Arlo Guthrie Interview

by Rick Landers.

Mention the name Arlo to most Boomers and immediately the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” comes to mind. That song alone would be a pretty darn good legacy. But Arlo Guthrie’s given us a lot more treasures over the years like “The Motorcycle Song,” “City of New Orleans,” “Deportee” and the counterculture tune "Coming into Los Angeles" he sang at Woodstock.

Most fans recall a young guy with wiley attitudinal humor and an ability to tell a tale with front porch charm. Today we all know when he fashions a story about the government, television evangelists or the price of gas there’s more than a smattering of critical analysis going on under that long silver mane. The end game for Guthrie seems to be targeted at making statements about life’s foibles and contradictions while he gathers up laughter from his fans.

As the son of the legendary songwriter and chronicler of American life, Woody Guthrie, Arlo’s talents and inspiration spring from a very deep well. He’s carried his father’s legacy along a straight and narrow path keeping ripe the elder Guthrie's spirited integrity while satirizing or poking fun at unbridled authority.

Landing on the music charts in 1967 with his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant, Guthrie quickly became a young icon of a turbulent decade. Nearly every year since Arlo's laid down tracks on a long list of memorable albums such as Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby and his highly acclaimed Amigo.

Forty years later and Arlo's own Rising Sun record label has just released his twenty-fifth album titled In Times Like These.

In 1991 Guthrie purchased the church that we’ve come to know as Alice’s Restaurant and converted it to the Guthrie Center. It's now an inter-faith gathering spot in support of various community needs and serves as a place for fellow musicians to play. Guthrie will be the first to tell you that the place was never a restaurant.

Last year we caught up with Arlo and his family entourage on their 2006 Guthrie Family Legacy Tour. He was accompanied by his son Abe, daughter Sarah Lee and her husband Johnny Irion. His 2007 Solo Reunion Tour - Alone at Last is just that with Arlo heading out on stage on his own singing songs from the past, as well as from his latest CD In Times Like These that debuted at #2 on three of the four Folk DJ-L charts for CD, artist and song.

After our interview by phone, Modern Guitars greeted Arlo as he stepped off his tour bus on August 12, 2007 at the Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center in Vienna, Virginia. He'd just been in New York meeting with photographer Annie Leibovitz for a shoot that will appear in this November's issue of Vanity Fair.

Folk legend Pete Seeger once said, "Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple." How would you compare writing complex songs to the more simple tunes?

Arlo Guthrie: Well I’m pretty sure in my own head dream the ones that are more complex are usually the ones I’ve been working on the longest. The ones that tend to write themselves down that are almost ready for prime time end up being the simplest.

When you wrote “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” was that a long process or did it come to you in a stream of consciousness?

AG: That actually took about a year to write. And I didn’t sit down and write it like you write a book. I had to live through the experiences one at a time and add them to the little song. That whole process took about a year. But that wasn’t like a song that I’d sit down and write a normal song.

Did your dad get a chance to hear it?

AG: My dad died in October of ’67 and the record came out in November. Yeah, he did.

What did he think of it?

AG: I don’t know! [Laughs] He just smiled and laughed. You know he had a difficult time talking at that time. In those days we had test pressings and my manager, a guy named Harold Leventhal brought a test pressing to the hospital and played it for my dad.

As the son of Woody Guthrie, what did you think when Pete coined the term “Woody’s Children” for the folk artists of the ‘60s?

AG: Well, I think he wasn’t talking genetically so much. He was talking philosophically. In other words, there were a lot of people who began to write songs that were not for the popular music charts or about the history of people who were engaged in the times. You know?

There’s different kinds of song writers obviously for different kinds of music. And both my dad and Pete really believed or felt that songs that had been handed down generation to generation, what we now call folk songs, was a very potent part of their understanding of their own history. And who they were, what happened to them and what their hopes and dreams were. Those kinds of songs that identify you and give you your history weren’t the kinds of songs people were writing and being played on the radio for the most part.

So anybody who was writing in that vein is who I think Pete was referring to. Because that’s what my dad did. He also wrote popular songs for popular music. It wasn’t that he was exclusive. It was only that he was not simply trying to be an entertainer. He was also trying to be a chronicler or a journalist of the times and add to this wealth of history that had been handed down in song for many generations.

He wrote songs about venereal disease while he was in the Army.

AG: Yeah, he wrote at least a dozen of them! Well, he wrote songs for little kids. He wrote songs for schools, for churches and synagogues where people sit around and sing. He wrote hymns. He wrote working songs, songs about the history of people who’d been working for a living, particularly focusing on the union because at that time people were having difficulties speaking up for themselves unless they got together.

He and Pete and others were writing all kinds of songs. He wrote songs about movie stars, falling in love, war songs, and peace songs. He wrote everything!

I understand Woody wrote 3,000 songs.

AG: Well, I don’t know! We have 3,500 of them that don’t even have music to them! For the past ten or fifteen years, my sister Nora has been getting these lyrics out to musicians all over the world.

That’s why we have Billy Bragg and Wilco recording "Mermaid Avenue". The Plasmatics just did a record of some of those songs that won them a Grammy last year. I just did a tour with a guy in Germany named Hans-Eckardt Wenzel who translated them into German. I mean it’s everywhere!

Would you mind telling us about some of your favorite moments with your father or what makes you most proud of being Woody Guthrie’s son?

AG: I think the best part for me and maybe the most difficult was that most kids at a certain age tend to want to get away from their parents as far as possible, both physically, emotionally, you know, and sometimes philosophically. And the circumstances of my life made that just practically impossible! Because, first of all, I agreed with them on a lot of things philosophically and still do.

And secondly I really wanted to play music. I mean, we have 8mm films of us at home and there’s not one out of the dozens that we have where I’m not sitting around playing guitar. So, I was really interested in him primarily because, I mean besides from being my dad, he had access to all this music. He had friends like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Cisco Houston and Pete Seeger and others that I could go see when they came in town. I was very close to his heart in that way. I really did love the music and I loved the people and I loved the friends and the craziness of it all. And so I didn’t go anywhere.

Were you hanging around some of the younger crowd at the time? People like Roger McGuinn, Ritchie Havens and Hedy West?

AG: Sure. All of them are a couple years older than I am. But in those days, I’m talking about the very early ‘60s, most of us were in our teens and we were hanging around the Village in New York listening to all the guys who’d come through or playing with each other out in Washington Square Park.

On every Sunday we’d be out there with a few hundred other kids just all banging on banjos and guitars and mandolins. And many of those people turned out to be professionals and are still working today!

You’re playing with Ritchie Havens soon, right?

AG: We’re doing three shows together that are coming up. I’m looking forward to it!

We’ve worked together for years. Obviously Woodstock is the big connection for most people. But, we go back a lot further than that and so I’m looking forward to these shows coming up! Good guy.

In the past folk music was a weapon that targeted inequality, the cruelty of war and other social causes. It had a tangible strength. Where is it today? Has it lost its voice or its audience?

AG: A lot of people confuse folk music with being a genre. It’s really not. What it is, it’s the way that people learn the music they’re playing. When you study it in school or when you read it in a book or take a course in it or when you can write it in music notation that’s generally on the classical side of things and that’s a great tradition. Nothing wrong with it.

But the folk music side of it is the kind of music that you learn by ear that you heard from a record or from a friend of yours on the street and all of the music that we’re hearing on the radio today. In the old days we didn’t have all these marketing devices to separate them all into genre like bluegrass or blues or rock ‘n’ roll. That’s all folk music.

I wouldn’t confuse folk music with the guy standing there with a guitar humming’ about the state of the world. You can do that in a death speed metal kind of way. You can do it in a glam rock way. I mean all of these different genres are all folk music because everybody learned to play it the same way.

And so the protest part of it is one small part that in some ways is purposely avoided by the entertainment industry. And so it has a political nature only because it’s been so difficult to get it on the air. Aside from that, the murder ballads of the 18th century or something like that, those kinds of songs were also chronicling the times. It didn’t have to be a political thing.

Or it could have been something making fun of somebody like “Yankee Doodle”. Those were political songs years ago. Now, it’s just a folk song that kids sing. It doesn’t have any relevance to anything. But you could get killed singing that thing a couple of hundred years ago!

There’s a quote by James Madison that reads, “"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation." Any thoughts on how that applies today?

AG: We live in a world a little more sophisticated than a couple of hundred years ago. And the tools that people use to rise to power, in nature, are the same as they’ve always been. You create the fear to speak out. You create a circumstance where people feel they’re betraying the community by saying something. That’s not any different now than it was two hundred years ago. But we’re a little bit more sophisticated now.

We have vested interests in keeping the songs dumbed down. Keeping everybody sort of in a state of, well, I was gonna say fear but it’s more than that. What people do these days is create the feeling in your community that you are threatened by other people. And when that happens then there are certain things that follow.

You’re gonna want to be stronger. You’re gonna want more rules and regulations. You're gonna want to be protected. You’re gonna want a world that insulates you from everybody else.

That what kind of fear is what gives rise to people in positions in authority. Guys who say, “Well, I’ll protect you better than the other one. I’ll defend you stronger than that guy!”

And so you have guys, whether it’s George Bush over here or Bin Laden over there. And the tactics are basically the same. You have people afraid that their way of life is under siege. And you have a large Christian community in this country that’s absolutely convinced that some bad guys are trying to take their way of life away. Well, that’s the same thing that Bin Laden’s doing over there!

And so these guys rise to power on the back of this fear. And that’s why the free expression of people is part of the Constitution. Not only is it healthy for you, it’s beneficial for the country and for the world. So the more people who are free to sing and speak freely the less likely they are able to sustain that fear for long.

It might be justifiable once in a while. It’s not justifiable as a way of life.

You’re known as a master storyteller and I’ll add that you’ve got a great sense of timing. What’s it take to craft a good yarn and then get it to really capture people?

AG: For me it’s just trial and error! [Laughs] You say something and sometimes people look at you with a blank look thinking, “What’s he talking about?” And when that happens over a period of time and it’s consistent then you just don’t say that anymore! You have a history of knowing what will actually work and be funny and engaging. I just keep it in my head. And I don’t think about it until I get to that same part of the story or that song. And that’s the way a great singer or guitar player learns to play.

And sometimes it’s funny or sometimes it’s powerful. It has all the nuances of the range of emotions that people have and when you’re able to practice it on live human beings a lot you develop a catalog of things you can do. You know a normal song goes by somebody’s mind real quick if you’re listening to it on the radio or live. But for the guy who’s singing it, he’s been there a couple of hundred times! The notes are a lot farther apart than when you’re listening to it the first time!

So every little nuance of what you’re doing can be practiced so that you’re working on levels that other people don’t even imagine or know exists. Because it becomes really big! I don’t know how to say it in words so much. It only takes two minutes to sing a two minute song, but if you sang that song a hundred times there’s a lot more minutes there to play with!

More magnified for you?

AG: Yeah, that’s a good word. Not just for me but for any guitar player who’s been working on a lick a long time. You know, the exact moment that you decide to bend a note or slide to it or walk to it or adjust to it. All these decisions that you can make are all finely tuned by people who are doing the same thing every night. And they just decided that, well, this one works better than that one.

A lot of people would shy away from having family immersed in their business, but you’re surrounded by family in the business side of your music, as well as the music itself. How do you keep things working smoothly?

AG: Well, I don’t know! [Laughs] We just get along really terrific. All my kids work together and they get along really well. We all really enjoy working together. It’s not like we have to. They all have the opportunity to do other things. But they just won’t go!

After years with Reprise and Warner Brothers, you started your own record label, Rising Sun Records? What prompted you to leave Warner and take the reins of your own label?

AG: Well that’s kind of a long story, but the short version is I had been with Warners for fifteen years, we had a series of five year contracts and we were working on the beginning of the fourth term with a record called Someday and they didn’t really like it. They said they’d put it out. But they weren’t really impressed and weren’t going to work too hard on it.

And I said, “Well, considering what you did with the ones you did like this ain’t doing me any great favors!” So we we're sitting around wondering what to do about it. [Laughs]

In those days the kind of music we were playing just wasn’t going to be played on the radio anymore. So we decided that we could market it better than Warner's could. These were friends, I had friends at Warner Brothers, not just business associates. These were my buddies. When we sat down to discuss it we all realized that I’d be better off doing it myself. So, I did.

Not many artists were establishing their own labels back then.

AG: Maybe not in those days. But in a few years other people began to realize they could probably do better doing it themselves.

No question that was a right decision for us to make. And I’m glad we made it early. For example, if Warner had known back twenty years ago that the internet would be so popular and a format for digital records they would have never given me the stuff back. It was only because they perceived that there was no value to them on the scale that they were working with that I was able to get all the material back.

While on stage with your family, do you ever look around wondering how you got to be so lucky or did you have a plan to grow your own Carter Family?

AG: Really it was a dream that my dad and my mom shared that we would be working together and singing together, not necessarily professionally, but just for fun.

And so over the years when my kids started playing instruments and I didn’t instigate that. They just did it on their own. I decided to take them out on the road and see what would happen. And I had always sort of worked with them in the studio from time to time when we were doing songs for kids or needed some children’s’ voices.

I would bring them in so they had an experiential knowledge of what the road was like, what studios were like and what records were like. And they just decided that was more suited to their personalities than getting degrees in things. So they ended up all playing music and all doing other things.

My son Abe, for example, I knew he was going to be a musician when he was three! He traded in his Big Wheel for a keyboard with a guy down the street. He was just gonna do it. There was nothing we were going to do to dissuade him. He just said, “Look this is what I’m doing.” And he’s still doing it.

Besides guitar, harmonica and banjo what other instruments do you play?

AG: I play a lot of things I don’t play well. You know, I can play the fiddle, the mandolin, the piano a little bit, and basses. Almost anything with a string on it I can figure out how to play. I can also play some instruments like clarinets and sax and things like that. I don’t play them very well. But, I have some kind of working knowledge of how they work.

What guitars do you own?

AG: Well, I have more than I need! I use to have about two or three guitars that do different things. I also kept a 6-string and a 12-string around and a high strung National style guitar. Over the years people give you things and you think you want them or you go out and get them. So I’ve got one good Les Paul [1966], a Tele, one good SG. So I have all those kind of things.

I have a Flamenco style and classical style guitar and the normal steel string instruments that I play on stage. I generally keep a few of them with me because they either sound different or play different. Or just in case a string breaks on one I don’t have to sit there putting strings on.

Don’t you own a Gibson J-200 Vine?

AG: Yeah, I do. It’s just a beautiful guitar. It’s a gorgeous instrument. I went out to Bozeman Montana and invited all the guys over from the Gibson factory. They just brought that over and gave it to me. I wasn’t looking for another guitar. That’s what I’m saying; you end up with more than you need!

I love the way it sounds. Even if you never saw it you’d say, “Boy that sounds like a great instrument!” And if you never heard it and looked at it, you’d say “Boy, that’s an awful pretty instrument!” So to get both of those in one is kind of rare.

I have an M-38 what they call a “Quadruple O” Martin 6-string that I’ve been playing since the ‘70s or maybe the early ‘80s. It was a prototype that they’ve been making fairly regularly from then on. And then whatever 12-string I can find, usually one of the Martin twelves I bring with me.

What about banjos?

AG: I’ve got a beautiful Whyte Lady that’s probably worth more than my house now! I would imagine it’s from the turn of the last century. I’ve got a Gibson Mastertone that I keep around. I’ve got an old Vega Pete Seeger model long neck banjo. I haven’t played them on the stage recently. My wife Jackie has been putting up all of these videos of the family. In the last six months she’s put up about ninety videos and there’s a bunch of them with me and Doug Dillard and some other friends just playing banjo. It’s terrific seeing them. And it’s sort of inspired me. But I’m doing a solo tour and you can’t really do a solo banjo thing. At least I can’t.

Over the years I’ve met some great players of course. And Dillard, I made him sit down and show me stuff. I said, “Douglas, show me how do that that!” And he’d say, “Okay!” And I’d say, “No, slow it down! One thing at a time!” So over the years I’ve learned an awful lot from Doug.

Obviously Pete Seeger is a different style all together but working thirty years with Pete I’ve learned a lot about what he does and from a lot of others. I can hold my own with other people playing.

Do you ever get the urge to rock ‘n’ roll or are you a true troubadour at heart?

AG: We made records over the years with me playing some of those things [Electric Guitars]. I bought them so long ago and with out knowing they’ve become valuable instruments. You know, sometimes you become a collector without noticing! [Laughs]

When Dylan went “electric” did that bother you like it seemed to bother other traditional folkies?

AG: Personally I thought it was great! The first record I ever bought was the Everly Brothers. I love the Everlys. I mean they weren’t quite screaming electric or anything, but they definitely weren’t “On Top of Old Smokey” either. So, I never had a problem.

Like I said to you earlier, folk music for me has shot out in all of these different areas. But it’s all from the same trunk. You know, different branches from the same tree whether it’s screaming death metal, or punk rock bands or any other thing that’s come down the road, including Disco. I mean, that’s all folk music to me. So I have never cared where it went or what it did. I always just stuck to what I did best and I wasn’t going to venture into waters where I don’t swim very well.

I was thrilled to have Phil Everly sing with me on a record we did in the early ‘80s. I was just frozen in time. They had a TV show that I did with them many years ago that was really great. These were the first heroes I had in that kind of music.

So, Dylan playing electric guitar? I was more concerned about understanding what he was saying than what instrument he was playing!

What guitars do you own and what are you taking out on the road? Any electrics?

AG: Primarily just three or four. The J-200 will go out there, the Quadruple O Martin, it’s what they call a J-12H or something like that.

A jumbo?

AG: Yeah. And they made me one that was a Signature Series. Between them, you know 12-strings not always easy to capo and keep in tune between taking those things off and on. So, rather than waste a lot of time, I 'll have a couple of them out there. One that I can capo up. So, I've got both of those because sometimes I play without a capo. But some old songs require different keys that I can actually sing in. I'n fact I've lowered the keys over the years!

What motivated you to start the Guthrie Center and what challenges did you have to overcome to make it into what it is today?

AG: Well, the only reason we bought it was because the folks that owned it were selling it and because we’d made the movie there and I’d written the song “Alice’s Restaurant” and a number of other songs there.

I had a history of the building that was fairly well known and I thought that would be a great place to continue the spirit of my dad’s and my mom’s work in terms of providing a place for people to get together to talk about things in the world and to sing the songs that were being written. To do a number of other things and I thought if I could pull this off we’ll go ahead and do it. I couldn’t pull it off myself financially.

We asked for all of our friends and fans and neighbors to chip in and a lot of them did and we were able to put a down payment on the place. I think we’re still paying it off. But so far it’s been morphing into something different every year. And this year there’s a lot of music going on in the summertime.

There’s no heat or air conditioning in the major part of the building so we can only use it certain times during the year. There’s childrens' shows going on, yoga classes and free lunches. A very wide range of things that interest me, all of which stem from some of the ideas and some of the philosophies that my mom and dad shared back years ago.

I understand you recently hit a milestone birthday (60). What would you consider your favorite achievements?

AG: My favorite achievement? Well, I don’t know. I never really ever achieved anything, I just sort of out lasted things. [Laughs] You know what I mean?

The thing that makes me happy is the fact that my wife and I have four great kids, we’ve got the seventh grand kid due any day, all of them get along, all of them like each other and all of them play music. I mean that’s really the biggest blessing. That’s not really an achievement. That’s just a blessing. I’m happiest about that. It thrills me that the kids want to go with me on the road. Now the grand kids are starting to want to go. One of my little grand kids is going with me in a week or two. Thrilled to go!

I haven’t had a chance to hear your latest CD, In Times Like These – how would you describe the songs and do you have a favorite?

AG: Well, it’s a collection of mostly previously recorded material in one way or another. And that’s just the nature of working with an orchestra that you can’t just write a song and have the orchestra go out and play it the next day. It takes months for an arranger to sit down and then you have to send it to the guys who actually write out the music. And then you get it to the musicians and they actually play it and correct all the mistakes that the copyists left in there.

So it can take months before an orchestra is ready to play the material. And so most of the songs, just by the nature of what we’re doing, are going to be songs that have been around for a little while. And we decided to go back and get the more moody pieces.

People don’t want to hear or at least I don’t want to hear “I don’t want to buy a pickle” with a full orchestra. I wasn’t going for those sorts of songs. I wasn’t going for the humor or material we go for on stage. I wasn’t going for the stories and the tales and the sagas. I didn’t want to have seventy people sitting there waiting for me to get through with a story.

So what we did was have my friend Jamie Burton arrange these moody songs that could set a mood and sort of be positive and yet not negate the difficult times were in. And I thought that the challenge for me was to create a record that could do that and still feel hopeful and still feel good about everything. So that’s what that record, hopefully, is for some people.

My favorite song is "Epilogue". It’s not one that I usually play during the show. There are a lot of songs like Pete said, “Are fairly simple”. But sometimes a song has possibilities that you can’t do with a guitar or you can’t explore very far. A melody can be really enchanting and have so many different possibilities of a structure that can surround it. It can change all the time.

You hear that in Beatles' songs as opposed to Bob Dylan songs. They might have the exact same instruments but the melodies that those guys came up with can lend themselves to further exploration musically and drift off into just beautiful places. So I tried to pick my songs that had that innate possibility of further exploration musically. And "Epilogue" is the one that I think just shines for me in that way.

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" runs about 18 minutes, but I've heard on stage you've extended that to over 45 minutes. It appears you still get a kick out of playing it and spinning the yarn.

AG: I think there’s probably been some exaggeration in terms of extending it time wise. I had different versions of it and some of those may have gone on a little longer.

"Alice’s Restaurant" was actually...there were three version of it that I did years ago. They all had the same chorus and the same music but totally different stories. And one of them we put them up on iTunes the other day just for the hell of it. Not because it was good, but because we had an old tape and it was easy to throw it up there.

People had been asking for it because they’d heard it in 1970 something and wanted to hear it again. It was never worth making a record of but it was easy enough to just throw up on iTunes and stick it there. We’ve done that and that runs about the same length. As far as the one that became popular and the one we recorded I haven’t really done it over all of the years.

When the Selective Service System was abandoned in the early ‘70s I quit doing it. When Carter re-instituted the Selective Service I brought it back but no one was interested so I dropped it again. And then there were people who were always coming to shows saying “I paid for Alice’s Restaurant and he didn’t do it!” And so I would give them their money back and say “Come back on the tenth, or the twentieth anniversary, or the thirtieth or the fortieth and we’ll do it again.”

And I’ve kept my word on these anniversary years and brought it back and even recorded it. We did a thirtieth anniversary that was recorded where it actually took place. And there was a fortieth anniversary where we recorded it the same night that we recorded the symphony orchestra. Some of them are available on CDs and the latest is only available at iTunes. It’s only about two bucks so you can’t beat it. It’s a long song and it’s not really worth putting out as a record. Most people like the original one. But it’s there for people who are addicted to it.

On your 2007 summer tour will you be flying solo or have your family along?

AG: No, it’s just me together again! At last with the original band!

Any chance you and Ritchie Havens will share the stage for a few songs?

AG: We haven’t in the past. His style is so different. I’m sure we’d love to do it. I mean, it’s just that nobody has the time. We’re all working. He plays in his own tunings and the great thing about him is the first chords he plays you know who it is. There aren’t that many people like that. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to just pick up a guitar and play along with him. And he hasn’t slowed down a bit.

Any new projects in the works or is there anything that you’d like to do musically that you haven’t?

AG: We’ll be in the studio in September recording new songs that we haven’t done for a while. We don’t’ have a title for it or anything. And while I’m doing this solo thing my son Abe will mix what we have in the can. So, I don’t know what will come out of that but there are a whole lot of products that we’ll get out into the market within the next year and a half.

Related Links
Arlo Guthrie
Guthrie Center
Michael G. Stewart Photography
Henry Diltz - Morrison Hotel Gallery

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