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Home , Marjorie Guthrie

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 1

MR. JOHN SHATTUCK: Hi. I can assure you, I’m not the main act. I’m John Shattuck. I’m CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of my wonderful colleague, Deborah Leff, who is sitting in the front row, who runs the Kennedy Library Museum, we’re thrilled to have you all here. And welcome to this foggy Dorchester outpost of Alice’s Restaurant . [laughter] [applause]

And I want you to know that Deborah and I tossed a coin to see who’d get the chance to introduce our guest of honor tonight. And obviously, I won. And she is deeply, deeply … she is in deep mourning. And in order to console her, I’ve had to agree to give her all of my records, which is, you know, a pretty big deal for me.

I want to thank our sponsors of tonight in all of our events: the Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, The Boston Globe , and 90.9 WBUR, which broadcasts all Kennedy Library Forums on Sunday evenings at 8:00. And certainly, I know this one will be listened to by many, many people.

Just a few words about why we’re here in this wonderful setting and we’ve been able to attract our guest of honor to come here. JFK was probably the last President to have enjoyed a pretty good relationship with songwriters. And the way things are going, he may be the last President ever to enjoy such a relationship. They liked him because he liked to challenge things the way they were, and so did they. And we know that President Kennedy attracted the best and the brightest. And they were not just the policy wonks and the people who wanted SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 2

to attend meetings in Washington, but they were also artists and poets and folksingers who wanted to escape from the 1950s. And he gave them a special way to do that.

It’s reported, for example -- I don’t know whether Arlo knows this -- that Phil Ochs bought his first guitar with the money that he got from a high stakes, high odds bet with a lot of people in Ohio that JFK would beat Nixon. And he got enough money from that that he was able to put himself into the business.

When JFK got to the White House, he opened the doors to many of these new performers. One of them, on a more serious note, Miriam Makeba, was invited to the White House just after she had been stripped of her South African citizenship for her anti-apartheid activities. And President Kennedy, then, invited her to perform at the White House. [applause] And, of course, when Dr. Martin Luther King and the leaders of the civil rights movement came to the White House with the March on Washington in August 1963, the songs of protest sounded loud and clear across the Washington Mall.

President Kennedy summed up what he believed about politics and the arts in a speech he gave in Amherst in 1962 about another great New England poet, Robert Frost. And he might just as well have been talking about Woody or Arlo Guthrie when he said, “Those who question power make an indispensable contribution to our nation. The highest duty of an artist in a democracy is to remain true to himself, and let the chips fall where they may.”

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And we all know what happened to the children of the ‘60s. I can see many of you here and certainly see one up here. We marched, and we sang, and we protested the war, and the denial of civil rights. And we listened to , and Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, and , and Peter, Paul and Mary, and very soon to Arlo Guthrie who put it all together for us in Alice’s Restaurant .

Today, we have another war and lots more violations of civil rights. And we’re beginning to hear new songs from Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen and many others. And once again, Arlo Guthrie’s special brand of folk music and storytelling are telling truth to power.

I want to just say a few words of introduction, as if he needs one, of our guest before turning things over to tonight’s wonderful moderator, Dick Pleasants, who many of you know as the voice of New England Folk Radio, who comes to us from WUMB, the radio station of our sister institution which is right next door at UMass Boston. And I see our wonderful Chancellor Collins here in the front row.

Arlo was born in Coney Island. [audience response] [laughter] Anybody else? [audience response] All right. There you go.

He was the oldest son of Woody and Marjorie Guthrie. And his mother … we all know and love his father. And his mother was a professional dancer with the Company and the founder of the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease, which we all know tragically struck Woody down in the prime of his life. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 4

Arlo grew up with a lot of musicians around; people like Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert, and , and Leadbelly, and Cisco Houston, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, all of whom he says influenced him as he began to develop his own great talents.

He also worked with other singer/songwriters and political social commentators like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He hit the big time at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967. And he’s been playing his guitar and harmonica and telling stories ever since. And you’ll see there’s some evidence of that right over to his left, fortunately, for us tonight, all over America and all over the world.

But his home and his heart are right here in Massachusetts. We’ve had a little chat about that upstairs before coming down. And I know he loves to hang out in the Berkshires near his old church in Great Barrington that he made famous in Alice’s Restaurant . And several years ago, I’m sure you all know that Arlo bought the church and turned it into the headquarters of the Guthrie Center and Foundation that he’s dedicated to serving the community, protecting the environment, promoting healthcare and a cure for Huntington’s Disease, and preserving the world’s local cultures from the ravages of globalization. So it’s with great pleasure that I ask you to join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library the great and incomparable Arlo Guthrie. [applause]

MR. ARLO GUTHRIE: Thank you.

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 5

MR. DICK PLEASANTS: It’s great to have Arlo here. And it’s great to see you all here. And you should all stand up a little bit and get a little exercise because this is what we do at rallies. Just get up.

MR. GUTHRIE: Can I stand up there?

MR. PLEASANTS: Stand up. [laughter]

MR. GUTHRIE: Cheer the sign. [A sign from audience member protesting the war -- applause]

MR. PLEASANTS: I’d start into aweem away , but you wouldn’t like it. [laughter] Well Arlo, it’s great to see you.

MR. GUTHRIE: Thank you.

MR. PLEASANTS: And it’s been a long time since we last met, but always hear about what you’re doing, and doing great things. And one of the last things you did was the City of New Orleans trip. It was the trip down the Mississippi, via train, down to New Orleans, taking instruments down to players down there. And you had a cast of dozens there.

MR. GUTHRIE: Yes, about 30 of us.

MR. PLEASANTS: Thirty of you doing that. That must have been quite a trip. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 6

MR. GUTHRIE: It was hell. But it was great. [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: Raised a lot of instruments for the musicians there.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, you know, what we did was we were sitting around after the, well, during the Katrina disaster. And these days, you know, when you have something like that happening -- whether it’s a tsunami here or there, an earthquake, whatever it is, some kind of disaster going on -- you’ve got millions of people around the world who can tune in and sort of watch it, you know. So we were watching it. And we sent some cash into the Red Cross, you know, all that kind of stuff. And still, it’s still unfolding as time is going by, not just the natural disaster, but the sort of manmade one on top of it. And it just kept getting worse and worse. And you’re trying to wonder, you know, what’s happening here. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t actually think of something to do. I wasn’t in a position to actually do a whole hell of a lot. And then I thought, “You know what? Sometimes you have to do something anyhow. Sometimes you can’t wait around to get the great plan or the good idea. And you just have to do something anyhow.”

So I called up my kids. Or I sent them, actually, a little email, said “What about this? What if we took the train, the City of New Orleans -- which Steve Goodman’s song did really well for us -- what if we took it from Chicago, and we went down to New Orleans, and we stopped along the way, and just did a couple of fundraisers or something with the intent of not trying to solve everybody’s SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 7

problem, but just get the musicians that had lost some instruments back into sort of a workable shape, somebody that lost a guitar or a horn or a piano, or something like that? And what about the little clubs?”

You know, I started thinking, “We got our own … we got the church going. And we got music in there in the summer.” I thought, “What happens if this place is under 20 foot of water? What would we lose that is probably not insured? You don’t even know you got it until it’s not there.”

So I started thinking about all that stuff. And I thought, okay. So I sent out the little email, a “what if.” And within -- I’m not making this up -- within 20 minutes, I got an email response from Richard Pryor saying, “I heard about your idea. And what can I do?” And I thought, Richard Pryor? [laughter] I had never heard from Richard Pryor in my life. I never met Richard Pryor. I love the guy. But I was trying to wonder, I mean, how the hell did he get this? Well, it turns out that the kids had sent it to their friends. And some of their friends had sent it to their friends. And anyway, within 20 minutes, it gets to Richard Pryor, and he’s writing back. And I knew he wasn’t well. So I wrote him back. I said -- I forgot what I said exactly, but it was something like -- oh, I can’t even say it here. But, you know … [laughter] So, at any rate, I just walked around with this email from Richard, just going, “Look who wrote me.” [laughter] And 24 hours later, I got a phone call from Willie Nelson saying, “Is there anything I can do?” And I thought, “Willie freakin’ Nelson calling me on the phone.”

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So I thought, “Well maybe this wasn’t just an idea. Maybe this was actually going to happen or something.” I have a lot of ideas. Most of the time, we don’t do nothing, you know. [laughter] So it looked like it might be real. And then I called some people and I said, “Well let’s see if Amtrak’s interested in doing this, helping us out with the train thing. And let’s call some other musicians, and see if we can get like a cast together that can go and do these shows.” This was like three weeks before the train was supposed to leave, we’re just starting. And normally, it takes about a year to put one show together of this kind of magnitude. So we’ve got three weeks to put eight shows together.

So I basically killed my daughters who work with me. And we got a crew of about 30 people, some incredible musicians, some very talented promoters, some local people in all of these little stops. We got Amtrak on board. We got some support from institutions, you know, like the Gibson Guitar, and anybody that had something possibly related. And we took this trip. But it wasn’t like I thought it was going to be. I didn’t know that the train left at 5:00 in the morning, you know. [laughter] I thought, you know, they give you a train, and you get on it like the old days. And the train waits for you to get some sleep, and does all that. Well that wasn’t going to happen.

So we would do these gigs. We would show up at, you know, do a show in the evening from 7:00 to 11:00, get out of there around 1:00 in the morning, drive to a train track somewhere which was basically an outdoor facility because most of the depots had been torn down since the ‘50s, be standing out there in -10 degrees around Chicago somewhere. The wind’s blowing. I’m waiting for the freakin’ SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 9

train, which is always … well, I shouldn’t say always, but generally late. And then you get on it, and you only go a half hour before you have to get off. Now it’s 4:00 in the morning. And you go to the hotel, the next hotel. You get some sleep. But the crew has to be up at 6:00 or 7:00 to set up the stage. Well, you do that for two weeks, and you’re basically dead. But we did it. And the feeling, that’s what kept us going. We would show up at these stations, these depots, even in Chicago, the big stations. And every one of the guys that worked the stations were giving us the thumbs up and slapping us on the back and saying, “This is great, man. This is really great.” And there were people everywhere who wrote us, or who showed up, and who waited for the trains to arrive. And the hearts of people were into doing something. And I think most people were just so frustrated by the government’s lack of ability to do anything with the organizations that were set up to do stuff. They really wanted to see somebody do something. Because we all heard horror stories of guys that were bringing in water that were stopped, you know, by armed guards saying, “You can’t come in here until it’s cleared by this guy and this guy and this guy and this guy.” So finally, anyway, we get down there. And New Orleans hadn’t had anything really happening yet. But when we showed up, and when we showed up with Willie Nelson, that was like … the place went bat shit, basically. It’s all you can say. [laughter]

And they gave us the tour. And we walked around to all the devastation and stuff like that. And I tell you, it was kind of interesting because I didn’t come away … You would think that seeing that kind of stuff you would have a definitive feeling. But I didn’t. It wasn’t confusion, it was just odd. I remember walking through all of this disaster, totally void of life -- no birds, no dogs, no kids, no nobody. And SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 10

my first thought was kind of odd. I thought, “You know what? There’s a lot of … This is a disaster for a lot of people. But there are millions of people around the world who would move into this place tomorrow and be thankful.” And it began to dawn on me how much work there is to do in the world. And it was just so daunting. I mean it was just so … All you could do at that point was stop thinking, start singing, do the stuff, and just go on. And that’s what we did. And that’s why, when I said we lived a year inside of two weeks, I wasn’t kidding. Well, we all aged a lot, but I think we got smarter in some ways and at least began to see the scope of, to put that in perspective in the rest of the world. You know, when you think of kids living in garbage dumps or something like that, even the bombed out part of New Orleans don’t look so bad. So it was great for us.

MR. PLEASANTS: The only reason I brought that up was because Arlo, obviously, he’s a man of action. And he does something. He reacts to it. And the topical song or the protest song that we’re discussing tonight is something that moves people to action, moves people to think, brings people together into groups, small groups, large groups. Arlo, what was the first song you ever sang that sort of brought people together, other than Alice’s Restaurant ? Or was that the first one?

MR. GUTHRIE: I think it was Ballad of the Green Beret , wasn’t it? [laughter] Oh no, that wasn’t me. [laughter] You know, there’s all kinds of protest songs. You generally … I got to say, I’m not a professional protester. I have very little interest in politics per se. I mean, I only get involved in things because they affect me personally. You know, when somebody tells me what kind of weed I can grow in my backyard, I go from being a farmer to a social activist. [laughter] You know SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 11

what I’m saying? I didn’t mean to become political. It’s just that somebody’s telling me what to do. And when you tell people who they can marry or where they can live or what their story is, or any of the usual stuff that we have sort of engaged ourselves with in the last 50 years, normal, everyday people that may not have an interest in politics become political. They become social activists. And, when you take that kind of action, frankly, it’s … I think, well, let me put it this way. I’ve met a lot of people who are always looking for something to react to, looking for something to occupy their mind or their story. I don’t trust those guys as much as I trust people who are just regular people who get pissed off enough about something that they have to say something and stand up and do something. Those are the people whose reactions I tend to trust. Not that there aren’t good and notable exceptions. But for the most part, I get really leery of people who don’t have enough to do with their life or something. And so, their life becomes a professional unhappy person. [laughter] And I just don’t … That’s not the kind of people you want to have a beer with, you know. [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: Well, protest songs have come from Aunt Molly Jackson in the ‘40s, and the union fights, and up into the ‘60s with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War later on. Of course, during President Kennedy’s period, it was the civil rights movement per se. And Phil Ochs was strong. And Tom Paxton was very active back then. Of course, Pete Seeger and the Weavers who came up through the ‘50s, and your dad who wrote some great songs back in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 12

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, Phil Ochs is a good example of what I was talking about. I knew Phil Ochs really well. When I was a kid, I would go down to the Village in New York, and hang out till way past when I was supposed to be home. And I’d go stay with Phil. And he was one of those guys who caught … He got so caught up in what was going on that, when that thing wasn’t going on anymore, he didn’t have anybody else to be. You know what I mean?

MR. PLEASANTS: Yes.

MR. GUTHRIE: It was very sad.

MR. PLEASANTS: Very sad.

MR. GUTHRIE: That’s what happened to him. I think that’s what the Bible says, “What does it profit a man to gain a whole world and to lose his own soul?” And you’d never … and I think that’s what happens to people who … and I’m not somebody that goes around quoting that stuff, generally. [laughter] But what I’m saying is I understand it. You don’t want to …. It’s good to get, I think it’s good to get involved in the world, in all of the things that are going on, but not to the point where you lose who you are, and not to the point where you lose your own spirit and your own soul. That’s why I don’t hang around political parties as much as I would have, or groups of organizations and stuff, because I might be with them on one thing but I might not be with them on everything.

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And I think what makes this country work, and if it’s going to work again, it’s going to take the kind of people who are not afraid to stand up and say what they want, and not have to play the game of supporting things you don’t like in order to get the things you do like. And we’ve been doing that for so long now. [applause] And by the way, I’m not prescribing this because I don’t assume that what I’ve just said actually helps. [laughter] I think you have to do it. I have to do it because that’s me. But I wouldn’t prescribe that to anyone else because, in the long run of things, it might be worth doing some of these other things. So I can only tell you how I feel about it.

MR. PLEASANTS: How about doing us a song? [applause]

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh, yes. [laughter] I don’t have a song about that, though, Dick. Probably make one up. That’s what I do, you know. Because the older I get, now, the smarter I’ve been looking to people. [laughter] And they’ve been asking me to speak at functions like this. [laughter] And it’s when I get there about this time in the program that I say it. Well, I let them know I don’t actually know that much. It’s too late now. [laughter] All right. What would we like to … Oh, I know what I’ll do. This thing is something new. Might fit here. [testing instrument] No. That might be a sign. [testing instrument] We checked it out this afternoon. It was working fine. Plugged in. Turned on, even though I’m still not used to turning on the acoustic guitar. [laughter] So maybe now is not the best time for a song.

MR. PLEASANTS: I guess not, Arlo. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 14

MR. GUTHRIE: Give them time to solve this.

MR. PLEASANTS: While they’re working on this, let’s talk a little bit …

MR. GUTHRIE: Let’s bring this over here.

MR. PLEASANTS: I knew that was going to happen. [laughter]

MR. GUTHRIE: Still sounds fine to you. [testing instrument]

MR. PLEASANTS: It’s not doing it.

MR. GUTHRIE: Is it this cable?

MR. PLEASANTS: I don’t think so.

MR. GUTHRIE: Trust me, it sounds better when it’s working. [laughter] Well, let’s let them play with it. And let’s just … I’ll sit here and chat with you.

MR. PLEASANTS: When you were growing up, you were surrounded by some wonderful folks -- your father, Woody, of course.

MR. GUTHRIE: Can they hear you, too? [laughter] No.

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 15

MR. PLEASANTS: You can’t hear me? [audience response] When you were growing up, you were surrounded by your father, Woody, and Cisco Houston, and all these wonderful folks. Was it a time that sort of made you lunge right into the music business and to use that as a sort of kicking and starting point for your career?

MR. GUTHRIE: I’ll tell you the truth. [testing equipment] Hang on. We’re just having technical difficulty. [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: Hey, Arlo.

MR. GUTHRIE: Yes.

MR. PLEASANTS: How are you doing?

MR. GUTHRIE: Doing all right, man.

MR. PLEASANTS: Is your mike working yet?

MR. GUTHRIE: No.

MR. PLEASANTS: My mike wasn’t working, and now your mike isn’t working. There’s a conspiracy here. Can we write a song about this? [laughter]

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MR. GUTHRIE: Well, this one was working. So let me ask you a question from here. [testing equipment] What’s that? What does that mean? [laughter] [playing guitar] Yes, the monitor got really loud, though. Turn that down. [applause] [playing guitar]

Actually, I’ll sing you this. I wrote this watching the TV during the Katrina thing. Because what amazed me was that, as the days were going by, every once in a while -- I mean there’s only so much disaster you can watch. And so, I’d flip the channel, and there’d be somebody selling jewelry or something like that. And it amazed me. In some ways, it was kind of comforting, actually, to see that in some ways, life goes on no matter what … that there are things …. and here we are in the midst of the worst disaster to hit the living memory of most people that are alive in the country, except for maybe a few that could remember maybe the dust bowl or something like that, back years ago when millions of Americans had to leave their homes and their families and look for stuff to eat and a job of some kind, or shelter, you know. But that took years to unfold. And this was happening in days. [playing guitar] So I wrote this little song somewhere in the midst of all that.

[playing guitar/singing song] [applause]

MR. PLEASANTS: A great song, great song. When did you write that?

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh, I guess during Katrina. Can you hear me now?

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 17

MR. PLEASANTS: Now I can. Now I can hear myself speak.

MR. GUTHRIE: [singing] [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: Over the years, you’ve been on the road a lot with Pete Seeger, playing in front of some pretty powerful audiences, I’m sure -- different audiences than the Arlo audiences by themselves because they have the Pete people mixed in. You tend to do a lot of the wonderful standard songs like If I Had a Hammer and Midnight Special , and things like that with Pete’s audience.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, of course, I grew up listening to most of those songs before I was able to play them. And by the time I was able to play them … As a matter of fact, the first active thing I ever, the first action I ever took as an individual that could be, in some way, construed as being a political action was the result of being a kid in grammar school, and we went to hear Pete Seeger. And we pulled up in the school bus on the street. And there were these sort of right wing, John Birch Society protestors outside the Pete Seeger show, saying, “Pete’s a commie. Don’t go,” or something like that. And I walked up to them. And they had these pamphlets they were handing out. I said, “Is that true? Is that Seeger really a pinko commie?” And they said, “Yeah.” I said, “Gimme them pamphlets.” And I got all the kids to take the pamphlets. And then, when they were out of pamphlets, we all went inside with the pamphlets. And they had no more to pass out. So they went home. [laughter] [applause] Sort of a win-win situation. [laughter] I forgot -- That wasn’t the answer to your question, but I guess at some point … SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 18

MR. PLEASANTS: Well, you can make up your own answers. And that’s fine.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, to answer your question to some point, when I started actually performing with Pete -- and I did shows with Pete for about 30 years, starting in ’60-whatever it was, and all the way up until just a few years ago when he more or less began to slow down a little bit, take it easy. But all of those songs that were the If I Had a Hammer-type songs, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? , all of these songs that were really important at that time. And they were important for a number of reasons. First of all, they were important because music was the primary vehicle for discussion back 40 years ago. Now you have all kinds of things. You got the Internet and whatever. But in those days, the only way that you could actually say something was through songs that maybe hinted at or pointed at or in some way created the feeling of hope and possibility that you weren’t seeing on the TV or listening to on the radio, for the most part. And so, the songs were important to people who not only were young like me at the time, but these were the same kind of songs being sung by the likes of Pete that were important in the ‘30s, in the ‘40s when people were struggling to be able to speak for themselves in the union halls, in places where people were struggling for decent wages and stuff. And there was a long history of songs being the vehicles for giving people the courage and sustaining the interest and the enthusiasm. And I’ll give you a great example.

I remember, when you look … I should say it this way. When you look back at the history of all of the events that were going on in the ‘60s, whether it was the civil SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 19

rights movement, the anti-war movement, the clean the water, fix the trees, save the air, burn the lingerie, whatever the hec it was, you know, there was a lot of stuff going on. And you tend to view it as all singular events that don’t have a lot in common. But generally, as far as I could tell -- and my recollection is that they were mostly familiar faces at all of these different things; they weren’t separate. It was because it was the same critical mass of people that you needed. You didn’t need most people. You didn’t need more than half the people. What you needed was a critical mass of people, enough to be able to make a dent in the consciousness of the times. And so, you had people who were active in all of these different things. And we would be marching around Washington or whatever it was, or up in Seabrook. There were all kinds of stuff going on. And there would be Pete with this big banjo. And he’d be singing at the top of his lungs and playing all these songs, you know. [singing a song] And people would be singing and stuff like that.

So year after year, event after event, people began to learn the songs, whatever the story was, you could swap the verse for I’m not going to do this no more to I’m not going to do that no more. [laughter] You know what I mean. They were sort of ahead of their time. They were modular. [laughter]

So here I was now, not that long ago, in Washington, D.C. It was the last unfolding of the NAMES Project Quilt, the AIDS Quilt. And it had taken up the entire Mall in Washington at that point. And so I’m standing there. I know friends on every one of those block-wide panels. And later that afternoon, we had this big march. And so we’re marching around. But there was nobody playing anything. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 20

There was nobody singing anything. Pete wasn’t there. And there were a few people that had brought like a flute or something, or maybe a guitar or two. And they would know a verse or half a verse to a song. And the promoters of the event at the end of the march had had these big speakers set up. And they were playing this canned music. And it was too loud for people to be talking to each other, like you and me. And it killed the atmosphere and the spontaneity of the crowd. And my first thought was, “Here are people who, if they had been involved in some of these other events 30 years ago, 40 years ago, they would have had the experience to know the difference between canned music and live, passionate people”. But they weren’t there, whoever had promoted this event. Or they didn’t get it or something. And I thought, “This is the stuff that gets lost over time is the experience of participating in these kinds of events.” We had learnt something 30 or 40 years ago that there are a lot of people today who have no experience having had. And not having had it, the events that are going on today don’t have, in some ways, the same passion and the same excitement and the same rallying sort of feeling that some of these older ones had.

So it becomes more and more important, to answer your question, that some of these kinds of songs and some of these kinds of experiences get handed down to succeeding generations of people so that we don’t lose the power that we know can exist in these kinds of activities. You don’t want to just … It’s not a matter of just massing together and letting the TV cameras show you. That’s not what it was about.

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I remember the day, for example, when individual people began to promote their own wonderful stuff. Up until that point, people were … If we went to an anti-war movement, all the signs said “No More War.” You know what I mean?

MR. PLEASANTS: Yes.

MR. GUTHRIE: I remember going to Seabrook. And there was a great sign that said, “Lesbian plumbers from Albany, New York against nuclear power.” [laughter] And I thought, “Now that’s a great freakin’ sign.” [laughter] But when everybody starts holding up their own sign, you lose the passion of the thing that everybody is there agreeing on. And so, in the age of individual expressiveness, whatever you want to call it, we lost a little bit of the unity that we might have had 30 or 40 years ago when people sort of stuck to their own thing.

Now, I’m not making a comment whether it’s a good thing or bad thing. What I’m basically saying is that there are experiences that people have doing these kinds of events. And some of them are probably fairly valuable to the society as a whole. And you don’t want to lose those things. And one of the best ways to keep that going is through the songs that guys like Pete Seeger wrote and was able to sing, that everybody can learn. And if we have enough events going on in the foreseeable future, which it’s looking more promising all the time. [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: How about singing us one of those songs? [applause]

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MR. GUTHRIE: No. It’s not a demonstration for that. You want to go all marching around or something, that’s one thing. But it’s not … I remember going to school one time. And there was this teacher teaching the kids . [singing] And it was like some kind of freakin’ march or something. And I’m going, “Jesus.” I mean my dad couldn’t sing this song twice the same way himself. And when it becomes official, when it becomes performance, when it becomes a demonstration, and you … There’s people who can do that. That’s not me, though. I’m good at singing some stuff like I’m able to sing, you know.

MR. PLEASANTS: Well, how about singing us another song? Because we’ve got this rabid audience out here that wants to hear you sing. [applause]

MR. GUTHRIE: What time is it? [laughter] There are certain songs for a certain time. Another song. I wasn’t going to bring the freakin’ guitar. I knew I’d get in trouble with it. Well, let’s see.

MR. PLEASANTS: While we’re testing microphones again.

MR. GUTHRIE: I think it’s working. [testing guitar] Even the guitar is working. Okay. Well, let’s see. What do I know? What were we talking about?

MR. PLEASANTS: We were talking about the songs that carried down from … [audience response] [laughter] Presidential Rag . There was a song.

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MR. GUTHRIE: It was a good one. [testing guitar] Let me think. Keep talking to me. I’ll think of one when it feels good. I can’t just sort of spontaneously …

MR. PLEASANTS: Well, you have this song that’s an anthem for everybody, Alice’s Restaurant , which obviously we have no time to do tonight.

MR. GUTHRIE: Thank God.

MR. PLEASANTS: But that song really set you up as an icon of that particular period of time. Has that been a hard thing for you to shake?

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, you know, I remember, before I did Alice’s Restaurant , I started out … I didn’t want to be a singer to begin with. I really hadn’t … I always wanted to be a singer and a player just sitting around the house, you know, with friends and stuff. But I didn’t want to become a professional, because in those days nobody in their right mind would want to do that. I mean there were a few exceptions. But you couldn’t make a living singing folks songs, I mean when I was little. And then, all of a sudden, these college guys showed up wearing sweaters, singing ballads about Tom Dooley or something, and the MTA, or whatever it was. And all of a sudden, folk songs were popular. And well, we had a little time there, it was called the “folk scare.” And songs were actually getting played about some of these old … mostly, for the most part, they were the stabbing and slashing, silver dagger, bloody blade, axe songs -- “Bury me beneath the what,” you know. And I found those interesting, but not to the point where I’d want to sing them all the time. But we wanted to learn the history of them because SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 24

my dad and others, and Pete Seeger, thought that the real history of things would be told in the words of who were there. And he made a special effort to go back in time and to write songs about events that he thought were significant and important. And one of the best ones … and he was very, he was really -- if I don’t say so myself, being his kid -- there’s nobody that has done it like that. It’s really an incredible thing. [applause] [playing guitar/singing song] [applause]

MR. PLEASANTS: That’s a great, great song.

MR. GUTHRIE: It’s great and it’s powerful. And that was 1913 that that happened. And it’s pretty much exactly just like it happened. And last year, we went back to Calumet. And one of the conditions was they wanted me to sing that song. And normally, anytime somebody tells you what to sing, we don’t show up. We don’t take that gig. But for those folks, I thought it would be important. And we got up there. And the feeling in that room was so intense. I mean we were just chicken skin, you know, like they say in Hawaii. And it was amazing because all of the descendants from all of those people that had been there, nobody else wrote a song about it.

You don’t read that stuff in the history books. I mean you’d have to be some kind of research scientist, scholar type to go even find out what happened. But it’s in the songs. And there is hundreds and hundreds of songs just like that about events that shape communities and people’s lives. And the history of the people is in those songs. It’s not in the books. You can’t hardly find it on the Web. You know SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 25

what I’m saying? And because the emotion is in the songs, it’s not in a document, on a piece of paper. It’s not in the words. It’s in the whole song.

And I think I became a singer because that’s what moved me. That’s what I learned about when I started singing the songs, the old songs. It’s when I learned about who we were as a nation, and as a people, and a world. And that’s when I became more convinced than ever that it was important to stand up and say stuff, and get in trouble, or whatever.

MR. PLEASANTS: As a person who might stand up and get himself in trouble, is that intimidating to you at all, ever? Have you ever been threatened because of something you said to somebody else or sung about?

MR. GUTHRIE: Yes. But times do change. I mean they’re so familiar in some ways now that you wonder if they change or not. But I’ll give you an example. I was flying out of Logan one day about three or four years ago, maybe a little more. And I was with my son, Abe. And we’re sitting in the waiting area, going overseas. We’re going to Europe. And across from us in the waiting room was a couple of Secret Service guys. And you could tell. I mean they’re all about six- foot five. They got the suits and the ear things and everything. And I guess the President was overseas, and they were going over to protect him or something.

So we’re sitting there. When you’re a child of the ‘60s, and you’re in that kind of proximity to those kind of folks, there’s a chemical reaction that takes place. [laughter] So I knew they were looking at me, even if they didn’t appear to be. So SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 26

I was just sitting there. And all of a sudden, one of them stood up. And he came walking right over to me. And he stopped in front of me. And he said, “Are you Guthrie?” And I thought, oh man . I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Guthrie, are you bringing in a couple of K’s [kilos]?” [laughter] And a big smile spread across his face. And I realized he grew up with that stuff, you know. So we ended up with all kinds of Secret Service pins and buttons and pens. And I thought, “Times have changed .” [laughter]

MR. PLEASANTS: You know what? We’re going to take some questions from the audience.

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh good. That’s my favorite thing.

MR. PLEASANTS: If you want to step up to the mike, we’ll take them one at a time. Take them going back from side to side. So line up at the mikes. And we’ll take as many as we can.

AUDIENCE: I have a question. Speaking of songs and the history that’s discovered in songs, I’m wondering if you ever heard the story of … Howard Zinn actually heard about a coal strike through one of your father’s songs, and then went back and looked over his research and decided that that was going to push his research in a whole different direction because he couldn’t find this in any of the books. And he thought he just overlooked this at one point, and he realized it just wasn’t there. But it was in one of these songs.

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I’m just wondering how you think that these songs are affecting the way history is being written now. Do you think they’re being taken into more account now than before?

MR. GUTHRIE: I didn’t get the last part of what you said.

AUDIENCE: Do you think that, with the oral histories that are going on now, collecting these songs, do you think there’s a move to preserve these songs more than before, in the past?

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, I don’t think you have to … To answer your question, it’s a good question, I don’t think you have to actually do anything. The songs themselves have a power to them or they don’t.

I know that I had a large collection. My dad had a huge collection of records, everything from Appalachian mining disaster ballads to the Red Army chorus, to cowboy songs, I mean of every conceivable ilk and style. And I still have them, by the way. I remember listening to them all when I was a kid. And I remember collecting my own stuff as the years went by when we had actual vinyl, real records. And what I would do is, when you had real records, you could … if you had a 78 record, and you had the right kind of record player, you could slow it down to 33, or take a 33 record and slow it down to 16. And it would play the same song or the same piece of music, but it would take twice as long to play it. It’d get slow. But it would be in the same key because it was by half. So you could actually learn to play that stuff. You know what I’m saying? Because you SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 28

could play along with it. So I don’t know how anybody learns anything off a CD. [laughter] But I guess what I’m telling you is that all of my records have been broken into, been broken into by my kids -- all my great Beatles collection and all that stuff. I mean the records now are used. I preserved them. I wanted to have them and all those old records, you know. Because there was something in the songs that attracted them, something that changed them so that now they’re writing the kinds of songs about events that are going on now like they heard in the songs that were in the collections that I had and my dad had.

I don’t think you need to do anything special, except for somebody has to somewhere have it available. It’s the kind of horse and well story. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of young kids who people don’t have a lot of faith in these days because they don’t seem to be doing anything. But I guarantee you that, when people get thirsty enough, they’ll know where the water is to get something to drink from. And they may have to make their own mistakes to find their way to it. And there may be all kinds of roundabout ways. But eventually, the source of what quenches that thirst is the greats works that other people have done in the past. And it could be just some guy playing the blues that … It doesn’t have to be about something. It has to be true to itself. It has that ring of truth to it. When you hear it, you know it’s real. It’s not some- … I’ll give you another great -- well, to me it’s great -- example.

I went one time a few years ago to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. And I saw about the best production I had ever seen in my life. I mean the sound was in this lousy place, the Staple, whatever it was. And a horrible hall. But it sounded SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 29

great in there. And the lights were fabulous. And the wardrobe and the costuming was unbelievably talented. And the choreography, you know. I mean everything was perfect, except it was about nothing. It was just about nothing. [applause] All of the money, all of the talent had gone into the shell of it. And a lot of people were disappointed about that. But I wasn’t. Because I thought to myself, “One of these days, somebody is going to come along and use all of that stuff, and create a great piece of work that rings true. And when it rings true, with all of that cool stuff, it’s going to be mind blowing. And it’s going to change the world again, just like music always has from time to time.”

So I’m not worried about it. I’m not concerned about it. I don’t think you have to do anything about it. The power is either there or it’s not. If it’s not, this discussion is a moot point. If it is, there will be people who find their way to it. [applause]

AUDIENCE: Hello. I was just wondering, with your father’s songs, the historical event songs, did he learn these stories from his travels? Or did the stories come to him, do you know?

MR. GUTHRIE: My dad would have wrote about anything. He did write about every … He wrote about anything. He was not the kind of person that you would want to visit you at your home. [laughter] He would write on all of your paper products, and eventually get to your walls and your ceilings, your floors, your sheets, your wife. He just had to write. He was not an artist in the sense of we think of somebody that was looking for sponsorship or somebody who was writing SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 30

about a particular thing. He just wrote. He was a witness to his life, and he wrote it. And he had to write. He didn’t have a choice about it. If you get up in the morning, he would be crumpled up on a floor somewhere. And there’d be all of these songs that he had wrote all night long, crumpled up in little pieces of paper, mostly in the wastebasket, but most of them scattered around the floors.

He had no interest in preserving them. He didn’t have the sense of things like normal people. If he’d go out and get a new car, ran out of gas, he’d just leave it or give it to somebody. I’m not making this stuff up. You give him a new guitar, “Woody Guthrie, here is a guitar.” “Great.” As soon as the string broke, ppfftt, give it to somebody. He was that way with clothes, money, family. And he just had no sense of that.

Now that doesn’t get talked about too much. I think people would like to prefer to consider him as some kind of disciplined writer. It was not disciplined. It was what he was. He was a writing machine. And he just wrote. And he wrote about everything. And I remember as a little kid, people would talk about Woody Guthrie in the newspapers like he was some kind of Depression era journalist, writer type, a Phil Ochs like, type guy, if you will, because that’s what he was writing about at the time. And ten years would go by, and they’d say, “Oh, he’s really a folk song singer about cowboy songs,” or ballads, because that’s what was popular at the time. And the truth is that he wrote over 3500 songs. That’s what we have now. We’ve got 3500 of them. He only recorded a couple of hundred. So nobody knows how the other ones go because he couldn’t write the music. So my sister, Nora, over the last ten to 15 years, has been getting these lyrics out to SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 31

people all over the world to put new music to it, and bring the songs back to life. And she has asked jazz musicians, and punk rock bands, and garage bands, and fancy people.

I mean the range of people creating Woody Guthrie music, as it were, or music to Woody Guthrie lyrics is so wide and vast. But it’s nowhere near the amount or the depth and the breadth and the width of his subject matter. And not only that, he remembered everything. He had one of these kind of photographic memories. He did a tour one time. I’m sorry to be taking all the time talking, but I got to tell you this stuff.

When he was a kid, about 16 to 18, they went … he took the family … he talked them into … he got them all drunk, and took them on an adventure to find his grandfather’s lost vane of silver in Texas. Because the alternative was to go up to Canada and cut trees for a living. This was in February. So he talked them all into going down to the Mexican border. They went down there. And he wrote a story about it. He wrote the story 40 years after the event happened. And they never found the vane of silver, but they found his grandfather’s, my great grandfather’s camp. There was a pot in the tree that he had, a steel, metal, whatever, pot at the campsite. And 30 years after my dad wrote the book, a publisher from Dutton got a hold of the manuscript. And using the manuscript as a guide, followed the trail all the way down to the border of Mexico in the middle of a national forest and came to the exact same spot. And the pot was still there in the tree. That was about 20 years ago. That’s the kind of writer he was. By his description, people SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 32

were able to basically walk down a deer trail for hundreds of miles and come to the same spot.

So it’s not just in the political songs or the social commentary and that stuff, it’s just in the general description of stuff. And he would just write that stuff. And we’ve got tons of it. And every once in a while, we get to get it out, as it were.

AUDIENCE: Hi, Arlo.

MR. GUTHRIE: Hi.

AUDIENCE: I had the pleasure of being in the studio audience when you recorded Alice’s Restaurant a long, long time ago.

MR. GUTHRIE: You’re kidding.

AUDIENCE: I’m not. So I’m still here. And it’s great to see you. And I’ve seen you a lot of times over the years.

MR. GUTHRIE: You guys were the worst audience ever. [laughter]

AUDIENCE: We laughed as hard as we could.

MR. GUTHRIE: I’m kidding you. I’m kidding you.

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 33

AUDIENCE: Anyway, my question -- I have two questions. One is, the Bruce Springsteen album that’s just come out of Pete Seeger songs, one of the things I thought was kind of odd, and I noticed, was that a lot of the reviews said, “Well he didn’t do Seeger’s political songs. He did other kinds of songs.” And somehow, that was reaching back even further and somehow better. And I wondered if you had a feeling about that or had even noticed that. And the second part of my question was kind of more general, which is what kinds of music today and songs today make you feel hopeful, in general, if they do?

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, on the Boss stuff, first of all, I don’t think he did any Pete Seeger songs. It’s just that he avoided the political ones, he didn’t do any. What he did was -- and I thought it was great -- he had a lot of fun playing songs that Pete Seeger had some hand in passing down from generation to generation. I didn’t listen to the record, so I can’t comment absolutely truthfully. But I did see something on TV where they were creating the record. And it looked to me like they were having a hell of a time. Now I wished I could have been there. I would have helped him with a couple of the actual melodies or something.

But aside from that, I thought it was absolutely terrific. And it was great seeing somebody like him. Don’t forget, if somebody’s doing a record of songs that the only connection with Pete Seeger is that Pete sang them, and still is willing to put that Seeger name on the title, that’s saying something, I think, socially and politically. He didn’t need to do that. He could have just called it Bruce Goes Back in Time or something. But he chose to call it “The Seeger Sessions” for a reason. And I do appreciate that. And I think it was great. And like I said, it SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 34

looked like they were having a hell of a time doing it. So more power to him. I hope it does really well for him. I forgot the second part of your question.

AUDIENCE: I was asking about what kind of music, what kind of songs today make you feel hopeful.

MR. GUTHRIE: I’m just glad that people are still creating their own songs and don’t feel sort of intimidated. As a matter of fact, let me tell you this, when I started writing my songs, of course, we had a thing called “the music industry.” And that was basically, at that time, record companies that were very large that were run, for the most part, by people who loved music and knew how to make it. Those are history. Those companies now have been bought by other companies, which have been, in succession, bought by other and bigger and larger companies. And they are run by people who love money and know how to make it. It’s a different world. I wouldn’t expect the same thing from these guys as I would have from those guys.

So what’s happened is that the music industry has become a very small part of a very large corporate world. And because they’re run by people who don’t actually maybe enjoy it or know what the hell they’re doing, it has become less influential around the world. That is the best possible thing that could have happened for local musicians in all parts of the world to make their own music count for something. Because there was a time when people felt intimidated by American music coming into their way of life.

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I remember going to Japan in 1967. And I saw a guy dressed as Elvis, looked like Elvis, singing like Elvis. But you know, I didn’t have the heart to tell him there was no way he was going to be another Elvis. It wasn’t going to happen. And I thought what he didn’t understand was that what you have to bring to the global table these days is a true, honest sense of your own stuff, and not some copying of what you think is popular or great. And when you do that, you bring something new and lively.

It’s happening in New Orleans right now. Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen to the culture in New Orleans. I can tell you, I’ve been there. It’s going to be a lot more horns. Because all the guys that are building New Orleans now that are living in the backs of pickup trucks who are willing to do the work down there are from Central and South America and from parts of the Caribbean and stuff. And that’s going to be added to that history and culture in New Orleans really quickly. And it’s going to sound really great. And I am looking forward to seeing what happens.

But what’s happened as a result of the record industry or the music industry becoming less, actually becoming irrelevant in some ways is that little guys everywhere … and even guys like me. When you go to the Web now, and you go to iTunes or something like that, my record is just the same size as Sony’s records and Warner’s records and everybody else’s records. And so the only thing that’s selling them right now is the merit of the music and not the hype behind the industry. That is the best possible thing. I can’t imagine how it will last. Somebody will find a way to screw that up. But so far, for the last few years now, SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 36

there are songwriters and singers, people learning the traditions, going back, learning the instruments, and writing the old styles, the new style, this style, that style. With the exception of some kind of modern popular music, there is a huge reenerg … I can’t even say it.

MR. PLEASANTS: Energizing.

MR. GUTHRIE: Yes, what he said. [laughter] The festivals are filled: the jazz festivals, the folk festivals, the bluegrass festivals, the blues festivals, the traditional festivals, the Celtic festivals, these festivals, those festivals. Everyone is going to hear live stuff. They’re beginning to bring their own instruments to it. It’s happening all over the world.

My website got hacked a few weeks ago. More than that, a couple of months ago. And when we went to our forums, there was some big Islamic banner with a guy singing some, chanting some holy Islamic song. I couldn’t figure it out. What the heck are they … Why are these … You know, what has that got to do with me? Until I looked up my schedule. We’re playing in Denmark. So I’m thinking, “Okay. What do you do?” So I put a little notice up. I said, “Look, there’s a Turkish band that’s been trying to get its CD into our record company. And they bypassed the usual process and just put it up on the front page.” And I said, “Listen guys, if you can read this, why don’t you send me the whole freakin’ CD? We’ll evaluate it like we do everybody else.” So then we figured out a way to unhack it. Then I posted that. Then they figured out a way to rehack it. So I had a friend in Turkey translate a little message to him. And then they took it away. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 37

And I thought, “This is great .” There are ways to deal with this stuff. But the thing was, the song was freakin’ beautiful. You know what I mean? I mean these were the guys coming to, you know, say -- I don’t know what they were … They were upset about us playing in Denmark. Good for them. I don’t care. But the point was that we had a smile on our face. We dealt with it. It was easy to do. And I really would love to hear the rest of what the guy was singing about. What they did, unfortunately, was they had a little piece, a 30-second little piece of their song. And when they sent the whole album, which they did, to the website, it was so big that nobody could download it. So nobody heard it. But at least we’re talking. You know what I’m saying? I didn’t answer your question. Or maybe I did.

AUDIENCE: What was your inspiration for the song about the pickle and motorsickle?

MR. GUTHRIE: No, I’m not going there. [laughter] Let me just say that there are times when you are totally inspired and times when you’re not, you know. And there are times that you wish you weren’t, even though you might have felt the inspiration coming.

It’s not only that. You know, you get stuck doing these songs. I mean Alice’s Restaurant , it’s like 18 minutes long originally. If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s keep the new ones short because they may become popular. [laughter]

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 38

Let me just say one thing. I was going to say this before, and I got off on a different train of thought. When I first started singing, I was singing my dad’s songs. I was a kid. I was singing those popular songs that we were talking about, like the Kingston Trio type songs, Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore-kind of songs. And then I wrote Alice’s Restaurant , and people came to the shows. And they got mad. They said, “What the hell are you talking for? Sing!” And there were people getting up and leaving. Then Alice’s Restaurant became popular. And then it got so popular that we had to do it. And years after that, I said, “You know, I can’t do this every night of my life. This is not a trained seal act.” So we took it off the tour. People came to the shows. “Why is he singing? [laughter] Why isn’t he talking?” And eventually, you learn at some point that you just do what you want to do. And over the years, I’ve been absolutely blessed to have people who are willing to put up with me doing what we are doing. And sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not so great. Sometimes it sucks. But it’s always real, and it’s always honest. You know, I learned from guys like Pete Seeger, that’s what you have to do. You have to be there. If I find myself in the middle of a song, and I’m thinking about what’s for dinner or where’s that beer, or whatever, we take it off the set list until it becomes fresh again. And there are people who get upset about that stuff and who came to hear certain things. You win some, you lose some.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned a little while ago that your sister was sending some of Woody’s unrecorded songs to some punk bands. Along those lines, what do you think of the new wave of protest music that a lot of punk bands are recording now?

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 39

MR. GUTHRIE: I think it’s great for people to have fun making music. I’ve got kids. I’ve got grandkids. Some of them look just about like you, which I found really weird. [laughter] I mean in a good way. I remember the days he came back, you know, with the spiky purple hair and all that. And I said, “Oh geez,” you know. But then I looked at pictures of me, and I said, “Oh God. How did we survive?”

I love that people are having fun. Music is primarily for communicating in ways that are supposed to make you feel good. It doesn’t matter if you’re singing at funerals. It doesn’t matter if you’re telling the history of your people. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. It has more power than language. That’s why it is what it is. That’s why a musician from any country in the world can go to any other country, not speak a word of the language and have something in common. So when people are having fun, what they’re really doing is learning to communicate.

When I started playing with my kids, and now my grandkids, we’re actually playing together. It surprised the hell out of me. Because all of a sudden, I discovered that I had to listen to them not as a parent, but as an equal musician on the stage. I couldn’t do what I was going to do good unless I knew what the heck they were doing. So we all started listening to each other as professional musicians. That carried over into being family. And we get along great. All of my kids like each other. That’s an amazing thing these days. All of the grandkids can’t wait to see each other. And they all play music.

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So it doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re playing or whether people even identify it as music. It doesn’t have to do with that. It has to do with the spirit of people enjoying each other’s company and getting into the rhythm and to getting into the sounds of things.

And the older you get, the more kinds of communication skills you learn, which may require additional kinds of music and different kinds of playing. And if you play it long enough, I know. I got good at this thing not because I wanted to, but you can’t do something and not get better at it if you do it for 40 or 50 years. It doesn’t matter what your intent is. [laughter] You have to do it. There’s no possible way. You can’t ride a bike worse as time goes by. You can’t unlearn it. So I encourage everybody. I don’t care whether punk bands or guys dressed in tuxedos or whatever. It’s fun. And when you really have fun is when you begin to bring the two together, and you really get to explore stuff.

I just finished a recording with the University of Kentucky Student Symphony Orchestra. Unbelievable. I played the same show with professional orchestras, even here in Boston. And when you get there, and they’re all looking at you like, “Oh, here comes the folk singer,” eventually, maybe you can make some of them smile. But these guys are very serious. But because we were playing with young people in Kentucky, they were right into it. They were there. I never had so much fun in my life. So I don’t know if that answered your question or not. But I think it’s great. [applause]

SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 41

MR. PLEASANTS: I think one of the things that’s happening these days as well, and has been happening for the last 40 years, is that people are playing with each other as well, learning some of those old songs, writing new songs, and just really … That’s been a real musical revolution.

MR. GUTHRIE: Like I’m saying, my kids and my grandkids and their friends … I remember the day my son came to me. He was about six or seven years old. And he had about ten guys with him -- not all male, ten people. They said, “We’re a band.” [laughter] I said, “You’re a what?” “We’re a band, Dad.” And I says, “Oh. Well, what are you playing?” He says, “Oh, nothing yet. But, you know, I’m going to learn the keyboards.” The other one said, “I’m going to learn the guitar.” And the other one said, “I’m going to do bass.” And the other one said, “I’m going to do drums.” And I said, “And what’s that guy?” “Oh, that’s the roadie.” [laughter] And I said, “What are them chicks doing here?” “Oh that’s the groupies, Dad, you know.” And I’m going, they grew up in that world, you know. They had the whole thing setup. They were six or seven. And you know what? Those guys are still playing together.

MR. PLEASANTS: Is that right?

MR. GUTHRIE: They’re all in their thirties now. We just did this tour down to New Orleans. All of those kids came, in one way or another. They’re still into it. Because music had the power to not just get along with each other, but they became more than friends. They became players. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 42

AUDIENCE: The spirit is willing. And thank you for inspiring us all that, when the whole human family comes together, we can save the whole natural world if we try.

MR. GUTHRIE: We’re going to save the unnatural world, too.

AUDIENCE: Yes, from itself, really. Yes. And have you seen the seagulls behind you? Every once in a while, one is just floating on the wind. And it’s beautiful.

MR. GUTHRIE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: And I wondered, do you know Malvina Reynolds’ God Bless the Grass ?

MR. GUTHRIE: [singing] I can sing along with Pete. [laughter] I don’t remember all the words.

AUDIENCE: [singing the song]

MR. GUTHRIE: It’s a good song.

AUDIENCE: Yes, it’s such a good song.

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MR. GUTHRIE: I love doing that with Pete Seeger. I used to watch him do it. That’s part of the problem I have is that I didn’t learn the songs that I was supposed to because I had more fun watching other people do them. But you’re right, it’s a good song. Thank you.

MR. PLEASANTS: Running really close on time.

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh, are we?

MR. PLEASANTS: Yes, we are.

AUDIENCE: In the program, you mentioned …

MR. GUTHRIE: What program?

AUDIENCE: The paper thing here, talking about “Singing for Justice.”

MR. GUTHRIE: Huh? [laughter]

AUDIENCE: There’s this paper thing they gave us when we came in here.

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh, they didn’t give it to me. What was it?

AUDIENCE: Well, it’s very insightful. It’s great.

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MR. GUTHRIE: Did I screw up something or what? [laughter]

AUDIENCE: Well, no. It mentions the transition from earlier generations of ballad singers and blues man to a new era of singer/songwriters. And I was wondering if you think there is a certain style of musician today that carries that same message, and who some of your favorite recently emerging musicians are. It was really … [simultaneous conversation]

MR. GUTHRIE: You know, I don’t have my own message. The one that my dad taught me that I like the best was that he … He said one time, “Let me be known as the man who told you something you already knew.” [laughter] I think what he was trying to say is that songs can give people the power to feel good about themselves, and the jobs that they do, and the places that they occupy in the planet, and in the sort of normal world of things. I think that’s what he was getting at -- that everybody has a uniquely individual value to the rest of us. And so, I’ve just tried to carry his message through in my work and in my life. And I’ve repeated his message in all the myriad of ways that I could think of making them unique and different. But I haven’t tried to change it. I’ve just tried to tell it different ways. Because there’s all kinds of different people who are living at different times of their lives who might need to hear a different something or other.

There are a lot of young people who are doing that today. I don’t want to start naming names. But they’re everywhere. I think of myself like a bad germ. You know, they got that soap now that’s the antibacterial. I think of myself as like a bacteria that they cleaned up the counter with. But I survived, and they missed me. SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 45

[laughter] So I now am like a super-germ that has become immune to certain forms of cleanliness. And I know that it’s working. It’s not necessarily coming from me. But I am seeing a whole new infestation, you might say, of ideas and singers and songwriters and musicians who are exploring all kinds of fabulous things. Some I get, some I don’t get. But the message that I have always had is not unique to me. I don’t think it’s actually unique to my dad. I don’t think he invented it. What he did was understand it -- that the value of each individual person in the world is unique, singular, and not equal to anyone else and not unequal to anyone else.

The value of people knowing that about themselves is what creates the conditions that we have in the world. When people don’t feel that, we get into trouble. That’s why we have all this trouble in the Middle East, as far as I’m concerned. Because there are people who feel as though their way of life, their values, their individual self is being threatened by some other outside something. To some extent, they might be right. Their way of dealing with it, I think, is obviously idiotic. But I understand the story. I understand people feeling threatened about their language and their culture, their religion, their tradition, and all of that stuff. We’ve got to find ways to bring to the table, like I said before, who we are, and find value in where we come from. And we also have to learn to speak the same language. We have to be bicultural, as it were. Maintain our own history and traditions, whether that’s in Boston or anywhere else, and bring to the table a way of dealing with each other that makes us global citizens. I’ll give you the perfect example. Am I going over time?

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MR. PLEASANTS: Yes.

MR. GUTHRIE: That’s okay. [laughter] So I married this girl from California -- I had never been really much out at California -- very California girl. Brought her back to my home in Brooklyn, New York. Got off the plane at JFK in Queens. Got in the cab. Turned off the radio for a second. I mean in real life. So I get in the cab. And I only have a $100 dollar bill. And I said to the cab driver, “I only got a $100 dollar bill. Are you sure you can make change at the other end?” He said, “What the fuck did you get in the goddamn fuckin’ car for? Who the fuck do you think you are?” [laughter] My wife looks at me like, “What? Who is this guy?,” you know. She’s looking at the driver. And I looked at the driver. And I said, “You fuckin’ asshole. If you don’t want the fuckin’ guy in the goddamn fuckin’cab, I’ll get the hell …” I’m talking like that. And I’m yelling at the top of my lungs. Now my wife’s backing away from me like this. [laughter] And I just had to explain to her, “Sometime it’s good to know the local culture,” you know. [laughter] [applause] Because as soon as I did that, the guy looked around and said, “I’ll take you wherever you want to go, Sir,” you know. And that was the end of that story. So let me sing one more song, and we can get out of here. [applause] I probably shouldn’t have told that story. [laughter] It is good to come from Brooklyn, the holy land. [testing guitar] This is one of the songs that I put some music to myself that my dad wrote the lyrics to. And I just did this about a few months ago, a year ago, whatever it was. And it’s a peace song, too. And I love it. It’s one of the last ones he wrote in the late ‘50s. But it’s not the marching around kind of peace, by the way. It’s the little peace kind of thing that’s in you that makes other people smile when they see you coming. Dogs lick you. Babies like SINGING FOR JUSTICE 05.15.06 PAGE 47

you, that stuff. Because I’m pretty convinced now if everybody would just take care of the little peace, the big peace would take care of itself at this point.

So I don’t know if you’re used to doing this here at the Library. But it’s only got two verses, and I’ll sing them both. I’ll sing them again. If you can catch up with me, sing along in here. Goes something like this. [playing guitar/singing song, audience sings along]

MR. GUTHRIE: Go in peace. Thanks. It’s been fun. [applause] Thank you, Dick.

MR. PLEASANTS: Thank you, Arlo. Thank you. [applause]

MR. GUTHRIE: Thank you. Been a lot of fun.

MR. PLEASANTS: Thank you. A great storyteller. Arlo Guthrie, Ladies and Gentlemen. [applause]