"I bet when some of you heard I was playing tonight, you thought 'Isn't that guy dead?" Arlo Guthrie mused to the crowd, which promptly burst into laughter tinged by what I presumed to be guilt on the part of some audience members. That guilt might have been warranted, however, as nothing could be farther from the truth: not only is Arlo Guthrie not dead, he's alive and kicking, as anybody who saw him perform that night will tell you.
Currently on tour to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his most famous song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (referred to from this point on simply as"Alice's Restaurant"), Arlo and his backup band, including the talents of Bobby Sweet on electric guitar and violin, drummer Terry Hall, bassist Darren Todd, and none other than his son Abe Guthrie on keyboards, stopped in Irvine last week to play songs and regale fans with stories from his life. The appeal of both was very real, as evidenced by the large turnout. Naturally, the crowd was mostly on the older side of the spectrum but surprisingly, the people were mostly clean-cut, a strange thing to observe given Arlo's association with the sillier elements of the 60's counterculture. Perhaps many of them were hippies when they were younger, but if so, it looked like they had left flower power, free love, and psychedelic drugs long behind them, in favor of kids, grandkids, and, judging by their clothes, cushy jobs. It must be noted, however, that this was definitely not the case with Arlo, who himself is pushing 70. Sporting long white hair, wearing thin-framed glasses and having grandkids of his own, he is sillier than ever.
Any doubts about this assessment were laid to rest when the screen in the back of the stage started playing a music video featuring "The Motorcycle Song". The source material for the video, featuring daredevil pickles brought to life in (in)glorious claymation, were said by Arlo to be lost since the 1980's. "You can see why," he quipped upon it's end.
Of course, this is not to suggest that it was just a night of Arlo singing sweet lyrical absurdities and cracking self-deprecating jokes. Shortly after "The Motorcycle Song", the band broke into "Darkest Hour", a decidedly more heavy, to say nothing of sensual, song. Heavy in the sense that the subject matter is heavy, not simply the sound or instrumentation. Before I offer my take on this particular part of the concert, I would like to point out that I almost always prefer the studio version of songs over live versions. I'd also like to point out that "Darkest Hour" wasn't one of my favorite Arlo Guthrie songs. So imagine what it says about the band's rendition of it that I came out of the theatre eager to
Light-hearted themes were revisited in "Me and My Goose", albeit with a dark twist. Explaining that he was tired of the increasing tendency of children's music to be blandly benign and often educational, he wrote this song in the style of the old campfire songs both he and his father (the legendary Woody Guthrie, for any heathens reading this) grew up listening to. "Me and My Goose" is musically conventional, but the subversive nature of the piece lies within the insincerely innocent lyrics, which tell the story of a boy and his pet goose, Al. One day, Al disappears and the boy is unable to find him when his mother asks him to come home for dinner, and all that that implies. Needless to say, the little girl sitting with the family next to me (one of the two people I saw that were either younger or around my age) was inconsolable. It didn't help that the background screen displayed images from the book (which I happened to snag a copy of afterwards), leaving no room for ambiguity as to Al's fate.
The screen would come in handy again when it was time for the centerpiece of the performance. Right after the intermission, Arlo started strumming one of his guitars (he had several on stand-by throughout the show) and easing himself into the spoken word opening of "Alice's Restaurant". Naturally, he invited the audience to join in during the chorus, which, being the stuffy Irviners they were, they did half-heartedly. This was not a matter of them not knowing the lyrics, as they were helpfully displayed on the screen, allowing even the musically illiterate like myself to join in the piece's notorious refrain. Their lack of enthusiasm was abundantly made up for in Arlo's apparent affection for the song. The fact that he still regards "Alice's Restaurant" with care rather than weariness is impressive, given the copious amount of times he has played it in it's 18-minute entirety over the years, if not decades. Indeed, the song's age shows, with Arlo having to explain the draft, a crucial plot point in "Alice's Restaurant", to those of us who were too young to remember (all three of us, although I don't count given my frequent perusing of the relevant pages on Wikipedia) and the scenes from the movie adaptation played on the screen portraying Arlo and his long-haired hippie friends crashing in the church Alice and her husband lived in and getting into trouble with law enforcement (portrayed more as buffoons than fascists) when, after finding the dump closed, they dumped some trash on Thanskgiving Day and thus charged with littering. Interestingly, the main antagonist, Officer Obie, was the actual cop who arrested Arlo, claiming that if anybody was going to make him look like a fool, it should be himself, as Arlo recounted. On top of that, over the course of the film's production, he became a good friend of Arlo's, right up until his death a couple years ago. Maybe there really is something to the song's message, however vague it may be, of unity.
This sense of community was still present by the end of the concert, when Arlo and the band played several songs written by his father and closing with that infernal stealth communist anthem (said with tongue partially-in-cheek), "This Land Is Your Land". I imagine most people haven't heard that song played live since elementary school, so imagine what it was like to hear someone (the son of it's writer, no less) play those simple chords and that iconic fourth line before a packed theatre. But Arlo didn't play the whole song. He just left us with the last, less known yet more moving verse before transitioning into the chorus we all know and love. I would quote it here, but apparently the Guthrie estate is very protective of Woody's lyrics. A bit ironic, considering the song rails against private property at one point, but hey, I can appreciate irony.
I will tell you though, that that last verse was quite a bit more thought-provoking (as well as libertarian) than paeans to California and redwood forests, at least in my opinion. But the paeans to California and redwood forests are what everybody remembers, so Arlo once again asked the audience to sing the chorus with him and once again the stuffy Irviners did it half-heartedly. This time though, Arlo wasn't having it, lamenting "Come on, even for Irvine, that sucks!" After the resulting laughter died down, he played the chorus again, and this time around, the audience finally put it's heart into it. For a moment, I felt young again, or at least as young as a recent college grad can feel. I wonder if the rest of the audience felt the same way.
At the very least, they enjoyed the show immensely, since many begged for an encore after he and his band mates got up and left the stage. Their requests were heeded, and Arlo promptly returned, much to the crowd's pleasure. He offered to leave us with another song penned by Woody. Lyrics penned by Woody anyway, as he never recorded it and the music for it could not be found. To that end, Arlo wrote some music for the song, titled "My Peace". Poking gentle fun at the "kumbaya" nature of it, he invited us once again to sing along with him. The crowd joined in, this time gladly following Arlo's lead as he sang the lullably-like lyrics and strummed his guitar. As the song said, his peace was all he had, and come it's conclusion, it was all he could give. The audience and myself appreciated this gift: on my way out of the theatre, I heard one older gentleman say to a friend, "You know, I feel like going home and breaking out my Arlo Guthrie." I had half a mind to say, "You and me, sir. You and me."
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