Sunday, December 10, 2023

Newport Folk Festival, Festival Field, Newport, RI, 7-25-1968 to 7-28-1968, Part 2 - Arlo Guthrie

The 1968 Newport Folk Festival continues with Arlo Guthrie.

As an aside, note that I'm not entirely sure of the order of performers in this festival. I tried to research it, but I only got some clues, like a mention of a particular act being the last one of the day, or one performer going before another one. So the order is my best guess. I do know which day each performance took place on though, and that information is in the mp3 tags. In Guthie's case, his set was on August 26th, the second day of the festival.

Arlo Guthrie is famous for being the son of Woody Guthrie, probably the most revered folk musician of all time. But he also has had a long and successful music career of his own. He found fame early, when he was just a teenager. In the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, he peformed a newly written long story-song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," and it got a tremendous reception. He recorded it at another concert shortly after that and released it on his debut album later that year. As a result, he was already well-known by the time of this festival, though mainly known for that one song.

If this is his full performance, then he didn't play that song this time. However, he made passing reference to it more than once, and you can tell from the reaction that the audience was familiar with it. Instead, he played a couple of songs done in a very similar vein, that was a mix of talking, often humorous, and singing. 

The last three songs are actually from a different set at the same festival. There was a special set with multiple artists that was a tribute to Arlo Guthrie's famous father, Woody Guthrie. Arlo played a few songs in that, so I put them at the end of his set. Two of them, "The Oklahoma Hills" and "Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues," were covers of Woody Guthrie songs. But the last one, "The Motorcycle Song," was an Arlo Guthrie original.

Note that the recordings of this festival were often plagued by the sound of wind blowing against the microphone. For some reason, this didn't seem to affect the music or singing much at all. However, it often was quite noticeable during the cheering after songs, and the banter between songs. It wasn't a problem with the first album I posted, but it affected some of the songs here. But happily, I recently got the audio editing program Izotope 10, and that has a "de-wind" feature that works very well. I'm not going to mark all the songs I edited, because there were many. But note that this version sounds better than others you might find on the Internet because the windy noises have been removed. (If any remain, please let me know and I'll try to fix them.)

This album is 48 minutes long.

013 talk by Jean Ritchie (Arlo Guthrie)
014 Swimmy Swim (Arlo Guthrie)
015 talk (Arlo Guthrie)
016 The Pause of Mr. Claus (Arlo Guthrie)
017 Meditation [Wave Upon Wave] (Arlo Guthrie)
018 The Oklahoma Hills (Arlo Guthrie)
019 Talkin' Dust Bowl Blues (Arlo Guthrie)
020 The Motorcycle Song (Arlo Guthrie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16033067/NewprtFlkFestivl_1968_02ArloGthrie.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. However, it was in black and white. I used the program Palette to colorize it, then did some touch ups with Photoshop.

No comments:

Post a Comment