular time."

Later that night, listening to a long-ago tale about Officer Obie and the eight-by-10 color glossy photos with the circles and arrows, you realize you are, indeed, listening to a traditional song, whether you call it that or not, because you're enjoying it and it's reminding you of things beyond just the song itself. What Arlo said in the morning, he proved on stage at night: That it doesn't matter what-you call a song, or a person. It's the underlying qualities which reveal its identity.

I came across this interview while I was looking for something else, but then this morning, I visited the outstanding folk music blog of a college coffeehouse colleague, Jim Moran, and thought maybe I should go ahead and scan this in. And now that you've read what I have to say, go see what he has to say. Yeah, and he plays better, too.

"It's not like it's dead, and it's not like
it only belonged here."

Twenty years ago, I interviewed Arlo Guthrie for a story that ran June 16, 1989, in the Press-Republican of Plattsburgh, NY. It was the second time I'd interviewed him, and both times we had a very enjoyable conversation that could only be hinted in the story that came from it. But this time, he said some things that have stuck with me and that I've referred to many times since, and thought of many more. Here's the story.

by MIKE PETERSON
Staff Writer

SARANAC LAKE - Arlo Guthrie will be bringing his guitar and his catalog of songs to Saranac Lake Friday, June 23, for an 8 p.m. concert at the Harrietstown Town Hall. It's a quiet style he has been pursuing for the past year and a half, after touring previously with a backup band and a country rock approach to his music.

"I really haven't toured like this since '67 when (Alice's Restaurant) came out," he said, in an interview from his rural Massachusetts home. "It's been great. I'm having a lot more fun. It's a little more work, but it's a little more intimate, too."

Although he is a country-dwelling family man, Guthrie still maintains a busy schedule. He spends more than 200 days out of the year on the road, and recently went into the record business, buying out the rights to the 13 albums he recorded for Columbia, bringing them out on his own Rising Son label and handling distribution through mail-order and at his concerts.

"It's been fabulous," he said of the cottage industry approach to recording. "We're actually making more money than we were when we were with the company."

That busy schedule is made a little busier by the fact that his four children are no longer young enough to simply come along. So a lot of his touring is in short spurts, with trips back to Massachusetts and the family between gigs.

"They're in that sort of critical time when they have to be in school, and they're involved with sports and all those kinds of things, so they can't just pop up and go anymore. But my wife is here all the time; she doesn't travel with me as much." Then he laughed. "They only go where there's palm trees."

But other people's teen-agers do go to his concerts, which he admits is not what you might expect, considering he made his mark as a 1960s' troubadour.

"Surprisingly enough, it seems there are a lot of younger people who are showing up," he said. "I haven't asked them why; I really don't want to know. But I find it interesting."

The fact that his audience is made up of more than 1960s veterans helps keep his music fresh, he said. "It's one of the things that makes me not want to stop doing 'Alice's Restaurant' right away, because it's a whole herd of people showing up who only know it through the record or through the movie. Live, it's a different thing, and so I'm playing it for the first time to a lot of people, and it doesn't turn out to be the nostalgic ballad it could be if I were playing it for my own peers over and over."

The fact that younger audiences respond to it may be part of a general trend among young people to look back on the 1960s with longing, and the feeling that their own time is not as interesting as their parents' was — that there is nothing going on for them now.

"I think their instincts are probably right," he laughed. "I think it was a fabulous time to be alive and it was a fabulous time to be a teen-ager. It was great; there's no doubt about it."

But that doesn't mean that there is nothing interesting going on right now, he noted: "It just isn't going on in the United States. For other young people, in other places, this may be the generation their children wax romantic over.

"I think what's going on in the Soviet Union right now, and what's going on in China right now, and what's going on in Poland, for those young people, this is that time," he said. "It's not like it's dead, and it's not like it only belonged here."

Moreover, Guthrie said, the various movements towards freedom and democracy will continue to inspire young people in other places, just as they always have. "There were people in other countries in the world who, 20 years ago, were looking this way. Younger people, I think, shortly, will begin to look elsewhere and see that they can participate in what's going on."

Of course, those people who know what happened in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, one Thanksgiving already know it only takes three people to make a movement.

For those who don't know, or may have forgotten, or want to hear it again, Arlo Guthrie will be appearing at the Harrietstown Town Hall in Saranac Lake, Friday, June 23, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12.50 in advance and $14 at the door and may be purchased at the Saranac Lake Chamber of Commerce and Peacock Records in Plattsburgh.

(I took my son, Jed, to the concert. We had a great time. In two years, he'll be the age I was then.)

This photo, by the AP's David Longstreath, is on my desktop for no other reason than the exuberance of these kids. Seeing them joyfully waving back each day is a tonic.

Did I say "kids"? They're young, but they're engaged in serious business. These are a group of Nepalese communists celebrating the successful conclusion of the demonstrations in that country that forced the king to restore parliament. And so there were a couple of factors here I found intriguing, when Nellie covered the story a few weeks ago.

To begin with, there is the political factor. I don't think these communists are the Marxists who have been waging war in the region, but the fact remains that the Marxists did declare a ceasefire in order to make common cause with the other groups who (peacefully) sought justice in the course of the demonstrations. The potential for reconciliation is encouraging, especially if the overall mix includes more moderate socialists such as I imagine these kids are, to mitigate the intensity of those guerrillas.

The other is the Sprite bottle, the Bob Marley t-shirt and the other accoutrements of Western culture -- and the fact that a couple of these kids are pretty natty, especially the guy in the bright blue shirt with his headband folded just so. They didn't just climb out of the mountains drinking fermented yak's milk and blowing on their panpipes.

Maybe they do that, too, at other times, and I would support the move to preserve national cultures, but I think it behooves us in the West to stop thinking of these other nations in terms of their most isolated peasantry.

My friend and colleague, Rina, for example, lives on the island of Borneo, which, in our culture, is a symbol of remoteness. For us to say that something is "on Borneo" means it's practically on another planet. But she and I exchange email readily and she, being in her 20's, is more up-to-date on pop culture than I am, being in my 50's. And I am regularly surprised at how often, for example, the movies that are just opening here are also just opening there.

So a bunch of kids in Nepal are drinking Sprite and wearing Bob Marley shirts, while a young artist in Eastern Malaysia is watching "Cars" and commenting on the animation. The world is indeed getting smaller.

Here's another thing about this picture: In 1989, I interviewed Arlo Guthrie and he was commenting on the number of young people who came to his concerts and were familiar with his music to the point of silently mouthing the words to "Alice's Restaurant" while he was performing it. And they weren't all coming with their parents, either, he added.

I asked him -- granted that we are both of an age but that he was immersed in the music industry and I wasn't -- if I was being unfair to think that there wasn't much going on in popular music at the moment. He responded that, no, I was probably correct that there wasn't much going on in the music, but that this was only natural because there wasn't that much going on in the country.

Rather, he suggested, things were happening in Czechoslovakia (where the Soviet grip was loosening) and Berlin (where the wall was about to come down) and China (where the Tianamen Square protests were ongoing). There, he said, the young people had things going on, just as we had in the days of Vietnam and Civil Rights and the sexual revolution and so forth. And a generation from now, he suggested, it would be their children who would say, "Wow! What was it like to be young in your day?"

I've often said to my contemporaries from those olden days that we were awfully lucky to have been young in the age in which we hit our teens and twenties. For those Nepalese kids, now is that time and this is that moment. Is every day going to be as joyful as the moment in which that photo was snapped? Of course not. And our days weren't universally pleasant, either.

But the intensity of riding that roller coaster, with its incredible highs and its swooping lows and the exhilirating transitions between, is a privilege that not every generation gets to experience.

Looking at their smiling faces makes me nostalgic for the moment when my own youth and one of those rare historic moments happened to intersect.