Arlo Guthrie gives a two-hour blast from the past

The spirit of Woodstock came to Sydney when Arlo Guthrie played a one-off gig this week, but the Cahill Expressway wasn’t closed, man …

Arlo Guthrie gave a one-off Byron Bay Bluesfest sideshow concert at Sydney’s City Recital Hall.

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“If I’d known back in 1965 that I’d be singing this song every night 50 years later, I would have made it a hell of a lot shorter,” Arlo Guthrie told his audience at a one-off gig at City Recital Hall Angel Place.

The song in question was, of course, Alice’s Restaurant, a rambling, rambunctious 20-minute part-ditty, part-autobiographical narrative about a bunch of hippies who run foul of a small-town police officer when they illegally dump the restaurant’s litter.

The song, which also includes a hilarious account of Guthrie’s encounter with the army draft “service centre”, went on to be made into a film and it’s the 50th anniversary of its release that Guthrie and his band of family and friends are marking with his current tour.

Over two hours Guthrie, with his trademark spectacles, labradoodle white mane and matching moustache, switched between 12-string and six-string acoustic guitars — with the occasional foray on keyboards — for a set of old favourites, including Ukulele Lady, Flying In To Los Angeles and Steve Goodman’s City of New Orleans.

In between he regaled his devoted audience with humorous anecdotes about the people he’d met, including, as a two-year-old toddler, Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, a year before the great bluesman died - “so I can’t say I knew him”.

WEIRD

Bob Dylan, on the other hand, came to visit Arlo’s father Woody when Arlo was 13. “The thing I noticed about him was his shoes — they were weird. Those are the kind of things you notice as a teenager.”

Dylan stopped singing his early songs at one stage in his career — “that really pissed off some people but I could understand it. You sometimes got to get rid of the old stuff to make way for the new,” Guthrie said.

Things came to a head when Guthrie had a gig in Tucson, Arizona, and at the airport a reporter told him Dylan was there playing the same night, “so why would anybody want to go and hear you?”

Guthrie, who always sang Dylan songs, replied: “Well if they want to hear the early stuff they better come to my show”. He played to a full house that night. Leadbelly’s Alabama Bound and a drop-dead gorgeous version of Gates of Eden, featuring superb electric guitar from Steve Ide, were among the Sydney show’s highlights.

With his son Abe on keyboards and daughter Cathy providing backing vocals, this was a family affair with a couple of songs taking us back to the interwar American era of his rambling folk singing father Woody and the novels of John Steinbeck.

Other numbers (Comin’ Into Los Angeles and Ride My Motorcycle) invoked the Woodstock era. Guthrie will be playing at a 50th anniversary free celebration of the festival on the original Bethel New York site later in the year, although it’s doubtful that the New York State Thruway will be closed on this occasion.

I’ve sung this song every day since my dad showed me the chords when I was a kid and when I dropped it from the set list the people said, ‘Are you crazy

The other two band members, Ide and drummer Terry a La Berry, have been playing with Guthrie for five decades so the arrangements were tight but relaxed.

There was plenty of audience participation when Woody’s anthem This Land Is Your Land came up. “I’ve sung this song every day since my dad showed me the chords when I was a kid and when I dropped it from the set list the people said, ‘Are you crazy?’”

As a touching encore he sang his own setting to a couple of simple and touching verses of poetry, one of the last things his father wrote, called My Peace.

Sydney audiences have been fortunate to have three living US music legends — Bob Dylan, John Prine and now Guthrie — coming out within the last year to bring a generation the songs that formed the soundtrack of their youth. Let’s hope they all come back again soon.

We need their poetry, humour and wisdom now more than ever.

DETAILS:

● CONCERT: Arlo Guthrie

● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place

● WHEN: Wednesday, April 17