The Storyteller

FOLK SINGER ARLO GUTHRIE IS ON TOUR WITH WHAT’S LEFT OF HIM

By Laura Mars
Photos By David Barnum
Historical Photos By Ken Regan/Camera5

From the pages of our May/June 2023 Issue.

“What’s Left of Me” is the name of Arlo Guthrie’s 2023 East Coast tour. But it’s clear after spending time with him at his home high on a hill in Washington that there’s a lot left of this 75-year-old music legend. Yes, he put the Berkshires on the map with Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Yes, he founded The Guthrie Center in Great Barrington. Yes, another of his songs, Massachusetts, is our state folk song. Yes, he’s performed since age 13. But no, he’s not done.

A young Arlo with his guitar.

The story behind “What’s Left of Me” — because there is a story behind most things in Arlo’s life—goes back to when someone came up to him and his wife, Marti Ladd, in a restaurant and asked if he was Arlo Guthrie. “I am what’s left of him,” he said to the fan. And to Marti, “I am what’s left of who they are thinking of.” The phrase caused them to think about life at a certain age. They made “What’s Left of Me” hats, which elicit smiles and nods of understanding from strangers in the supermarket, usually older folks who get it because they’ve lost something, which invariably happens if you live long enough. Life becomes a come-as-you-are party.

The Guthrie house and stone barn studio—“The Farm”—is found at the end of a dirt road surrounded by quiet views. It’s where the Guthries return to after spending winters in their home on Florida’s East Coast. I let out a long exhale when I pulled up to the home, feeling the tension dissipate in the cool spring morning mist. Stepping inside the house, I caught my breath as I took in the large, light-filled room, anchored by a piano holding court in front of a million-dollar view. (Catch some of those early-morning views on Arlo’s Facebook page and Instagram feed, @folkslinger.) Looking around, I took note of guitars on the chaise lounge, next to the couch, as well as a sitar and small accordion behind glass.

With Pete Seeger at the Clearwater Benefit in Tarrytown, New York, in 1969.

The large dining table, which was big enough to seat 12, also commanded attention. And that was where we sat and conducted the interview—Arlo at one end and Marti, his friend for more than 20 years and wife since 2021, at the other. We talked about his tour, his music, the Dream Away Lodge, The Guthrie Center, his kids, his parents, his “protestness,” and the Berkshires, whose hilltowns, he says, are pretty much the same as when he bought this place in the late-’60s. “You go over the hill to South County, a lot has changed. But around here, in the town of Washington, not much has changed. I think we made the right decision to be here.”

Arlo relaxing in his Berkshire home in Washington, Massachusetts.

The first question was whether Arlo will perform his songs during his storytelling tour, which features an unscripted conversation between storyteller extraordinaire and Grammy Museum Executive Director Bob Santelli, rarely seen video, and audience Q&A. (Arlo and Marti created Gut3 Productions for the tour, and Marti is the director of set design for the series.) It’s hard to imagine there won’t be a guitar on stage, within arm’s reach. Nope, he says. He retired after a series of strokes and “because I was losing the ability to perform at the standard to which I had become accustomed.” (To our pleasure, he did pick up a guitar and strummed a bit during the photo session.) He says he’d love to do this show in the Berkshires and will consider it after this tour wraps up. Fingers crossed!

Arlo’s stories come from the times and places in his life that hold fond memories. Those memories include the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, just ten miles from The Farm. Arlo regularly visited the restaurant in the ’70s and ’80s, enjoying the food, friendship, and music of owner Maria “Mama” Frasca and her daughters. He recalls bringing Bob Dylan their, when Dylan was playing in Springfield with the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975—Dylan, Joan Baez, Alan Ginsberg, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and “whoever else.”

After her daughters sold the Dream Away, Arlo became friends with the new owner, Daniel Osman, and continued going there once a week. “They had the best blue cheese wedge salad,” recalls Marti. “When everything became cookie-cutter, the Dream Away, with mismatched chairs, mismatched tableware, was charming.” She and Arlo both look forward to the reopening of the Dream Away under new ownership, with Daniel still very much involved. (See page 60.) “When the Dream Away was closed last year, there was nowhere to go,” says Arlo.

Like father, like daughters Cathy and Sarah Lee Guthrie. The Guthrie Girls are performing at the Dream Away on June 18. “For the folks who appreciate it, it will always be an icon,” Arlo says about the Dream Away. “For the folks that don’t get it, fine. There is enough of a parking problem as it is. And, for the record, the food is awful, you don’t want to go there.” (Wink. Wink.)

Another blast from Arlo’s past is the Berkshire Folk Society, founded by Hank Grover, father of Berkshire musician David Grover, who died in 2021. “The first concert I ever gave that was a ticketed event was put on by Hank Grover,” recalls Arlo. “It was held at the Berkshire Athenaeum, and I was probably around 16 or 17. Years later, of course, I started working with David and we became close. As a matter of fact, in the movie I made in 1968 [Alice’s Restaurant], my roommate in college is played by David’s brother, Michael Grover. I had a long relationship with the Berkshire Folk Society, now long gone, and the entire Grover family.”

The Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, formerly the old Trinity Church, offers more intriguing history. It was the home of Alice and Ray Brock in the ’60s, site of the famous 1965 Thanksgiving dinner—and where Arlo got the garbage that wound up the subject of the 1967 song, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. If none of this rings a bell, look it up. It’s an Arlo story worth reading. (We recently found Alice in Provincetown, and her story was highlighted in the Holiday 2022 issue of Berkshire Magazine and can be read on berkshiremag.com.)

Ray died in 1979, Alice moved away in the 1980s, and Arlo bought the building in 1991, creating an interfaith church whose goal is to meet the ongoing needs of the community and to support cultural preservation and educational achievement.

When he walks through its doors today, he doesn’t pay too much attention to the center’s history. He asks himself what’s going on now, what’s going to happen in the future, and feels confident about its future. His grandson, Shivadas, is director; Arlo’s daughter, Annie, is executive director.

“We have a responsibility,” says Arlo. “A lot of things have changed. You have to learn and accommodate and grow, and we do the best we can. But I’m old school. The church needed to have a future, and it’s not with me.”

Arlo and his wife Marti Ladd at their Berkshire retreat—“The Farm”—rich with history, elegance, and as comfortable as a denim shirt.

Despite new leadership, his association with The Guthrie Center continues. He will likely be around on May 21 for the annual Garbage Trail Walk to support Huntington’s Disease, which took his father and grandmother. Will Arlo ride his motorcycle along the six-mile route, as in years past? Marti speaks up, eyebrows raised, “After three strokes and compromised coordination, I say take the insurance off of it.”

“It’s ready to roll,” says Arlo mischievously, to which Marti responds, “He says that just to piss me off.”

Ongoing events at The Guthrie Center include free community lunches every Wednesday and monthly musical Hootenannies. The Guthrie clan also will gather there to celebrate their Scottish roots. The family’s history goes back to the Guthrie Castle in Scotland. Hang on tight. It’s time to go for a ride with Arlo.

“About 40 or 50 years ago,” begins Arlo, “my uncle, who was really my father’s uncle and cousin, a fiddle player who was not a great fiddle player, but a dance fiddler, meaning he didn’t have to be that accurate . . .”

As the story goes, this uncle tells Arlo that the family comes from a famous castle in Scotland with a famous bell, a story that Arlo chalked up to too much drink until about 20 years ago, when he gets a call from a Harry Guthrie in Pittsfield “on behalf of the Friends of Guthrie Castle.” Wait a minute. There really is a castle? “Oh yes,” assures Harry, Arlo’s distant relative, now deceased, and former head of Clan Guthrie worldwide. There is a castle, which the Guthrie family has lived in for 900 years. And now they were selling it.

So, Arlo goes to Scotland to discover that the last of the Guthrie women to live in the castle had a daughter who married an Australian gambler. You see where this is going. The castle is gone, but about five years ago, Arlo gets another call. The new owners of the Guthrie estate houses (apparently part of the laird system of inheritance) don’t want the portraits of the ancestors. Can he help?

“No, I can’t,” he recalls saying, spreading his arms as he tells the story to indicate the large abstract paintings by his guru that encircle the room we are sitting in. “I don’t have room on my walls.”

But there was the church, which is where the portraits now live.

“Now the church is one of the main spokes in the hub of Guthrie clanness,” continues Arlo. “The castle is gone, the estates are gone, but the portraits are still here.” This year’s gathering of Guthrie clan members in June, with events that include a whole lot of live music by the Guthrie children, a Guthrie Castle artifacts panel led by Arlo himself, kilt & tar- tan night, and a Guthrie family ceilidh.

The conversation turns to Arlo’s feelings about performing songs that audiences want to hear, but that he might not want to play after the umpteenth time.

“Music is the soundtrack of your life,” he says. “It’s the responsibility of a musician to keep providing those memories—when you first fall in love, when you leave home, when your dog dies. The audience paid money to see you do that song to trigger that response. And you don’t feel comfortable doing it? Screw you.”

Another image of Arlo at the concert in Tarrytown. Here, he’s working the crowd . . . most likely telling stories!

He has a similar response regarding fans who say to him “Kill, kill!,” a line from Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. “They don’t come up in person, but I do get comments on social media, not only about those words but other phrases, from people mostly in their 70s and 80s, for whom those words mean something. They are words they heard when they were younger, and they made an impression. It’s funny to them, and you put up with it as best you can.”

Does Arlo consider himself a protest singer? Not in the traditional sense. He argues that everybody expresses themselves, and that is a protest of the way things work. Anybody who grows, who changes, is a protester. He sees the individualization of the ’60s as a good thing but acknowledges that in the process we lost something, like operating as a group, as a team. Take loudmouths, for example.

“I don’t care who the loudmouth is—left, right, or center politically,” he says. “I don’t trust them, people who seek the spotlight at the expense of everybody else. Not as politicians, teachers, chiefs of police, or lawyers.”

Sound advice to pass down to his four children, Sarah Lee, Abe, Cathy, and Annie; seven grandchildren; and a six-month-old great-grand-daughter. “Yes, we are great-grandparents,” Arlo says with a smile. “There’s nothing like having a great-grandchild that reminds you that you are not here forever. But the wisdom of a family doesn’t get lost just because someone dies. It just looks different.”

But does it sound different? Arlo’s father, Woody Guthrie, died before Arlo had a chance to hear him perform live. About 20 years ago, his sister, Nora, was sent an early 1940s recording of his mother, Marjorie, interviewing Woody on stage. As the siblings listened, they heard Woody go off script, rambling on with stories that seemed would never get to the point, but somehow did.

Here we thought Arlo was the original storyteller of the family!

“I suddenly realized that a lot of what I have, I have to thank my father for,” he says. “I thought I was being me, which I was, but I was also being a link in a chain rather than a singular point of light. It will happen to my kids, my grandkids, my great-grandkids.” ■

Arlo is touring the New England area, and his next show is on April 28 at the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Then he appears at The Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center in Stowe, Vermont, on May 27. Check gut3.me for updates on his What’s Left of Me tour, and sign up for the Garbage Trail Walk on May 21 at guthriecenter.org.