Beyond 'This Land Is Your Land'
http://www.rogovoy.com/491.shtml

Last nite while driving in the car, I was flipping dials on the radio & CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Arlo came on a station. I haden't heard that one on the radio in along time so it was a nice surprise. Yay! We all love you Arlo! <img src="http://www.arlo.net/ubb/smilies/smile.gif" width=15 height=15>

http://www.rogovoy.com/503.shtml

"Bromberg is the raw deal"

"There was little if any artifice in David Bromberg’s concert at the Mahaiwe Theatre on Thursday night ...
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Bromberg delivered enough of his trademark goods – the old-time country ballads, the bluegrass breakdowns, and the pained, she-done-me-wrong blues – to please his old friends and fans. A couple of those friends even joined him on stage for most of the show. Bromberg brought with him his trio,... but he called on a couple of longtime Berkshire acquaintances, including Billy Voiers and Arlo Guthrie, to sit in with the group, turning it into something of an old-time, back-porch jam session ...
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An intense, solo version of “Statesboro Blues” was a highlight, in which Bromberg subtly added some urban despair to the Delta lament. Voiers contributed soulful dobro solos on several tunes, and Guthrie passed the “sobriety test,” as Bromberg called it, in his unusual role as guitar picker and sideman for the evening.

Guthrie’s daughter, Sarah Lee, and her husband Johnny Irion, warmed up the crowd with a lovely set of their original and traditional folk and country songs, and even played a post-concert set back at Club Helsinki, which presented the evening’s show. In just a few short years, the two have grown tremendously as performers. They’re still young and finding their way, but already they blend their voices and personalities with the ease and style of great country couples like Johnny Cash and June Carter or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Looking at them together on stage, one can easily imagine a long, fruitful career that will at some point see them establish themselves as the next in a line of first couples of country and folk music."

My family and I attended a fireworks show in Mumford, New York, about 25 miles southwest of Rochester, New York, on August 30. It was probably the best fireworks show we have ever seen (OK, so the chicken barbeque was pretty good too!)...set to music from the theater, past and present.

Anyway, it was getting cold, the blanket we brought was quite wet and damp (and yes, cold)...but firworks were awsome, so we almost did not feel it.

The fireworks end, there is silence, and everyone starts to clap and cheer...and then we start getting cold. Since the fireworks were set off in a big meadow (Mumford is the home to the Genesee County Museum, which is an historical village), there were no lights to help people out, only residual lights from a bandstand (swing music was played earlier).

THEN, the lights of the bandstand go on, and they turn on their amps...and what song is played first but City of New Orleans by Arlo! Of course my wife, my two kids and myself start singing and forgetting the cold (my 5 year old daughter started dancing), but we noticed many other folks singing right along, too.

What an extra treat! Listening to Arlo after wonderful fireworks.

No big deal, but cool nonetheless!

That is so neat! Up in Ohio one day we heard on the radio while flipping dials HIGHWAY IN THE WIND by Arlo. The dj said they would be inturrupting the folk music program in a few minutes for 15 minutes to play a speech by Dubya. So Arlo was the opening act for one of Dubyas speeches LOL!

I caught the last minute of Word for the Wise (http://www.wamc.org/wftw1.html) this morning on NPR... it's a short program that has fun with words, word origins, phraseology, etc. The program always ends with a snippet of music, related to that day's word.

The word for today was MASSACRE ...
"... So I proceeded to tell him about the Alice's Restaurant Massacree..."

Item in Vows column of NYT today (Oct.26,2003) mentions a wedding as taking place in the Berkshires on the grounds of The Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA.

One paragraph from it:
"Dinner and dancing to a klezmer band followed at the Dream Away, a kitsch-filled restaurant chosen by the couple for what Mr. Miller called "a funk factor 5." Built during the Depression as a brothel and speakeasy, the Dream Away is famous for the night in 1975 when Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez came by to jam."

....got my weekly update from Club Passim's mailing list....enjoyed it for a moment....so decided to share it.....


[ALL 5 SHOWS SOLD OUT – THANK YOU BOSTON!]
***Mon November 3  thru Fri November 7 @ 8pm***
Arlo Guthrie, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnn Irion open (Christopher Williams opens 11/6 and 11/7)
(http://www.arlonet.net)
$35/$33
“Arlo practically lived in the most famous venues of the "Folk Boom" era. In New York City he hung out at Gerdes Folk City, The Gaslight and The Bitter End. In Boston's Club 47, and in Philadelphia he made places like The 2nd Fret and The Main Point his home. He witnessed the transition from an earlier generation of ballad singers like Richard Dyer-Bennet and blues-men like Mississippi John Hurt, to a new era of singer-song writers such as Bob Dylan, Jim Croce, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs. He grooved with the beat poets like Allen Ginsburg and Lord Buckley, and picked with players like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson. He learned something from everyone and developed his own style, becoming a distinctive, expressive voice in a crowded community of singer-songwriters and political-social commentators.” – www.arlonet.net

October 31, 2003 issue of The New York Times had an almost full page article on Great Barrington, Mass. (Page D7)
The article includes a short paragrpah about the Guthrie Center.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/print/84275.html

Ears on a Beatle to Begin Previews March 16, Opens March 28

By Robert Simonson
February 9, 2004

Ears on a Beatle, the new Mark St. Germain play inspired by recently released FBI files on John Lennon, gets its Off-Broadway premiere at the DR2 theatre March 16. Official opening is March 28.Daryl Roth—who lends the "DR" to the DR2 theatre—is the producer. Starring in the piece are Dan Lauria and Bill Dawes. The two also starred when Beatle was performed July 2-19, 2003, by Barrington Stage Company in Sheffield, Massachusetts.

The playwright, known for the Off-Broadway and regional play, Camping With Henry and Tom, also directs the work.

The play, about two FBI agents whose undercover assignment is to conduct surveillance on John Lennon, is billed as a "thought-provoking and gripping look at life and liberty in the '70s, when peace and paranoia swept the nation and then—as now—there were no secrets in America but the truth."

Lauria and Dawes play the agents, one a graying cynic disillusioned with a romanticized concept of justice and the other an eager neophyte striving for virtue in his profession.

The show has a set design by Eric Renschler; lighting design by Daniel Ordower; sound design by Randy Hansen; costume design by David Woolard.

Heard in voiceover at Barrington were Dick Cavett, host of the popular TV talk show on which guest John Lennon claimed the FBI was tapping his phone line in 1972; Leon Wildes, John Lennon's attorney throughout his five-year battle to gain U.S. residency in New York in the 1970s; Arlo Guthrie, nationally recognized folk musician and peace activist; Robert Vaughn, star of 1960s TV spy series "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."; and Geraldine Ferraro, the first national party ticket female vice-presidential candidate who was defeated by the Reagan-Bush team in the 1984 election. Fred Savage, who played Kevin Arnold, the central character on the TV show, "The Wonder Years," which chronicled the adolescence of a boy growing up in the 1960s and 70s, also performed a voiceover. Lauria played the dad on "The Wonder Years," but he is also known as a respected regional theatre actor, writer and director.

St. Germain's work also includes Out of Gas On Lovers Leap and Forgiving Typhoid Mary, and, with Randy Courts, the musicals The Gifts of the Magi, Johnny Pye and the Foolkiller and Jack's Holiday.

You just can't escape Arlo Guthrie, he's EVERYWHERE!
I was playing the board game Trivial Pursuit: Genus IV last night with the offspring when I was asked to answer the question (card#26) ... What U.S. state has an official commonwealth folk song written by resident Arlo Guthrie?

"New Orleans! ... right!"

"The worst thing that can happen to a song is to make it official." - Pete Seeger

Ummm.... New Orleans is a state???????

Levi is in a state... state of confusion!

Your quick psychoanalysis of my state only reinforces my reason and purpose for being here in the first place.