Arlo Guthrie: Mystic Journey

Arlo Guthrie’s ‘mystic’ songwriting journey has led him back to Trinity Church where he wrote his infamous protest song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Trinity Church is now the home of Guthrie’s record company, Rising Sun Records, and the Guthrie Center, a not for profit interfaith church dedicated to community services.Arlo Guthrie’s ‘mystic’ songwriting journey has led him back to Trinity Church where he wrote his infamous protest song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Trinity Church is now the home of Guthrie’s record company, Rising Sun Records, and the Guthrie Center, a not for profit interfaith church dedicated to community services.

“A lot of interesting things have happened to me in the last ten years,” says Guthrie, “one of which is spiritual.” He attributes his recent spiritual interests to working with a teacher, Ma Jaya, who practices Kali Yoga and hails from Brooklyn, N.Y., near where Guthrie grew up. She has inspired several new songs on his latest recording, Mystic Journey, including “Doors of Heaven.”

“We were driving down the road and she just had that thought,” Guthrie explains. “If all the doors were closed in heaven, where would all the angels go?” I just thought, “that’s a song.” At that moment she looked at me and said, “You know there’s a song in here,” and I said, “I know!”

Guthrie, son of legendary American songwriter Woody Guthrie, actually began writing songs in the sixth grade, while creating parodies to his father’s famous songs. “I wrote a song called ‘The Math Test,’ he muses, “It went, ‘We had a math test but I ran away. The teacher she caught us the very next day. She put us in jail. It was a classroom, She got so mad, she hit me with a broom, So long, it’s been good to know you, so long it’s been good to know you, so long, it’s been good to know you.”

Seven years later he wrote “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” inspired by the avant garde ‘beat’ poet, Lord Buckley. “I never actually saw Lord Buckley live,” he says. “I listened to some of his records and I loved them. He was playing stories like an instrument and told stories in the lingo of his time. It was the first verbal jazz I’d ever heard.” Guthrie first presented “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, and the song gained him instant recognition. He recently re-recorded his original Alice’s Restaurant album for a special 30th Anniversary record.

Guthrie’s storytelling/songwriting technique is a peerless combination of wry wit, flawless timing and a unique perception into everyday life. He uses verbal and musical images that eloquently describe everything from ecology and other social commentary, to life on the road, stories of home, and songs of relationships and love.

He says that songwriting incorporates a wide-range of artistic elements. “Writing songs is not like writing a letter, not like painting a picture, not lie writing a symphony, but it has all those elements in it. It happens on such a deep subconscious level. That’s where the magic come from.”

“Songwriting is not a philosophy to me,” he continues,” but rather something I love doing. Over the years that hasn’t changed. There are different states of consciousness or awareness for different kinds of songs. The best songs seem to happen spontaneously and very quickly. It seems the more labored they are, the less people are interested in them.”

Guthrie describes the process of writing lyrics as “something that comes from ether, or the muse, or the place where songs come from. It’s like when you wake up after a dream, and at first the dream is very clear, but as the seconds go by you begin to loose it—you’re not sure of what it was. Then, after an hour you don’t even remember you had the dream, I just try and keep up with it. If I can type as fast as the words come into my mind, then I’m doing a good job.

“Then I have to sit with it for awhile, because something gets lost in the translation, which means that some of it is still fuzzy,” he says, “some of it doesn’t make sense, or it is so different I couldn’t quite get it. I have to make it work. In the process, I make it mine—I put in some of my consciousness that originally started unconsciously.”

He says he know he has written a good melody when somebody is willing to listen. “In the beginning, when you’re young and you start writing songs, you probably have to test them out on people more but, as you grow older, you have a sense of how people are going to react to certain sounds or progressions. When you find that holds up, you don’t test them out on people as much.”

Guthrie’s rich musical training was fostered by his mother, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, who performed as a dancer with the Martha Graham Company, and by his father. His first instrument was the recorder, and he learned to play three-part Bach pieces with his brother and sister. Later he took piano lessons and learned music theory at summer camp. Then he went on to study music for a semester at college in Billings, Mont. Some of his college music experiences were chronicled in the 1969 full-length feature film, Alice’s Restaurant. When asked how he found his songwriting voice while growing up in the midst of such great songwriters as Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Leadbelly, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Pete Seeger, and his father, he hesitated, seemed a little puzzled, then replied, “It’s not like I had to go looking for it. All of those wonderful people that surrounded me, they were of the kind that didn’t really allow for imitation. Their whole philosophical basis is that each person is unique and has their own voice.” In the same vein, Guthrie advises aspiring songwriters to create their own songs. “Nobody can walk where anyone else has walked,” he explains. “There comes a moment in becoming a songwriter or a musician when you realize that this is who I am and this is what I do.”

Guthrie says a well-crafter song includes the marriage of images, feeling and emotion. “It’s the way the sounds fall off your tongue, and the way it feels when somebody else sings it. In my mind, a song’s success can’t be measure by how long it’s been well known. It may only be valid for one evening. That doesn’t mean it was a waste of time or a bad song.”

He admires his father’s songs because, “he had a way with words that almost no one to this day has. You don’t hear it in a song like “This Land Is Your Land,” although that was his most popular song. The best songs are so intense they create a memory in you as if you’d been there, like “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “1913 Massacre,” and his songs about the tragedies of the Depression and the ‘Dust Bowl Ballads.’ They’re mythical. Bigger than life.”

“Highway In The Wind,” an early ballad Guthrie wrote, is a song he knew was well written because, “It seemed close to my soul,” he says. ‘It’s proven this over the years because I’ve been ending shows with it. I began writing it here at Trinity Church, and I finished the song when I was in L.A. at a club with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the night before my first gig.”

He claims that writing on the road can be difficult, but the road provides a stimulus of information, or the occasions to write. “I prefer to write at home with the same set up all the time, with my computer, with my notebook, my piano and my guitars sitting right there,” he says. “For many years I had to write with pen in hand. On the road, the last two or three years, I’ve been transferring to my Power Book lap top.”

He acknowledges that a new world of songwriting has emerged with the use of innovative technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. “People are using the Internet to reach around the world. Paul Simon did something similar, when he went to Africa and South America. In the 60’s, we had people like Mississippi John Hurt or John Lee Hooker to learn from and listen to and to get new stuff,” he reflects. “That’s what the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did. They were able to reach back to places that hadn’t been heard of in the mainstream.”

Guthrie referred to some cultural changes he feels shaped today’s song writing industry. “In other times, elders were expected to pass on experience and culture to their tribes. Then in the field of education, we developed a school system where only those with certificates were allowed to teach. In the same way, instead of everybody writing songs, we relegated that task to a few ‘important people.’ We developed experts and professionals.

“Pete and Woody believed that people should come up with their own material and not leave it to the experts,” he continued. “They lived on the edge of a world, where one world was dying and another world as being born. That world that was dying was where everybody sang and everybody participated and wrote songs. Similarly, we are living on the edge of a world that is dying and a new one is being born.”

“Songwriting to me, is like coming out of a dream,” he summarized. “You find yourself in a different relationship with time and space. You are lost in the words, and the spaces between the syllables are very big. That’s a wonderful place to be—and if you love it, and you spend your time doing it, then you’re lucky.”