Jake TenPas The Entertainer | Posted: Thursday, March 27, 2008 10:00 pm
Arlo Guthrie keeps folk germs alive so they can infect a new generation
Corvallis - When Arlo Guthrie compares folk music to a germ, he means it in the best possible way. It's something that won't die and can't be killed.
"I would think of it like a germ," he says of folk music, "A super germ. Things get messy and somebody says, we need to clean up the germs. So, they invent some kind of germ-killer soap or something like that, and everybody cleans their house with it.
"But there are always a few germs that survive, and they become even stronger. Then they come out with the stronger, new, extra-special, on-sale germ cleaner. And you'll wash your house out with that.
"But there's always a few that survive, and they become even stronger."
Sounds like there's a song in the making somewhere in there.
What Guthrie's talking about is folk music's - and all music's - ability to survive and mutate, defying the attempts of corporations to imitate it and package it for mass consumption. Like a germ, music defies the best-laid plans of men to either control it or capitalize off of it.
Guthrie, who plays the Corvallis High School Theater at 8 p.m. next Friday, April 4, should know. He's been a part of that folk music tradition since he was born the son of folk legend Woody Guthrie. He's been an even greater part of it since the mid-'60s, when he began performing with one of his dad's old comrades, Pete Seeger.
"I really learned more from him than from anyone," he says of Seeger. "One thing I learned from him is that you never do the same thing the same way twice."
Guthrie first came to national attention with the release of his album "Alice's Restaurant" in 1967. Its corresponding single, "Alice's Restaurant Massacre," was an 18-minute long slice of talking blues that took FM radio by storm back before FM radio became the same five stations packaged under different call letters.
The song was an alternatingly funny and bitter commentary on the Vietnam War draft, as well as being based on true events in Guthrie's life. He also starred in the movie adaptation of the song.
In 1972, he followed on that success by popularizing Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans," and many of his albums from the '70s were praised by magazines including Rolling Stone.
But Guthrie's career, like folk music, was never exactly destined for mass consumption, and after his time in the limelight, he settled back into making a steady string of albums and touring roughly 10 months out of every year.
"Folk music was never a genre itself so much as the way that you learn it," he says. "So, any kind of music that you learn from other people or from records or CDs or whatever, that's folk music.
"What I'm saying is, every garage band, every punk band, every rapper, every jazz player and bluegrass player and blues player, that's all folk music to me because you learn it the same way."
In other words, folk music never went in or out of style. It simply changed its name depending on the era it was in, he says.
"Folk music arose from people who'd discovered their own history," he says of the first wave of folkies, who unearthed the music of the previous century and found new resonance in its songs of a country in flux.
Folk, of course, was eventually co-opted into a cleaned-up, inoffensive facsimile, as would be punk and eventually hip-hop years later. But Guthrie maintains that after that wave of commercialization passes, the musicians that survived come back stronger than ever, and keep the music alive.
As one of those survivors himself, Guthrie's gained some perspective on playing music that he didn't have in his youth.
"When you're young, the more notes you can stick in a particular timeframe, the better you are," he says. "Although the older you get, it's the quality of the notes you're playing that mean more to you."
When Guthrie comes to Corvallis, he'll bring a sound that's been tested by internal and external forces alike. And he'll bring it to a mixed crowd made up of both fellow survivors and kids young enough to still be fixated on the number of notes he's playing.
For more about Guthrie, his music or tickets to the performance, see www.corvallistheaters.net or www.arlo.net. Tickets run from $36.50 to $32.50 and are available now.
