Larry Schwartz
Arlo Guthrie has lived with the knowledge that he might succumb to the hereditary disease that took his father’s life just over 30 years ago.
“I was the oldest son,” says the singer-songwriter who has mercifully not yet shown signs of contracting it. “I was the guy that lifted him up and put him in the wheelchair and put him the car. We took him home and fed him and we played him that week’s worth of records that had come
in.”
A giant in American music who penned thousands of songs, including standards such as This Land is Your Land and Pastures of Plenty, Woody Guthrie spent the last 15 years of his life in hospital with Huntington’s chorea, which causes progressive deterioration of the central nervous
system. It did not rob him of his pleasure in music.
There were days when Arlo would sit and watch his father write songs. “I don’t remember which day and which song, but I remember being around him. We had some wonderful moments when we would sit down and the new records would come in with his songs on them in every language
conceivable.
“He was thrilled to hear his songs being sung by people from all over the world. He would listen to them over and over again.”
Arlo Guthrie has enjoyed a 30-year career from the rambling anti-establishment song-story, Alice’s Restaurant to a new album, Mystic Journey.
“I look back at my career since Alice and I feel that there are a few good songs there,” he says. “I’m happy that they decided to come through me and give me something to do. It doesn’t mean that I’m done. I’m still looking to write some.”
He laughs when asked if it had ever been a burden to be Woody’s son in the music industry. “I think my family enjoyed my attempt to live up to and through that,” he says.
The legacy continues with his 28-year-old son, Abe, a keyboard player with whom he is now touring Australia. “I think he gets asked about it a lot more than he thinks about it,” Arlo says, adding that his son is a strong-minded individual who won’t be swayed by others’ expectations.
On his first Australian visit in more than a decade, he is heartened by interest in a new song, When a Soldier Makes it Home, inspired partly by Vietnam War veteran-friends. “I remember writing it before the war in the Gulf got started,” he says. “There was enough that needed to be said
before we sent more of my friends out …”
He grew up in Coney Island and, later, the Howard Beach area of Queens, New York, in houses frequented by artists including Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Rambling Jack Elliott, Josh White and Lee Hays. Although he will tell you the adults were probably chasing him outdoors in those days,
he found the blind blues harp player Sonny Terry and guitarist partner, Brownie McGhee particularly willing to show him how to play.
He was about 13 when Bob Dylan turned up on their doorstep in 1961. “A strange guy came in and sat down and said, ‘Oh, look at that harmonica you’ve got there’,” Arlo says. “He came to find out where my father was. I think he was just off the boat from Duluth or Hibbing or whatever.
We played harmonica for a while. He was showing me some stuff … It was just one of those neat moments.”
His mother, Marjorie, was Jewish, and he had what has been described as “probably the first and only hootenanny bar mitzvah in history” with square dancing and ritual prayer.
The Guthrie family runs an inter-faith church foundation and organisation that champions not only those affected by Huntington’s chorea, but other illnesses including AIDs.
“I was brought up in a family that complained bitterly if you just sang about something,” Arlo says. “There’s enough whiners out there, crying about the state of the world. There’s not enough people actually doing something.”
The Age, 17th of April 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 