You Can’t Get Everything You Want, Arlo : Music: Stop the presses! It turns out Woody’s kid always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

The secret is out and remember that you heard it here first: Arlo Guthrie never wanted to be a folk singer.

Forget for a moment that he’s the son of Woody Guthrie, who wrote more than 1,000 songs, or that he’s written a sizable number of memorable tunes himself. Forget all those great interpretations of “Goodnight Irene,” “Amazing Grace,” “Stealin’ ” and “This Land Is Your Land” that you’ve heard him do over the years. Don’t even think about “Alice’s Restaurant”--where you could get anything that you want--that epic tale of youthful rebellion and anti-war protest

What Arlo Guthrie really wanted to be was a newspaper reporter.

“Yeah, there must be a repressed reporter in one of my hidden personalities because I love to write,” said Guthrie, whose musical career has seen him evolve from the ‘60s-kid protest singer with a sense of humor to one of the pre-eminent voices in American folk music.

But he says, “I didn’t become a folk singer because I wanted to be. I ended up doing this because I didn’t know how to do anything else.

“And that hasn’t changed much,” he adds with that quick, good-natured laugh that his fans have heard so often over the years. It’s the one that sometimes surfaces right on stage, in the middle of a song, when something strikes him so funny that he has to stop and tell everyone about it.

But now the funny stories, the wry asides, the general observations on the oddities of life are as apt to go down on paper as over a microphone in a concert hall.

The ones that are written go into Guthrie’s newsletter, The Rolling Blunder Review, an epistle written in a style that evokes rollicking images of the kind of old-time journalism chronicled in such movies as “The Front Page.”

But the newsletter never started out to be a newsletter. “It sort of came about by accident,” Guthrie says.

In the mid-’70s he began collecting addresses of people who might want a schedule of his shows, but he never really got around to sending them one.

“People started asking us, ‘When are you going to send us something?’ They’d say, ‘I signed up 14 times, and I never got anything,’ ” he recalls.

So with a great sense of guilt, The Rolling Blunder Review was born. Guthrie and his wife, Jackie, typed it on a single sheet of paper, made copies and mailed it from their home in Washington, Mass. Early issues contained only the long-sought schedule and a few funny comments on “Alice’s Restaurant” and other songs.

But as word spread, the newsletter grew. Five years later, it’s an eight-page quarterly, containing stories, letters to the editor and information on how to buy Guthrie’s albums, T-shirts and other merchandise. There’s even a cooking column by Alice Brock. (“You remember Alice. There’s a song about Alice.”)

From 60,000 to 70,000 people pay $3 a year for it, although it goes free to people in hospitals and prisons.

Among the stories in recent issues are reports on concerts to benefit the environment and in support of student protests in China and elsewhere. But somehow, almost everything, no matter how serious, comes out funny. Sort of like an Arlo Guthrie concert.

Although Guthrie has almost always included a Woody Guthrie song or two in his concert repertoire, he downplays the father-son connection.

“For whatever cosmic reasons--and who really understands those things--I ended up similar to my dad in some ways,” he says. “But we’re vastly different in other ways.”

But the connection also brings up another inevitable question. Woody Guthrie died in 1967 of the debilitating neurological disorder Huntington’s chorea. It has a 50-50 chance of being passed from parent to child, it strikes in middle age, and Arlo Guthrie is 43.

But he dismisses such inquiries good-naturedly. “I’m not dead yet,” he says. “Does that answer your question?”

He is also not through working yet, continuing to tour regularly and making plans to record again after several years without a new album.