Conversation with Arlo Guthrie

well ro I imagine you can play pretty much anywhere that you want I know when you're on tour you come back to Wisconsin quite a bit why do you always come back here it's great crowd anywhere in the state and this is a perfect time to be here the weather is great I mean who'd a thunk you get you know get up here it's a little iffy at times and it's going to be soon we all know that so we're enjoying it at this particular time we're going to be around this state and you know throughout the Upper Midwest here for a little while I was at a show in Oshkosh Wisconsin had to be 15 years ago Wow people were yelling out requests as they do and someone said Alice's Restaurant and you said yeah right you went a long time without really playing that regularly now you're back out with the 50th anniversary you're singing it every night what's that experience been like sharing that with the fans again well you know Alice came out as a record in 67 and it was really a successful on all across the board we actually sold more records through the PX through the military than we did through the regular record stores so it was very popular with people across the board regardless of political uh you know or social or economic factors and but in the mid 70s by the 10:00 mid 70s had rolled around the draft was over the war was winding down that's becoming home it's a different time and so I took it off the setlist because it was just so long it was you know basically 20 minutes and then people complained and they'd come to the show and they say he didn't signal it is restr I want my money back and so it's a okay give him his money back don't come back and it was the remedy that was the remedy but you know after a while I realized that we could even though we couldn't do it every night didn't mean that we couldn't do it all together at some point so every 10 years we do about a two-year tour which is the next decade and so here we are at the fiftieth which is the big one and I started writing this in 1965 in November and here we are 50 years later just about to the day and it'll be out on the road with us for a while and everybody that I asked not to come back it's going to come back and they'll be happy this time and it'll be a lot of fun you know I think this genre of music more than any other it's it's a generational thing you pass things down your father to you I know Abe's toured with you for many years your daughter's is she on tour with you a she is my daughter Sarah Lee so I just wonder is that a reason for you to still be out here to be able to continue to share that with them I think the reason I'm out here is because I remember making a conscious decision when I was 18 that I was not going to know how to do anything else because my mom had said you know Harlow if you want to be a singer that's fine but audiences can be fickle y'all don't know how to do something else and I remember thinking if I follow her advice if it ever gets tough I'll do something else but if I don't know how to do anything else I'll stick with this and so I went against her wishes and I burned every Bridge to everything I could possibly do otherwise except maybe be a bartender ISM and and I'm still doing it and the times did get tough at times you know like everyone like in everybody's life it goes up it goes down and we've got through it basically because I think we just decided not or I decided not to do anything else I you know I know some artists have talked about people assigning meaning to their songs that they didn't necessarily intend or even you know pickle song for example that had no meaning it's like you're on a mission and the great story about how they were studying the lyrics and things like that I mean do you find that that that is something that people do with your music well you know what it's not so much the meaning but if you fall in love on a particular day the music that's plan becomes part of the soundtrack of your life doesn't matter whether it's a good song bad song and different it just becomes part of it so that every time you hear it you remember and it calls to memory times if you're in life like driving down a road you come to a place that's familiar you remember it from the last time you were there or the umpteenth time that you pass through there and songs are like that songs become part of other people's lives it's not the same for me because we're doing them all the time but for most people songs like city of New Orleans or Alice's Restaurant are coming in to Los Angeles or anything that I'm known for has become part of somebody's life somewhere down the road and when they hear those songs again it it ties together the time in a way that hopefully makes you feel good about it do you have favorites that you that you like to play not really I do but I have favorites I play for myself when I'm sitting at home it's not the same stuff we do on the stage but there are songs that are the same for me could be an old Everly Brothers tune or the songs I grew up with or an old Beatles tune - something like that and I'll sit there with my friends and those are the kind of songs that we will sink just like everybody else has songs that they play or songs that they would turn on for different circumstances so yeah I got those I guess after all these years what motive see what still drives you to go out on the road well it's kind of fun for me because you know we have entered into this big sort of social media something and somebody wrote me the other day and says what does folk music got to do with social media and I thought about it for a minute I thought folk music is social media that was the original social media and it's still relevant in the same way that people communicate today with their computers and phones and whatever the songs that people told for the last 30,000 years the histories of people the way they communicate and how they know what's going on most people for most part of history could never read so you the way you knew something was going on is that somebody would send a song about it well that's not any less true today just because there's the addition of all the technological stuff it still works it still holds true and the thing about technology is that what's coming through it is the expertise of the person who's writing it well some people who spend a lot of time doing it know how to do that fairly well and that so that when you come upon something that they've written it's actually interesting it's not a new way to the new video of your cat playing with the tennis ball or something like that which we all see all the time some people do that really really well and it's the same with songs some people at mostly professionals by now have learned how to tell a story in such a way so that it's actually worth going to hear and it doesn't mean you know there's no justice in it we all know people who are very very popular don't deserve to be there and plenty of people that deserve to be there and nobody's ever heard of so it doesn't have to do with that but by and large people who are making them live and doing this who have been doing it for a long time the guys that in my sort of ilk like Willie Nelson or others you know they tell good stories and they and they do it in such a way that they tie them together you get a sense of time and history and where you are in the world and you remember the love you had and the dog that died or whatever it is you know and it just becomes part of your life and it fills it fills the part of your heart that your mind can't really go to so it's it's one of those kind of things and I that's why I keep doing it because it feels good I think to you I don't go to enough shows anymore it was so rarely go to a show but when I do every time in there I'm like why haven't I been back to to hear live music there's something about being together with those people having that shared experience and then and hearing it live isn't there yeah absolutely I mean that's why it's still happening I mean for as long as there's been people in the history of the entire world there have been live events I mean it just goes together and because it makes there's a part of you of you that is tied to the rest of humanity and you don't always get to know that in this day and age the technology tends to separate as well as bring you together and so the actual feeling of being in a place where people's spirits are allowed to escape the the confines of their physical bodies you can feel it you can feel it in a house you you feel it at a big demonstration or or catastrophe or something like that the spirit of people doesn't always come through but when it does it leaves an impression on you and for the most part it's a good impression there's times you know we've all been in situations where the situation where the impression it leaves is not all that well could be a famous war in history or something like that that some of us have been through but for the most part the the good the better part of humanity comes through in the most unlikely places but you have to be there if you're not there just hear about it and that's different than getting the sense of it that actually crawls inside you gets into your soul gets into your heart makes you want to sort of reconnect at times and it'll keep chasing you until you keep showing up at the at the gigs we'll be there tomorrow there that's what I'm saying all right your music is storytelling and are there young artists out there that are doing good stories coming through music it is so are there any day kind of catch your ear there are so many young people now who have gone back and listened to the old records seen the old whatever video we have or the movies whatever you got to realize that when I started out there was maybe 50 years of recorded music that was it for the and at that time what they were recording was the previous 30,000 years because nobody had ever recorded it before so anything that anybody remembered for the last 30,000 years got recorded in the first twenty thirty years of recorded music they're recorded speech is not just songs it wasn't entertainment it was history so they recorded all that stuff my dad and all his friends for the most part sat around recording old ballads and shanties and cowboy songs and other stuff people don't do those songs today but they have access to them and I had access to the first 50 years of that when I was learning my stuff now people have a hundred years of stuff that's a lot more to go through and so they tend to acquire the techniques and the skills a lot younger than I was able to do and so there are people who are really capable now it takes a little time to be able to be convincing there are a lot of great technicians but to be convincing every night those that has to do with art and it has to do with discipline and you know all the other stuff that that you don't acquire in the same way you have to actually go out and do it and there's skills to doing that that you can't listen to on a record I remember hearing a record of my father I listened to all the old records and they were all songs that were recorded in studios and with friends and stuff like that until one day just about two years ago we discovered a live recording there weren't any nobody knew of any somebody showed up with a wire recording of a concert that he did and I sent there with my sister and we listened to this thing we had never heard our dad in concert all we had heard was the records and we looked at each other and we're going that's why people liked him it wasn't just the song so it wasn't that he was a songwriter or protest sang or stuff like that he was a great entertainer and he was he had the audience in the palm of his hand you could hear it on the recording and not only that he started going off drifting into these crazy tales that seemingly went nowhere and then somehow got back to the point my sister looked at me she said I thought you invented that I thought I thought I invented that too and there it was it was more genetic than art I hated that part but what are you going to do it you you were surprised to discover that because I had word describing your show to me it blew me away because I really thought that I had done something that was unique and different you know just finding my way through life and all of a sudden here's this guy doing the exact same thing even better than me and I thought oh jeez how many decades more do I have to do this to acquire that same sense of magic is really is what it is when you do the same thing over and over and over and over again like a song like city of New Orleans I've songs every day since the 70s well to me that song is pretty big I know my way around every little note but when you're hearing it in the audience it's over in three minutes so what I have learned to manipulate by doing it all those times is something you're not even aware of that's magic that's what a magician does gets up there he's practiced it it knows the routine so well that your eyes don't even see it and it looks to you like it's magic but that's what a great entertainer is somebody who has done it so often that the that the art of it is lost because you're caught up in the story or you're caught up in whatever the theatrics or whatever that to me is the art of it and that's what we do is it different you know when you when you drop into your storytelling and you keep the song going and you hop back in do you find that it's different show to show or is it usually pretty standard it's different every second it's always different because the audience it's always different the house is always different you know you're open your mouth to sing and a fly comes in that's different you know it's a different fly every night and but you get so used to it that after a while you look like you know what you're doing because you've done it before and you dealt with it I do have one last release any favorite Wisconsin memory over the years comes to mind well the best time I had was fairly recent and I've been coming to Wisconsin a really long time my calendars don't even go back far enough for all the gigs that we were doing here but sometime in 2011 I went overseas with my wife and we were coming back and we heard that there's a whole lot of stuff going on in Madison political stuff you know there was the old Union guys and there was the other the new sort of regime and there was all the stuff happen and I thought man I got to get over there and on my father is 100th birthday instead of going home we flew from Germany to Madison got off the plane walked out into the street and there is all these guys that my father would have been right there with them for sure and I thought this is where I need to be and the response not just at that time but since that time has been overwhelming even people that criticize my political thoughts or whatever understand that sometimes you got to give credit to somebody who needs to who is willing to be where they think they need to be and I blend that's true for everybody right left center I don't care where they are you appreciate the people whose concerns are real and not just manufactured for the moment and when I was there I was able to sort of carry on the spirit of the family for all of those folks whose parents and grandparents grew up singing those same songs and to me that was one of the highlights thank you very much fantastic all right Donna

Channel: Vince

Views: 77,285

Keywords: Arlo Guthrie (Musical Artist), Vince, Vitrano

Id: jt_1R5HJmC4

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2015