NEW ORLEANS – Arlo Guthrie is all too familiar with the destructive power of both hurricanes and bureaucracy.
The folk singer and his wife spent the past 20 years painstakingly restoring a sprawling structure on the Intracoastal Waterway in Sebastian, Fla. They had nearly finished converting the former World War II-era Coast Guard station and seafood factory into their dream home and headquarters when three hurricanes trashed the place in 2004.
The destruction, Guthrie recalled during a telephone interview this week, was difficult enough. But he then spent months wrestling with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration and other government agencies over the cost of restoration and new building codes. He finally abandoned the Florida project in favor of his Massachusetts farm.
“A lot of people whose hopes are riding with these organizations are going to be disappointed a year or two years or 10 years from now,” Guthrie said of Hurricane Katrina victims. “The hopes and dreams of people that get caught up in these disasters don’t always get fixed.”
As Katrina’s drama played out, Guthrie knew he had to help. “And I wanted to do more than just send in bucks to the Red Cross.” So on Dec. 5, he, his family and a host of musical friends boarded Amtrak’s southbound City of New Orleans in Chicago and launched “Ridin’ on the City of New Orleans: Bringing Back the Music,” a fundraising and instrument-collecting journey interspersed with concerts along the way.
The trip culminates with a long weekend in New Orleans. Tonight at Tipitina’s, Guthrie is joined by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other guests. Guthrie returns Saturday for a sold-out show with Willie Nelson and Nelson’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael.
Ticket proceeds from both nights, likely more than $40,000, are earmarked for the nonprofit Tipitina’s Foundation and its efforts to resettle local musicians.
That Guthrie is a musician with a social conscience is no surprise. As the son of activist folk legend Woody Guthrie, he grew up surrounded by his father’s friends, compatriots and admirers. The younger Guthrie cut his teeth in New York during the 1960s. He scored his first hit with 1967’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” a song he premiered at the Newport Folk Festival.
He currently oversees a family cottage industry that involves his three daughters, his son and a handful of friends.
When he learned that Amtrak had resumed service to New Orleans post-Katrina, he hatched a scheme to aid the city’s working musicians and call attention to the importance of the passenger rail system.
That he’s riding aboard a train dubbed the City of New Orleans is appropriate: Both he and Willie Nelson recorded popular versions of the Steve Goodman song of the same name. Guthrie grasps the uniqueness of New Orleans’ cultural contributions. He relates an anecdote about some friends in the Ozarks jamming with an Irish fiddler. They immediately fell in sync; the music had remained unchanged across generations and continents.
“Around the world, most traditional music is played the way your fathers and grandfathers played it,” Guthrie said. “But something happened in New Orleans about 100 years ago that changed all that. People were expected not just to play the traditional stuff and know it well, but to add something spontaneously in the moment.
“That’s why you have dueling banjos and jazz and ragtime, where people are not just talented technicians, but they’re doing something that’s totally invented in the moment, something they’ll never play that way again.
“That’s fed into blues and rock ‘n’ roll and country. Most people don’t realize that every glam rock pop star, every punk rock kid in a garage that’s playing a lead on a lousy electric guitar, is doing something that was invented in New Orleans.
“So just as a musician, I feel like I owe these guys a thanks. That culture that produced this is still vibrant. It’s not just historic.”
New Orleans, he believes, should not be “Disney-fied” in its reconstruction.
“Nothing wrong with Disney – I work with them all the time,” Guthrie said. “But there’s a place for everybody, and they don’t need to be in New Orleans. It doesn’t need to be time-shares or owned by Donald Trump. That’s probably what will happen unless people can get back to their apartments and houses as soon as possible.
“The best way to defend against an oncoming cultural disaster is to get the music going and the food cooking and the people walking around. Get the people back into the city who were living there all along. The uniqueness of New Orleans depends on the people themselves. And it’s not good enough just having some other people – it has to be those people.”
The mass displacement of the Depression-era Dust Bowl, in which tens of thousands of Midwest farmers abandoned their drought-stricken farms for greener pastures, was a defining moment for Arlo’s father. Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” and hundreds of anthems documenting and celebrating the struggles of the working man.
The younger Guthrie sees a parallel with the great Katrina Diaspora.
“My dad, and millions of others like him, had to leave their farms, homes, families and jobs and look for work and stuff to eat. It was a calamity unheard of and unechoed until (Katrina). So there’s a family connection here, because my dad would have been one of those guys playing in the (New Orleans) bars. As a young man, that’s what I was doing, playing on the streets for tips.”
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Despite his pedigree, Guthrie says activism is not his natural inclination.
“I’d much prefer to be lazy. That’s more in my nature. But you get caught up in this stuff and find yourself doing things that you didn’t think you would. I don’t look for stuff for protest; I’m not a professional protester.
“But I grew up in a family with values that said you can’t just sing about things. Anybody can sing and talk. You have to actually do stuff. Sometimes you have to act without waiting to understand. That’s been our family philosophy: Love now. Live now. Serve now. Do it now. The understanding will come at some point. I raised my kids to get involved in what’s going on. There has to be somebody willing to help.”
JL END SPERA
(Keith Spera is music writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at kspera(at)timespicayune.com.)
AP-NY-12-15-05 1434EST
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