Records, which signed him and issued Alices Restaurant on its Reprise subsidiary in September 1967, only weeks before Woody Guthries death on October 3.Arlo Guthrie - Running Down The Road (1969 us, wonderful country hippie folk psych).Is it possible to be a one-hit wonder three times The question is provoked by the recording career of Arlo Guthrie, which is best remembered for three songs in three different contexts.
There is The City of New Orleans, Guthries only Top 40 hit, which earns him an entry in Wayne Janciks The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders. And there is Alices Restaurant Massacree, the comic-monologue-in-song that gave him his initial fame and took up the first side of his debut LP, the million-selling Alices Restaurant. Arlo Guthrie Running Down The Road Rar Full 40 YearsWhether these successful tracks make him a one-, two-, or three-hit wonder, they were arguably both flukes in a performing career that was still going strong a full 40 years after Guthrie first gained national recognition and facilitators of that career. With their help, he spent 15 years signed to a major record label, charting 11 LPs, after which he was able to set up his own label and go on issuing albums. More significant, he maintained a steady following as a live performer, touring worldwide year after year to play before audiences delighted by his humorous persona and his musical mixture of folk, rock, country, blues, and gospel styles in songs almost equally divided between his own originals and well-chosen cover tunes. Arlo Davy Guthrie was born July 10, 1947, in the Coney Island section of the borough of Brooklyn in New York City and grew up there. He was the fifth child of Woody Guthrie, the famous folksinger and songwriter, but the second child born to his fathers second wife, Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia Guthrie, a former dancer with the Martha Graham dance troupe who had become a dance teacher; his older sister, Cathy Ann Guthrie, had died in a fire at the age of four five months earlier. After having two more children, Joady and Nora, Guthries parents separated when he was four and later divorced; his mother remarried. His father remained an important presence in his life, however, giving him his first guitar for his sixth birthday in 1953. By then, Woody Guthrie had been diagnosed with Huntingtons disease, an incurable, hereditary illness; he was hospitalized permanently in 1954, and Guthries mother supervised his care. Houston brought him up on-stage at the Greenwich Village nightclub Gerdes Folk City for an impromptu performance when he was only ten.) Guthrie later said that he had been unaware of his fathers fame until he switched from public school to a progressive private school in the sixth grade and found that students there were singing Woody Guthrie songs like This Land Is Your Land. Nevertheless, he did not expect to become a performer himself, feeling that his introspective personality was not suited to such a career. When he graduated from high school at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts in 1965, he enrolled at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT, to study forestry with the intention of becoming a forest ranger. Returning to Massachusetts, he stayed at the home of Alice and Ray Brock, a deconsecrated church. The Brocks were former faculty members of the Stockbridge School who had opened a restaurant called the Back Room. ![]() Convicted of the offense, they paid fines of 25 each and retrieved the garbage. This proved fortuitous shortly afterward, when Guthrie was summoned for the military draft and judged unfit for service because of his criminal record. Arlo Guthrie Running Down The Road Rar Professional In FebruaryGuthrie took up performing, turning professional in February 1966 with a debut at Club 47 in Cambridge, MA. His repertoire included a 16-bar ditty he had written that constituted a musical commercial for the Brocks eatery, with a chorus that went, You can get anything you wantAt Alices restaurant. The song, however, was the least of the performance, as Guthrie told a fanciful and comic version of his adventures in littering and at the draft board, spinning it out to what amounted to a 20-minute comedy routine with a tune wrapped around it. He performed what he called Alices Restaurant Massacree (idiosyncratically pronouncing the last word mase-kree instead of mase-ker, hence the extra e) at Carnegie Hall as part of a folk song festival sponsored by New York radio station WNYC, and another local station, WBAI, began airing a tape of the song in the spring of 1967, to popular response. Guthrie attended the Newport Folk Festival and found himself promoted to the closing-night concert on the main stage, performing Alices Restaurant Massacree to 20,000 folk fans on July 16, 1967.
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