Just Plain Folk

Arlo Guthrie presides over the Guthrie Family Rides Again tour at Homer’s Center for the Arts

Arlo Guthrie is a musician inevitably connected to the legacy of his father, the folk music icon Woody Guthrie, the “folk boom” of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and the 1969 “music and arts festival” that was Woodstock. His 1967 rambling “talking blues” “Alice’s Restaurant,” a satiric pinion of the draft system, and “Motorcycle Song,” a fatuous nonsense ditty subtitled “Significance of the Pickle,” engaged audiences with their wit and humor, and established Guthrie’s reputation for an approachable sense of self-deprecation as well as a poignant political and social awareness.

Guthrie’s 48-year career as a singer, songwriter and political activist—he debuted as a performer in 1961—has spanned 28 albums, the well-known singles “City of New Orleans” and “Coming into Los Angeles,” TV and movie acting roles, more than 40 appearances with symphony orchestras and a touring schedule that has taken him to Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, in addition to North America.

Guthrie founded his own record label in 1986, Rising Son, and the Guthrie Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at environmental, health and cultural issues. Guthrie, 62, with his “Family Legacy Rides Again” tour will appear at the Center for the Arts, 72 S. Main St., Homer, Sunday, Nov. 1, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $50 to $75. To order, or for more information, call (607) 749-4900 or visit www.center4art.org.

Q: What are you bringing with you on this tour, and what are you performing?

A: Well, I’ve got four children and seven grandchildren with me and we’re concentrating on two things. First we’re performing family originals—songs that my children Sarah Lee, Cathy and Annie and my son Abe and son-in-law Johnny Irion have written. We’re also doing new material that my dad wrote. He wrote lyrics, but my dad could not write music, so if he had tunes for these words, they went with him when he left us. And so over the last 15 years some other musicians like Billy Bragg and Wilco, Janis Ian and the Native American group Blackfire have brought these songs to life. I’ve written music for this material, too, but I’ve been doing it forever. This tour we’re trying to introduce it to people that haven’t heard it before.

Q: Is it a problem if people think of your father when your name comes up?

A: That’s like asking Noah, “How does it feel to be related to the Ark?” {laughs} You’re glad it’s there or you wouldn’t be who you are. I can’t imagine not being thankful for both my parents and for what they believed and what they did. We’re living their dream. I see myself as another link in that chain, rightly or wrongly {laughs}.

Q: It’s hard to separate Arlo Guthrie from Woodstock. Is that an issue?

A: A person’s life can go in a lot of directions. Mine certainly has. That was certainly a major event in my life. It was so rare, an incredible moment in history. The decision of the promoters to forgo the money for the wellbeing of the people was courageous, and that’s why we’re still talking about Woodstock. By the way, all those guys who gave up their income made it all back. There’s a lesson there. That’s what defines that time. That was an amazing moment; it didn’t happen anywhere else, it may never happen again.

Q: Were you part of the 40th anniversary events?

A: I went back in August to the new venue they built there, Bethel Woods, with the Boston Pops. We did a fabulous performance there. I thought, “I’m coming back with the biggest band.” I wanted to get together with Richie {Havens}, Country Joe {McDonald}, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and take the tour around the country. But we just couldn’t put it together.

Q: The “folk boom” in Greenwich Village in the 1960s was message-driven. Can folk music ever have that impact again?

A: I think it would be a mistake to limit it to message-driven music. In the late 1920s, ’30s and early ’40s Alan Lomax went around the country documenting the songs that were being lost. People like The Kingston Trio rediscovered these songs in the 1950s and created the “folk boom.” They weren’t necessarily message songs, they were the histories of people in songs, as well as songs about the conditions of their lives. It was all being lost due to the entertainment industry, which was selling pop songs. It didn’t start with people writing about events, it started with people trying to re-identify their own histories. Today’s popular music is targeted to specific groups. There may be music with commentary but it doesn’t get out to the general public. It’s based on marketing decisions.

Q: You have recorded 28 albums. Any favorites?

A: Well, Amigo (1976) was great technically, but Son of the Wind (1992) is a favorite. It’s a bunch of old cowboy songs.

Q: What do you want to do now?

A: We just released Tales of ‘69. It’s a live concert from 1968 or 1969 with a 30-minute cut of “Alice’s Restaurant.” That version isn’t about the draft or garbage. It’s just insane. We aren’t using it or “Motorcycle Song” on this tour. Compared to the new stuff, they just don’t hold up. What I’d like to do is tell my publicist to start my career in 1986, the year we founded Rising Son Records. There would be no mention of my earlier life. Anyone who wanted to know about it. . . let them find it. Then I would hope that the merit {in my career} is what’s valuable today.

Family guy: Arlo Guthrie brings his kin to perform with him at the Center for the Arts in Homer this Sunday.

Because he’s been on the scene for quite a while now, six-string virtuoso Derek Trucks may seem like an elder statesman of the blues, but he’s only 30. Rolling with the adage that it’s the experiences on life’s highway that gauges one’s age, Trucks has already marked more miles than most musicians in the autumn of their years flicking the blinker toward the off-ramp sunset.

Since age 19, Trucks has regularly played more than 300 gigs a year, splitting time between the Derek Trucks Band (DTB), and the Allman Brothers Band (ABB). His uncle, drummer Butch Trucks, is an original member of the ABB, and that familial liaison set the scene for the young guitar prodigy. By age 9, he was hip enough to try imitating the slide guitar sounds of Duane Allman (1946-1971), one of the founding members of the ABB who is considered by many to epitomize the highest order of acclaim on the ax. Rolling Stone magazine ranked Duane No. 2 on their 2003 list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All-Time,” behind Jimi Hendrix.

As a student of the guitar, Trucks had found his kindred spirit that would be the guide of his euphonically developing mind, and by age 11, he set out on a limited touring basis with the ABB. Shortly afterward, he was sitting in and recording with a who’s who in the music industry, including Buddy Guy, and by 1994, he had formed the first incarnation of the DTB.

Trucks became a full-timer with the ABB in 1999 and it was on that initial tour that he met his future wife, singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi, whose band was opening for the legendary Southern soul stirrers. The pair, married since 2001, currently live in Trucks’ native Jacksonville, Fla., and have a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.

Because of the incessant touring with both bands, Trucks has built a reputation as not only one of the hardest working men in the business, but has also established himself as one of the best at what he does. Trucks found himself on that same aforementioned Rolling Stone “greatest guitarist” list, ranking at No. 81 and, at age 24, was the youngest living person on the list. In a February 2007 Rolling Stone, he was pictured on the cover along with John Mayer and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a feature article titled “The New Guitar Gods.”

When Trucks plays with the ABB, he’s strolling the musical cosmos along stars that were aligned before he was born. But with his own band, he leads the direction in music, which can include anything from Pakistani and East Indian Qawwali, Latin, jazz, blues and Afro-beat. His sixth and latest studio album with the DTB, Already Free (Legacy), released last January, debuted at No. 19 on the Billboard charts. While his previous albums have been rooted in blues, the new one really lets each member’s idiosyncrasies color the sound. (With Trucks, the DTB consists of Kofi Burbridge on keyboards and flute; bassist Todd Smallie; Yonrico Scott and Count M’Butu handling drums and percussion; and Mike Mattison on lead vocals.)

The Derek Trucks Band will perform at the Mulroy Civic Center’s Crouse-Hinds Concert Theater, 411 Montgomery St., on Sunday, Nov. 1, 8 p.m.; tickets cost $30 to $50 and can be purchased by calling 435-2121. Trucks recently spoke with The New Times from a hotel room in Arkansas at the end of a fall tour with ABB, about his inordinate touring schedule, life with the ABB and DTB, as well as finding harmony on the road in a musical family.

Q: You’ve got another week or so on the road with the Allmans, then 10 days off before you start the tour with your own band. I take it you’re not the kind to sit still for too long?

A: If you want to keep a band together you really don’t have a choice, you got to get out there and work. With the ABB’s schedule, it makes it really busy, but I love to play and I love to travel. It’s a little different now having kids and it makes traveling quite a bit different. But we built a home studio last year, me and my wife, and we’re really thinking about next year and rethinking the way we travel and doing it a lot less and spending a lot of time in the studio writing and recording.

Q: Your wife Susan is a very talented musician in her own right. How do you balance the touring schedule and family life between you both?

A: It’s a juggling act, for sure. Over the 10 years we’ve been together we’ve had two kids, probably eight records and six or seven bands, so it’s a crazy life. {laughs} At one time, Susan was pregnant and on the road singing with the Dead, and I was out with the ABB and my group, and then Clapton’s band, and then me and Susan did a band together, so it’s crazy getting all the schedules to line up. Now that all of our kids are in school it’s a completely different ballgame. Before, they could just travel with us but now they’re in public schools so somebody has to be home at all times or you both stay gone just two or three days at a time and my mom will help out. We’re lucky; we have a really close family that all live near us at home and that makes all the difference.

Q: Splitting time between the Allmans and the DTB, is there a different mindset or approach to playing with each respective band?

A: With a band like the Allmans, who were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before I joined the band, there’s a serious legacy and the arc of the band is pretty well intact, so if anything, you’re trying to infuse new life and continue to make it fly. With your own projects, you really feel like you’re writing the story from scratch, so it is a different approach. But anytime you’re on the road or onstage playing you’re completely dedicated and locked in.

Q: Is there a different understanding of the Allmans’ music now as to when you first started sitting in with them at 10 or 11 years old? And were you more or less trying to emulate Duane {Allman} in the early days?

A: When I first started sitting in with them, it was just a song or two here or there and you’re kind of playing what you heard before. When you join a band—I joined {the ABB} when I was 19—you take a different approach. It’s kind of one foot in the past and one foot in the future and as you go further along that whole dynamic changes. The longer you’re in the group and the older you get, the more comfortable you get helping guide the direction of the band musically, and my role has shifted quite a bit from the very beginning.

Q: What is the creative process like in the Allmans these days?

A: It’s really a musical democracy. From night to night it subtly shifts from who is taking control. {Guitarist} Warren {Haynes} has really assumed a great quarterbacking role the last few years. He’s been in the band on and off for 20 years now and has a great rapport with the new wave of musicians and the original guys and, being a lead singer and a bandleader {with Gov’t Mule}, he naturally takes on that role. But musically it really is open to whoever wants to grab the reins at any given moment, which is a great situation.

Q: Duane was obviously one of your influences in the early days, but who are some of the other people that influenced your style of playing?

A: It really goes everywhere. Elmore {James} and Duane were the first two, but from there, it went back further in the Delta blues to people like Son House and Bukka White and then Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Miles {Davis}, Sun Ra, a lot of Indian and classical musical, and a lot of vocalists like Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson. You listen around and I think it’s important to find the masters in every genre and figure out, No. 1, where it was coming from and, No. 2, what’s different about them. And the more you listen to that stuff, I think the more you appreciate people really focusing in on what they do.

Q: Your new album Already Free has kind of a vibe similar to The Band’s 1968 LP Music from Big Pink, where you can’t really pin down an exact type of music to label it. Was that kind of the approach on this one and do you approach albums to develop them, or do you just kind of let them develop organically?