Arlo Guthrie Plugs In to a New Audience

Arlo Guthrie still uses an acoustic guitar to sound the social agenda he’s pushed since the 1960s. But the folk singer, whose song “Alice’s Restaurant” was an inspiration to protesters against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, now has also taken to the Internet to spread the word.

Nothing curious about that, Guthrie said while in Okemah, his late balladeer-father’s hometown, to play at the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Arts Festival. “As a matter of fact, the Internet is the last bastion of real freedom,” he said. “It’s the world’s biggest democracy.”

A visitor to the online Guthrie Center--https://www.guthriecenter.org--is greeted with a photo of the building made famous by “Alice’s Restaurant,” a former church in western Massachusetts, which today is home to the Guthrie Center, a nonprofit interfaith foundation.

“Our center provides help for people with AIDS, cancer, life-and-death situations,” Guthrie said. “I don’t believe anyone should die alone. We try and serve those people ostracized by society with normal services most others get.”

The church also houses the Guthrie Foundation, a nonprofit educational effort named after his father. It was formed to help local cultures preserve their music, stories, medicine, dance and spiritual traditions in what Arlo Guthrie calls “an ever-encroaching global identity.”

One program, on which the foundation is working with Bell Atlantic and the Walt Disney Co., will let American children communicate with other children around the world through video conferencing.

“This is the way to end the idiocy in Bosnia and other places,” Guthrie said. “The idea is to have children make friends with each other before they reach the age of picking up guns.”

More broadly, the idea is to help foster “a deeper understanding of the world and its peoples,” he said. “We need to recognize that people change the world, even if they are different.”

During the 1930s, Woody Guthrie traveled the country performing songs he wrote, many of them characterized by leftist populism and Dust Bowl grit. One is the classic “This Land Is Your Land.” He is credited with inspiring such 1960s artists as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Judy Collins.

Like his dad, Arlo Guthrie, 51, spends much of his time on the road, but he also uses the Internet to communicate with his fans.

Visitors to ArloNet--https://www.arlo.net--can send e-mail to the singer, view photos of Guthrie on his numerous tours, and read the lyrics to the songs he has written over the years.

Guthrie also has a message board for fans to write and browse notes on almost any topic. A recent chat session included topics ranging from potty training to housing costs.

One message bemoaned the fact that Guthrie would not be playing at an upcoming folk festival near the writer’s home, while another took a swipe at conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in Washington.

Visitors also can use the site to arrange exchanges of recordings from Guthrie’s concerts, answer trivia questions about the singer, and purchase CDs, T-shirts and other items.

Though Guthrie says he has been “playing with computers since they came out,” he has come a long way from his days as a young troubadour with flowing hair and a hat pulled low.

His songs touched on every theme, but his best known was an ironic look at the military draft that was then sending thousands of young men like himself to Vietnam. He was rejected for the draft because of a littering conviction, an offense he committed when he helped a friend remove a truckload of trash from Alice’s Restaurant, now the site of his foundations.

With satisfaction, Guthrie says now, “There is a lot going on at that old church.”