MUSIC & MORE

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to talk with Arlo Guthrie about the life and work of his father. This generated a feature story in the Napa Valley Register. Here is an extended excerpt from that interview:

DK: Would you talk about the name of your current tour, “Here Comes the Kid.”

AG: For my entire life, I have remained Woody Guthrie’s kid. I have come to love it, even though at first, it was a little odd getting used to. At this point, I felt the celebration of his 100^th birthday that started in July and will continue through May was an opportunity for me to do more of his songs than I would normally be able to do in the current climate of my shows. I thought it would be fun to give the tour a name that let people, in some way, know that there was a relationship, aside from the obvious biological one, and I thought that was a humorous way of dealing with it.

DK: It’s sort of musically fully embracing the kid-ness, yes?

AG: I didn’t want to do one of these tribute shows. I didn’t want to fully try to incorporate his life and his work into one night. I think that it would be crazy, especially because there are a lot of people who also have come to love some of the things that I’ve written over the years as well. I was trying to find a way to incorporate both in the name of the tour that would be short and simple to remember. We didn’t used to name tours, you know. This is relatively new, during the last eight to ten years, when the venues decided that we need to tell people what’s different from the last time you were here. We started naming the tours, and I’ve had a humorous time with that. They were looking for a name for this one and I just figured it would be good to acknowledge the relationship so that people could expect to hear some of my dad’s material, but also do some of my own as well.

DK: I saw your last tour in Napa, which was the family band. I don’t remember exactly what you called the tour, but it was you and the family members. How different is the experience for you subjectively, playing solo. This is going to be a solo tour, right?

AG: Right, this is a solo tour. If that one was within the last two years, it was the “Guthrie Family Rides Again.” That was because we had a “Family Legacy” tour that we did about four or five years ago, where everybody could contribute, not only to singing the songs of the entire family, but including some of their own, because all of my kids and grandkids at this point have begun creating their own material.  I thought it would be fun for the audience to hear how the ideas have moved through the generations, as well as hear the original songs that my father had written. The obvious difference is that if I’m doing a show with a lot of people on stage, when you have 14 people on the stage, you don’t have the time yourself.  No one has the time to fully do their own stuff, and so I felt more like a ringleader or a circus maestro, you know.

DK: I’m presuming that there’s more flexibility solo because playing with the band really requires structure in a set list, more than the freedom that you would have performing by yourself. Is that true?

AG: It is true, although it may be a moot point.  At this point in time, the show that I’m doing is fairly concrete, with some exceptions that I can obviously play with, but I like the show the way it is. It’s been distilled from the experience of doing it since last July, and I think it gives a fairly complete picture of the kinds of songs that are still relevant, that he wrote 70, 80 years ago.  It’s hard. There’s no way to squeeze it all into one night no matter what you do. It’s really a matter of picking and choosing, and having the songs make sense, one to the other, so that it’s not just some hodgepodge of material. 

I like the shows to have a flow that is surprising in its depth, and I think that’s the show that has been distilled so far. I like it that way, so I’m not likely to change it from night to night, with exceptions, depending on, you know, there may be songs about particular places that I’m playing on the tour, and so I will include something local, if he wrote something about it. By and large, the tour is fairly stable. The songs, the set list is fairly stable at this point.

DK: I don’t normally ask artists about other artists, to take the time to talk about other artists, but in this case, because the tour is dedicated, in a sense, to the centennial of your father, I’d like to ask you some questions about Woody. Is that okay?

AG: Oh, sure, of course.

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