Growing up, there was always music around the house. My parents and older siblings had extensive record collections, and there was a huge variety of styles and genres to explore. To this day I’m obsessed with music, still listening and learning. One thing that’s particularly enthralled me since those early days is the folk idiom: journalism in American song, pictures of a history and culture coming alive in a few minutes of catchy tune, sketches of plains and forests and deserts and cites and the incredible diversity of the characters populating them. And some of the music that best illustrates this is the 70s catalog of Arlo Guthrie.
Sometimes an artist hits an incredible hot streak, and that’s just what happened to Arlo between 1970 and 1976. Five albums in six years, each something of a masterpiece.
By that point, he’d already become a quasi-celebrity a few times over. First, for being the folksinging son of possibly the most influential and important American folksinger, Woody Guthrie. Third, as the composer and performer of “Coming Into Los Angeles”, which he performed at Woodstock and which played an integral part in the ensuing record and film that documented that concert.
Oh, and second (and probably most notably), as the man behind “Alice’s Restaurant”, the 18+ minute song that caught the ear of the late 60s underground, was adapted into a Hollywood film, and quickly became a cultural touchstone for a generation in the shadow of the Vietnam war.
So by 1970, Arlo had credit to burn, was signed to Warner Brothers Records and had some of America’s finest musical talent at his disposal. What followed was a sequence of albums (Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby, Last Of The Brooklyn Cowboys, Arlo Guthrie, and Amigo) that brilliantly blurred genre and style, spawned a major hit (his cover of Steve Goodman’s “City Of New Orleans”), and blended traditional folk, country, western swing, bluegrass, and a half-dozen other genres into a distinct and individual style of Americana.
Mixing original tunes with a wide variety of covers and backed by the cream of L.A.’s musical talent (Ry Cooder, Linda Ronstadt, Spooner Oldham, Clarence White, Doug Dillard, Jim Dickinson, Jim Keltner, and others), Arlo honed a sound on these records that was wide-ranging and fiercely unique: a song about a miners’ strike sits next to a joyous take on “Ukelele Lady”, slide guitar blues back up to irish reels, children’s songs and scathing political satire and tender ballads sit side-by-side-by-side.
And thinking about it, I realize how deeply that very sense of exploration and inclusion affected me, opening my mind and ears to sounds that I can spend the rest of my life learning about, creating a picture that’s all the more exciting for its diversity… From cowboy yodelling to barroom storytelling to Appalachian mountain music to songs about trains and farming and corruption and traveling and gypsies and hobos, it’s the sound of America and all that it encompasses.
Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby, Last Of The Brooklyn Cowboys, and Arlo Guthrie (1974) are available for download on Amazon, or as remastered CDs. Amigo is currently out of print, but will be reissued later in 2011 on Arlo’s own Rising Son Records.
YES! Arlo was a formative experience for me too. His were some of the first songs I learned the words to. Ah the sounds of my childhood…