About halfway through the show Friday night, Sherry leaned over and asked me why Arlo Guthrie kept interrupting his great stories with all these songs. Her question was a testament to the quality of Guthrie’s storytelling more than a comment on the music, which was rich, varied, and engaging.
Witnessing Guthrie weave old and new original compositions across the warp of old folk tunes, my eye was drawn to the crumbling plaster ornaments surrounding the balcony of Tiffin, Ohio’s Ritz Theater. The Ritz was built in 1928—twenty years before Arlo Guthrie was constructed—during Tiffin’s heyday. A renovation in 1998 returned much of the Italian Renaissance glory to the once posh entertainment center, but it’s almost 80 years of service are obvious, and the theater’s financial woes speak to both the fall of Tiffin since the Interstates bypassed the city and overseas outsourcing has gutted the manufacturing base of the community. Like many former glorious theaters in small towns, The Ritz is a monument to the reality that doing things right doesn’t always pay. Seeing Guthrie in a venue like this drives home the fact that humble songsters making music with meaning are a rarity that commercial money machines find difficult to promote.
Like the mix of folk standards and new compositions that Guthrie sings, the crowd at the Ritz is an eclectic mix. Tiffin’s upper crust are ensconced in the up close floor seats ($51); some seem to be there more out of fealty to their subscriptions than out of love for the performer, but I daresay he wins them over in the end. Guthrie’s pull as a 60′s counterculture icon also brings in the aging wish-I-were-an-ex-hippie boomers, some of whom drag their kids along. Taking up the two rows before us in the balcony are a group of bikers, decked out in leathers, head scarves, and dirty jeans. Throughout the first set, the entire group was never present as one person was always making a beer/bathroom run. By the second set, the beer had erased any inhibitions they might have had, and they were getting restless. Sure, Guthrie’s down-home tales of dealing with the Secret Service and meeting Bob Dylan were as entertaining to them as anyone, but it was clear that they came for one reason and one reason only. This was a group that would be demanding a refund if they didn’t hear about pickles, tickles, and motorsickles.
Guthrie describes the writing process as fishing. You sit by the river with your line in the water waiting for songs to go by. When one drifts past, you take your pen and nab it, quickly writing it down before it gets away. If you’re smart, you’ll make sure you’re not downstream of Bob Dylan. (We heard many asides about the prowess of Bob Dylan and his lack of humor.) Guthrie claims to have had the experience of true inspiration, of pulling a whopper out of the river, only a few times in his life. And he was just a bit disappointed when at the end of an almost religious experience he found himself writing “I don’t want a pickle…”
Fortunately for all of us, he sings “The Motorcycle Song.” After high-fiving as though they had scored a touchdown on an imposing linebacker, the motorcycle gang, much to the embarrassment of the two ladies in their presence, exit the balcony en masse and, I imagine, wobble home.
In 1968 The New Yorker described Guthrie’s signature song “Alice’s Restaurant” as “funny, personal, deft, surprising, and wild.” On the 20th anniversary of the song, Guthrie commented that “he wouldn’t do it again until 1997 because once every 10 years was plenty.” Now, in the midst of the Alice’s Restaurant 40th Anniversary Tour, Guthrie is again playing the tune. He’s tried to update it some, but it’s clear that the song is no longer surprising, and 40 years have worn out any deftness and wildness that it once had. Whether it’s because the draft is distant memory for most of the audience (and a mystery to the rest) or because there are precious few movements to be found in the post-Nixon malaise, the song seemed more tired and dinosaur-like than any of the folk tunes twice its age that Guthrie pulled from his childhood memories.
As much as “Alice’s Restaurant” may seem tired, Guthrie has breathed new life into two of his father’s old songs and used them to make compelling the call to action that fell flat at the end of the story song. As the concert wound down, the band—including Arlo’s son Abe on keyboards and Gordon Titcomb on steel, banjo, and mandolin—kicked into a rollicking rendition of that old Woody Guthrie favorite “This Land is Your Land.” As we wound around to the second verse, Guthrie stopped the band and began to preach about Joseph, the son of Israel. As you might remember, Joseph’s brothers—the 12 sons of Israel from whom the tribes originate—sold him into slavery in Egypt. Joseph, making use of his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, rose to great power. Several years later, in the midst of a drought, Joseph’s twelve brothers came to Egypt seeking food. To make a long story short, the Israelites are eventually welcomed back into Joseph’s good graces, and they settle in Egypt. Flash forward a few hundred years and the nation of Israel has grown in momentous proportions and the Pharaoh, forgetting Joseph, enslaves the Israelites. Moses, the Exodus, Ten Commandments, King David, King Solomon, and the Babylonian captivity all follow and eventually culminate in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. What’s interesting is that none of that—nor the bulk of human history for the last 2,000 years—would have occurred if an unnamed man in a field hadn’t seen Joseph wandering around in a field looking for his brothers. When Joseph asked the man if he’d seen his brothers, the man said—in the Guthrie paraphrase—”they went that-a-way.” If the man doesn’t guide Joseph to his brothers, he doesn’t get sold into slavery, and the whole sequence of events doesn’t unfold. Not only has all of human history been changed by the actions of a single man, but there was no way that man could have known that simply answering a simple question could have had such an impact. As the band picked up the refrain, Guthrie encouraged us to act; we have no idea how big of an impact even the smallest action can have.
Woody Guthrie died leaving hundreds—if not thousands—of unrecorded song lyrics behind. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave the tunes. A recent project of the Woody Guthrie Foundation has been to farm these lyrics out to artists who write tunes for them and record them. Arlo Guthrie concluded his concert with a song he’s just recently set to music. After playing the simple tune once, he asked us to join in. The last music that the Ritz Theater heard Friday night was hundreds of people singing
My peace, My peace Is all I've got That I can give to you
I don’t remember the first time I heard a recording of “Alice’s Restaurant.” It could have been shortly after an uptight high school English teacher kept me after class to ask if my parent knew I was reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. (They did.) Or it could have been during my first year of college when I was initiated into the counterculture clubs of Athens, Georgia, hearing live folk music for the first time and eating hearty organic mushroom soup. Whatever the case, I do know I was mesmerized by Guthrie’s humor, storytelling, and easy—going manner, a personality that made you feel like this was a person you’d want to spend time with and who wanted to share with you good music regardless of who wrote it. When I heard that Arlo Guthrie was coming to the Ritz, I wasn’t sure if it was a great thing for Tiffin or a sign of how bad the music industry treats its treasures and its past. Like the Ritz, Guthrie has some crumbling plaster, but whether he’s singing about his pet goose Al or calling us to share our “little-p” peace with those around us, he opens the curtains a bit and lets us glimpse how grand music can be while making us feel as welcome as the next door neighbor.
So come right in, it's around the back, Just a half—a—mile from the railroad track. You can get anything you want At Alice's Restaurant.
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