Yes, Arlo Guthrie’s two-part “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” is 18 minutes and 20 seconds long; yes, that is also the length of the missing footage from the Watergate tapes.
Coincidence? He thinks not. Guthrie, endearing political musician and storyteller of the ’60s, has not only recently released Tales of ’69, an album of lost recordings from his Woodstock days, but will also be performing at Madison’s Barrymore Theatre Oct. 20.
This is no shy attempt to recapture yesteryear, however. Guthrie will be bringing his family along for his North American “Guthrie Family Rides Again” tour, each of whom outdo themselves in carrying on the Guthrie family tradition of brilliant and captivating musical abilities, which he says started even before his father, Woody Guthrie, of “This Land is Your Land” fame. In an interview with The Badger Herald, Guthrie discussed his fans, his long career and what audiences should expect at the show.
“Something I’ve had follow me over my career is that it’s a very wide range of audience; there are people on the left, people on the right, people who have money, people who have nothing,” said Guthrie. “You don’t see that kind of mixed crowd at a lot of events these days. There’s nothing targeted to everybody hardly anymore. There are a lot of people that end up singing together at one of our shows that wouldn’t be seen talking to each other on the street; I love that.”
With life moving so quickly these days, going through old home videos or photo albums is always a great way to relive and cling to precious memories of the past — to see life as it once was. However, when you are the family Guthrie, these endeavors hold a much greater entertainment value. While looking through multitudes of boxes on the family farm, hoping to salvage the aging magnetic recording tape, the children and grandchildren of Arlo Guthrie stumbled upon several historic recordings of their relative that soon turned into the artist’s most recent album release, Tales of ’69. The collection celebrates the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, an era Guthrie looks back upon fondly.
“I think the biggest chunk of that record was fairly funny stuff at the time; I don’t know if it’s as funny as it was then. I think one of the reasons we put it out was because it was so early in my career that it was a funny little window into a time that I had forgotten about,” he said.
Guthrie recalls that this tour is an achievement that his father always wanted to make happen. Woody Guthrie gave rise to a definite folk movement in the U.S. along with Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many others, yet the one thing he hoped to accomplish with his family had to wait a generation to become a reality.
“That was a dream that he had that he never got to live,” Guthrie said. “I remember as a kid him saying he wanted to have a whole lot of kids and take them all out, run around doing shows and performances, so we’re living a dream that he had. And I think he’s still with us somewhere, just enjoying this very much.”
One way the family will be memorializing its beloved father, grandfather and great-grandfather is adding a series of songs to their playlist, written to accompany unpublished lyrics by Woody Guthrie — some of which were written in his last days. While Arlo doesn’t think performing his father’s lyrics would “impress him all that much,” the fact that the words of this national icon can finally be presented musically to an audience is, at any rate, a gift to America in itself. Aside from Arlo, artists such as Wilco, Billy Bragg, Eliza Gilkyson, Wenzel, Janis Ian and The Klezmatics have written and produced entire albums of music from the inspiring lyrics of Woody Guthrie.
“There’s everything from Native American chant dancers to German cabaret punk bands; it’s a very wide brush that we’re painting with. My sister, Nora, invited them into the Woody Guthrie archives to go through the material and see if there was something in there that jumped off the page and into their soul; something that they related to,” Arlo said. “There was enough there for all of these different artists to do a few songs, a few records. What we’re doing [on the tour] is not just a lot of our own songs, but we’re doing a lot of this material as a way to say thank you to all of these fabulous artists who have contributed to the Woody Guthrie song collection.”
Madison has so much to offer on the live entertainment scene, yet this show still manages to raise high above the norm. Passing up the chance to see the Guthrie family “ride again” would be a critical mistake — just ask those who opted out of going to “that concert” in ’69.
Arlo Guthrie will be performing at the Barrymore Theatre Oct. 20. Tickets are $30 in advance.
