A storied tradition

AN hour before Arlo Guthrie is to go on stage, a reminder of life’s serendipity walks into the old church here.

A volunteer doesn’t recognize the man at the door, and she can’t find his name on the “comp” list of invited guests, either, so she calls over Guthrie’s longtime right hand, George Laye, and tells him, “There’s a Mr. Wilcox....”

Laye confers briefly with Richard B. Wilcox, laughs and says, “Oh, of course. I’m sorry. Go right in.” Then as soon as the new arrival has stepped into the onetime sanctuary to await the concert, Laye announces, “That’s the chief of police of Stockbridge!”

Everybody has a good laugh at that, for this church in the Berkshires would not be the Guthrie Center today had it not been for Stockbridge police. And Arlo himself ... well, had not those cops arrested him four decades ago for the crime that began right on this spot, he might have gone on to be a forest ranger, as he’d intended as a kid, and not followed his doomed father, Woody, into musical storytelling.

The tale of that absurd life-changing encounter became the entire A-side of his debut album, “Alice’s Restaurant,” the 18-minute, 20-second song relating how, as a teenager in 1965, he had Thanksgiving dinner in the church -- then a commune of sorts presided over by Ray and Alice Brock -- and thought he’d do a good deed by carting away the truckload of trash that had accumulated at the place

The catch was, all those glossies were of little use as evidence when his case came before the local judge -- the blind judge -- and then came the real twist, in Arlo’s song’s version of history, when the misdemeanor arrest prompted a New York draft board to toss him aside with the other rejects, the mother stabbers and father rapists, thus sparing him a trip to the front lines of the Vietnam War or, more likely, flight to Canada.

“Garbage has been very good to me,” sums up Arlo Guthrie, who was resting up, that hour before his “Spring Revival” concert, in the old bell tower of the church, now the green room lounge of his nonprofit Guthrie Center.

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Keeping things afloat

FOR years he owned a farmhouse a half-hour away, in a hill town with no traffic light, but he did not get the church until 1991, when he was brought here by a TV crew filming what he calls a “whatever-happened-to-him?” feature. The deconsecrated church, which dates to 1829, had been through a number of owners since the Brocks had it and was not in the best shape. But the owners at the time must have seen him coming, for that story has them peering out the window exulting, “Oh, there’s Arlo Guthrie, he’ll buy it,” and he did, with the help of donors, whose names now adorn a wall of the Guthrie Center.

Today, there’s still no heat or air conditioning in most of the structure, but that doesn’t stop the crews of volunteers and one paid staffer, the 64-year-old Laye, from offering free community lunches every Wednesday, with health food (lentil soup, rice dishes) provided by a nearby yoga center. Thursdays there’s “Hootenanny Nite!” with an open mike for local musicians in the 100-seat performing space that has tables set up nightclub style where the pews once were. Summer weekends, the professional acts take over in a “Troubadour Series.” And on two or three weekends a year it’s all Arlo, in fundraising concerts that help keep the operation afloat.

His annual spring weekend has spawned another tradition, a “Historic Garbage Trail” walk to combat Huntington’s disease, the hereditary neurological ailment that killed his father. Participants trek 6.3 miles from the church to Stockbridge, the scene of other “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” landmarks, the tiny restaurant once run by Alice and the Stockbridge police headquarters. The cops no longer have cells there (“liability issues,” Chief Wilcox says), but the front of one has been preserved for posterity and was displayed on a platform for this year’s Sunday hike, May 21, so the walkers could pose behind the same bars that once confined the littering Arlo. In the spirit of the ‘60s, they also were given pens embossed “This pen has been stolen From Stockbridge Police Department,” courtesy of the chief.

As a child, the 57-year-old Wilcox was a model for a Boy Scout painting by the local chronicler of Americana, Norman Rockwell, and he later served two tours in Vietnam. But the chief long ago came to embrace Arlo and that contentious era as slices of Americana as well, even if a church volunteer did almost diss him and his wife at the door that evening. “They try to keep the riffraff out,” Wilcox reasoned, “but we snuck in.”

The Garbage Trail walk alone brought in $8,500, but the weekend was more than a fundraiser for Arlo, who took the revival theme seriously, for the time back home was his bridge between two long forays on the road: The one just finished was a 40th anniversary tour commemorating the Alice’s Restaurant incident, an occasion to dust off the rambling story-song he normally eschews these days; the one upcoming is a “Guthrie Family Legacy Tour,” which was to begin in Alaska, of all places, and which takes him to downtown Los Angeles on Saturday for a free 3 p.m. concert at California Plaza, part of the Grand Performances series there.

The “Legacy Tour” looks to the past too, obviously, embracing the work of Arlo’s father, the voice of the Dust Bowl Okies and other underdogs, who penned “This Land Is Your Land” as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” But it’s also a showcase for new songs written from lyrics Woody Guthrie left behind -- and for newer musical Guthries, who are in no short supply, thanks to Arlo. The bushy-haired hippie kid of the Woodstock Festival is now, at 58, a father of four and grandfather of five.

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Faiths’ equal billing

THREE generations of Guthries are milling about the church bell tower on this Sunday night. As Arlo himself relaxes on one sofa, a harmonica ready around his neck, his youngest daughter, Sarah Lee, 27, plops in the sofa across from him, cradling her own little girl, Olivia, who is not quite 4. Between them, a small table supports three lighted candles, while another to the side displays a drawing of St. Francis, a small skull (“to point out that the body is fleeting but the soul is forever”) and a bottle of sacred oil given to Arlo by his spiritual advisor Ma Jaya, a onetime Brooklyn housewife (Joyce Green Difiore Cho) who now heads an ashram in Florida.

Ma also provided the interfaith dedication that hangs over the entrance to Guthrie Center’s main room: “One God, Many Forms/One River, Many Streams/One People, Many Faces/One Mother, Many Children,” and above her words is a portrait of a somber Woody Guthrie with his guitar, pointing into space. Someone has made sure the message does not seem too heavy, however, by adding a cartoon-style balloon that has Woody saying, “He went that way....”

There’s another portrait of Woody in the bell tower lounge, beside one of Jesus. All faiths get equal billing here, even as Arlo says, “I’m still a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.”

By the time he was growing up in Coney Island, his father was all but done performing and about to show the first signs of Huntington’s, a genetically caused degeneration of the brain cells that often was confused then with mental illness. Woody’s mother, who had it too, spent the last years of her life in a hospital for the insane in Oklahoma, and Woody was hospitalized much of the last decade before his death in 1967 at 55, three years younger than his son is now. Woody later would be viewed as an iconic figure, his life the stuff of movies, but the reality then was that other folk singers had to stage a benefit concert in New York to help support the Guthrie family.

Arlo sometimes turns the grim period into fodder for the comic stories he spaces between songs on stage. One recalls how some people thought his dad was just weird, a misdiagnosis complicated by the fact that “he was weird” -- if you had him over to your house, he’d start scribbling songs and ideas on anything he could find, Arlo says, “use up all your paper products.”

Arlo also recalls a German psychiatrist at one hospital telling his mother that her husband had delusions of grandeur -- he believed he’d written all this stuff. So his mom went over there and Woody reported that someone finally had recognized him. Another patient in the mental ward said, “I know who you are, ‘You’re Woody Guthrie. I love your book “Bound for Glory.” ’ And my dad’s just so pleased. And finally he says, ‘You read my book?’ The man says, ‘No, I ate your book.’ ”

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More serendipity

THE bell tower lounge becomes busier as show time nears. Arlo’s bear-like oldest son, Abe, who has played keyboard for him for 23 years, changes into his concert shirt. Sarah Lee’s husband, Johnny Irion, practices his guitar across the room -- they have their own band when not with Arlo. On the “Legacy Tour” they’ll be joined at times by another daughter, Cathy, who has her own act, a duo, Folk Uke, with one of Willie Nelson’s daughters. And a few stops will include a third daughter, Annie, who usually has her hands full managing the family’s business affairs and her two school-age children.

Then there’s the family matriarch, Jackie Guthrie. The moment the Los Angeles stop is mentioned, she announces, “I’m from L.A.” and launches into the tale of how she and Arlo met, another moment of serendipity.

The short version is, “He was playing the club at the Troubadour, we got together and been together ever since.”

The long version tells how she was this flippy hippie girl -- that’s what they called her, “Flippy” -- who used to see the statue of Bullwinkle on Sunset Boulevard and joke that she was going to marry Bullwinkle. Except when Arlo arrived in spring ’69 to play the Troubadour, where she worked (“cleaning dressing rooms” and the like) she joked that she was going to marry him, only they didn’t even meet during his scheduled two weeks there. But then Neil Young canceled his two-week gig at the club, they held Arlo over and it happened. “It’s Neil’s fault,” says Jackie, who right afterward went back east with Arlo, though she did not join him at Woodstock that August. “I was pregnant,” she explains, with Abe. “Arlo said, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go.’ ”

The impending fatherhood also persuaded Arlo to give up his pad at ground zero of the folk movement, Greenwich Village, and get the farm up here in the Berkshires, where Jackie’s story resumes that October, as the fall foliage did its thing and “Arlo says, ‘Oh it’s going to peak in three days -- let’s get married then.’ ”

“I thought it would be a nice day,” Arlo says 36-plus years later.

“You know, we got more press than Jackie Onassis on our wedding,” she says.

“Our wedding picture was actually in National Geographic,” he says. “National Geographic!”

“I know why,” she says. “You were trying to be secretive about it, mysterious.”

“But still, National Geographic? They don’t got paparazzi. This was crazy. Not only that, in one of the magazines they said we had plastic flowers. That was the height of insult to flower people, you know?”

“We called Alice,” Jackie says. “She catered it.... Judy Collins sang ‘Suzanne.’ Your mom and everybody took the bus up. We didn’t actually send out invitations.... Everybody got the bus from New York.”

“That was,” he says, “a pretty good time.”

So is the reminiscing until George Laye comes in to report, “Nine minutes.” Laye was road manager for the singing group Joe & Eddie in the ‘60s but came east to visit the Guthries in 1971 and has been part of their extended family since, working as a carpenter at the farm, and in the office of their Rising Sun Records after Arlo split with Warner Brothers in the mid-’80s (“to make our records without contracts, without power lunches and without money”). Arlo’s philosophy for work around here is, “If you say, ‘That’s not my job,’ you don’t have a job.”

The plan for the evening is for Sarah Lee and her husband to do four songs, then have Arlo and Abe and the band come out, and maybe they’ll bring the littlest Guthrie up at the end -- granddaughter Olivia has already sung “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at a San Francisco Giants baseball game and does a mean “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

Laye also asks, “Can we do something at intermission for Wyldeflower?” a woman from Albany (a.k.a. Carolyn Madsen) who has been one of their most dedicated volunteers, doing the baking in the church’s kitchen, but is moving to Colorado.

“Tonight’s her last night,” Laye says. “I have a peace sign made out of a piece of the Woodstock fence [for her], and we’d just like you to say something from the stage and bring her up and let her cry for a couple of seconds.”

Arlo is worried about singling out one volunteer over others. “I’ll think about that,” he says as it’s time to face the smallest audience he sees all year, one that will be enjoying the last of Wyldeflower’s cookies and date nut bread.

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A varied audience

THE show attracts not only veterans of the ‘60s but young couples Sarah Lee’s age, and burly biker types, complete with tattoos, and a table of Canadians who saw Arlo in Toronto, then had to catch him on his home turf too. And a police chief, of course, still appreciative of how Arlo once volunteered the church for a fundraiser for a Stockbridge shop owner whose child had cancer, then volunteered Abe’s band too, then said, “Don’t tell anybody,” and showed up to play himself.

Jackie Guthrie directs a video camera at the stage as Arlo announces an addition that the church regulars probably noticed, “Finally got the ramp out there” for wheelchairs, and maybe they’ll get that heat and AC soon, he says. “Little by little, we’re getting there.”

Keeping history alive is hard indeed -- Arlo does his father’s song about the mass deaths of Italian workers and their families in Calumet, Mich., in 1913 in a crowded hall when someone yelled “Fire!” when there wasn’t one and notes how locals tried to preserve that hall but “the next generation wasn’t interested.”

He tells how there was a knock on the door once, when he was 13, and this strange-looking fellow says he wants to see his dad, “said his name’s Bob Dylan.” But Woody Guthrie is in the hospital, so the unknown Dylan goes there to pay homage “and it seems like right after that we were all singing Bob Dylan songs,” Arlo says. Then he deadpans, “So I went to see my dad after that ...,” and lets the audience figure it out.

Though he then does Dylan’s classic “Mr. Tambourine Man” in perfect Dylan voice and does some Carter Family tunes too, with his family, Arlo doesn’t ignore his own songs. He just doesn’t feel pressure here to do the ones he has to do on the road, namely “Coming Into Los Angeles,” or his only chart hit, 1972’s “The City of New Orleans,” that a cover of a Steve Goodman song. Onstage, he downplays his works as basically taking dictation of songs that come to him in dreams, and he does a haunting one about the night, 1976’s “Darkest Hour.” Only offstage does he admit his pride at hearing his daughters begin to use some of his love songs in their acts, ones he wrote for their mom.

During intermission, Arlo decides they should, after all, bring up the volunteer Wyldeflower when the show resumes. When he asks why anyone would move to Colorado, and warbles a few bars of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” to dissuade her, she calls out, “I have two grandchildren there.” Still, the baking grandma does cry on cue when Laye gives her the peace sign necklace supposedly made from the Woodstock fence.

Soon after, they bring up Arlo’s own granddaughter, but instead of joining the party, little Olivia buries her head in her papa’s shoulder. No “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” tonight.

Arlo is known to borrow an old used-car dealer’s line, “It’s not the age, it’s the mileage,” and he is an unusual mix of both. While his zeal and high-pitched voice remain those of a man far younger, his face shows some overtime on the road. Forget the literal miles -- there was a stretch when he lived in the church because Jackie was being treated for breast cancer and “rather than stay home, which was just not home without her, I stayed here.” There was the stretch too when they were going through the “divorce attempt that never succeeded.” There was the Arlo Zone store in nearby Pittsfield that didn’t make it and the years spent fixing up an old Coast Guard station in Florida for use as a home office, only to have a hurricane wreck that dream in 2004. “We weren’t insured,” shrugs Arlo, who has since moved the family record company up here, into his barn.

And that’s not mentioning living the first decades of your adult life not knowing whether you and your children and their children may have inherited the disease that claimed too many Guthries before them. Experts in the disease say there are no guarantees, but you usually learn your fate by age 40 or so. It’s not been that long, then, that Arlo has known that he, and they, are likely in the clear.

“Like everybody, you go through stuff and try to make the best of it,” he says offstage. “It’s not easy being a human being. You do the best you can.”

On stage, they wrap up the night with a few sing-alongs: “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Woody’s “This Land Is Your Land” and a new one Arlo has adopted from the lyrics his dad left behind, “My Peace,” a brief two verses that he’s not released on a recording but is already using to close shows. “My peace, my peace / Is all I’ve got / That I could give / To you.”

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Back to Woody

THE challenge in the end is to avoid living in the past but let the past, however bittersweet, live through you.

Arlo Guthrie, who spends 10 months a year on the road, has already figured out what tour he wants to do after this family legacy tour, and the concept sends him into squeals of delight. He says, “I’m getting a little jealous of all my friends being able to get back together with their original bandmates and do these reunion tours. And I started out by myself. So I’ve created the ‘Arlo Guthrie Solo Reunion Tour.’ It’s called ‘Together Again With the Original Band.’ And it will just be ... me!”

The other idea that gets Arlo going is making a film of the book his dad was writing when he died, “Seeds of Man,” a fictional account of a trip Woody made while a young man, with his family, to find a “lost vein of silver” in Texas that Woody’s grandfather supposedly had once discovered and claimed. After they failed to find it, Woody went on to his other career of rambling and writing and singing and seeming weird.

“What it really did is it set him out on the course to become who he was,” Arlo says, but what tickles him is 1) how he’s gonna find the Guthrie silver, for real, when they make the movie, and 2) how the entire family history might have changed had Woody found the vein and not had to pursue that other nonsense.

“I would have been a rich kid or something,” says Arlo Guthrie, who, in his own way, is.

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