Arlo Guthrie has been a part of my life in some sense for almost 40 years. I listened to his music growing up and have been going to his concerts since college. So, I wanted to interview him for my show on music. Interviewing people is always tough - the more famous, the more often they've been interviewed. The more often they been interviewed, the more packaged their responses.
I don't know if Arlo's responses were packaged. Some were, I'm sure. I asked him about the success of Alice's Restaurant, for example, and he said something like "If I knew that, I would have written more songs like it." More likely, Alice's Restaurant was a success because it touched on the stresses of the time - the individual (particularly the anti-war contingent) versus the Establishment. The individual is, in this case, Arlo the litterbug and the Establishment is the police force who imprisoned him for littering. Naturally - the little guy wins and wins big: the episode helped Arlo avoid going to Vietnam or, more likely, in exile to Canada.
That being said, I liked Arlo a lot for a few reasons, all of which, I'm sure, have contributed to his success over the years. First, he was friendly, but sincerely so; he had a kind of accessibility, a lack of self-importance and immediate presence that became a springboard for the interview.
He had a good sense of humor, too, which is important to all the interviews I do. Lots of guests have it, Biotech reporter Moria Gunn, of NPR, for example, and Barrymore Scherer, classical music reporter for the Wall Street Journal. People in places who address serious issues yet have a sense of humor. Humor underscores Guthrie's approach, not ha-ha humor, per se, but a sense of not quite taking the whole thing seriously. In fact, in the interview, he acknowledged the importance of humor to dealing with the Big Issues that are like minefields promising to go off in all of our lives.
More though, I think much of Guthrie's work works on a metaphorical level so everyone can recognize and own it. His lineage, as the son of Woody Guthrie, is also the lineage of working people from the Depression on and the difficulties that confront them. His work is also a metaphor for Americana in a more sweeping sense: American love affairs, American cities, American values at their core. Even his comments speak to the substance of who we are, not the gloss. In the interview he mentioned that he went to the Grammy awards, with its incredible sound systems and technical brilliance. Yet, the substance, he said, wasn't there. It was empty. And everyone knows that he's right... and that even the Grammy awards are a metaphor for something else- something distantly shallow about our culture and values, something that will pass soon and not be remembered.
As for Guthrie - he speaks to what's funny, sad, rebellious and accepting. That's it. Right there. And it's with us all the time, part of our history, This Land Is Your Land, and all the rest.
Anyway, the show is The Greater Voice...it's at www.thegreatervoice.com, if you want to listen. Arlo will be on Thursday, the 11th of October, but archived and available to download after that.
