Arlo and Strings

We saw Arlo Guthrie Saturday night, doing the Pete Seeger Memorial (I know, he’s alive) Thanksgiving concert at Carnegie Hall. This reminded me that once, when I was working at a bookstore in Penn Station, someone actually asked me how to get to Carnegie Hall. After grinning madly and telling him that I had been waiting years for someone to ask me that question, I finally got to say: “Practice, practice, practice!”. Anyhow, Arlo – whom we last saw a few years ago at Purchase, performing a terrific set with his daughter and son – was accompanied this time by the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra (bet you didn’t even know there was one). This third or fourth tier orchestra was not bad (which is a measure of the depth of musical talent around); they opened by performing Bernstein’s Overture from “Candide” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”, and didn’t embarrass themselves. although their performance was notably lacking in crispness and displayed occasional mistimings (no serious squibs, though).

The problem was that although they may be mixed better on the CD (yes, there is one – pictured above), the full orchestra overwhelmed Arlo’s amplified singing, guitar, and piano-playing. You could hear him, but there was just too much sound going on all around him. Another singer and songwriter, Randy Newman, writes orchestral scores – he knows how to work with various ensembles and it shows when he engages with a full ensemble on the album, “Sail Away”. Arlo doesn’t do this kind of work, and while his musicality is unchallengeable, I think this current interest of his would work better with a chamber orchestra, say, a more stripped-down sound – and more interesting arrangements. I mentioned Newman in part because there was a definite Newmanesque ragtime sound to several of the pieces (although Arlo’s interest in rag is also long-standing), and overall the sound was slickly soundtracky, and not particularly distinctive in and of itself.

Putting folksongs or folk-style songs (Arlo has an appropriately broad view - IMHO - of what "folk" means) to new and interesting arrangements is certainly do-able. Bruce’s “We Shall Overcome – the Seeger Sessions” is an outstanding example of how to do it right, Dixieland brass and all. Arlo’s attempt wasn’t an outright failure, but it didn’t work well for me over all. I much preferred the Purchase performance, where the focus was solely on his playing, singing, and story-telling (at which he excels). Incidentally, one of the numbers he did in both shows is a story about playing with Pete Seeger at a show in Germany which concludes with Arlo leading the audience in singing the Elvis hit, “Fools Rush In”. This number, like all his others, works just fine as a solo – all the orchestra added was an unnecessary sweetening.