American Songwriter- A New Conversation with Arlo Guthrie

BY PAUL ZOLLO Part 1. Arlo & Pete Seeger Arlo and Pete played their last show at Carnegie Hall. Pete was 94 and worried he wouldn’t remember all the words or sing well enough.Arlo said, “Pete! Look at our audience—they can’t hear like they used to hear. It might not be a problem!”Pete laughed and everything was okay.“All songwriters are links in a chain,” said Pete of the historic and artistic connection between all songwriters. Pete connected us with Woody Guthrie and also his boy Arlo, and performed extensively with both. Arlo picked up Pete and Woody’s musical torch, and has kept it lit all these years.This is our first part of an extensive interview with Arlo, conducted during this season of lockdown, 2020.He was born into a family of history and moment. His mother Marjorie Mazia, the daughter of a Yiddish poet, was a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe. His father was Woody Guthrie. He grew up on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island with brother Joady and sister Nora. Woody is now known to be one of the greatest songwriters America has known, writing beloved anthems of American splendor and inclusion, such as  “This Land Is Your Land.” He was a pioneer, both poetic and pointed, inject reality in his songs but always with flair, such as “Do Re Mi,” “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Deportees” that showed the dark side of the American dream. Woody had Huntington’s Disease, which stole most of his last decade from him. He was confined to a hospital in New Jersey where young folksingers, like Bob Dylan, would come to meet their idol. The first song Dylan wrote himself and recorded was “Song for Woody.”Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ alongSeems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s tornIt looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born Woody died in 1967, the same year Arlo’s career got going. It was sparked by one remarkable song, a folk/rock American epic which established forever the singular brilliance of this man. “Alice’s Restaurant.” It’s an expansive, hilarious, infectious folk-rock masterpiece showing the madness and folly of our ongoing war in Vietnam.  It was the new generation walking in Woody’s footsteps. That song got him his record deal, and the album Alice’s Restaurant came out with that great title song taking up the entire first side...