POP MUSIC REVIEW : Arlo Guthrie Injects Folk Culture Into ‘60s Nostalgia at Coach House

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Arlo Guthrie has not been seen or heard from much since the “hippie days.” So it was easy to assume that the perennial longhair’s shows might be one long, nostalgic wallow in the Woodstock mud bath. But while the 42-year-old singer did indeed supply extensive documentation of those times in his Coach House show Thursday evening, he made it a fitting, and somehow timely, part of a rich quilt of American folk culture.

Along with numerous examples of his own singular satiric shaggy-dog song stories, Guthrie rambled through Dylan’s “Percy’s Song,” a pair of Mississippi John Hurt country blues tunes, and one of his legendary father Woody’s songs, and even managed to inject some fresh feeling into the overworked “Amazing Grace.” He accompanied himself throughout on digital electric piano or exquisitely finger-picked acoustic guitar, joined by guitarist Ed Gerherdt for the John Hurt songs.

What Guthrie lacked in a great singing voice he more than made up for with an amiable, folksy delivery and a continual invention playing on his lyrics and between-song digressions. No sooner had he begun his 17-song set when someone in the audience questioned him on his still-wild hair, prompting an immediate explanation: “One day all my thoughts just came out and turned into hair, so I’m afraid to cut it.”

Guthrie had understandably deep-sixed his signature song, the interminable talking blues “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” for several years. But he said he recently realized, given the 22 years since its release, that many of his younger fans had never heard it. So, for those fans, he placed the counterculture, draft-era fable in historical context with an account of having to perform the 18-minute opus, guitar-less, for a grim Judge Julius Hoffman at the Chicago Seven trial. He closed it by joking that the song had ended the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter’s son, Chip, Guthrie said, had told him of finding the “Alice’s Restaurant” album in Richard Nixon’s presidential record library, leading Guthrie to speculate that’s what Nixon was listening to during the famous 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.

Though his “Motorcycle Song” and “Coming Into Los Angeles” were also embellished to epic length, they proved much more immediate and humorous, and more effective in detailing the differences between people prevalent in late 1960s America. The songs provided an ideal setup for Guthrie’s recent ballad “When a Soldier Makes It Home,” which used the Soviets’ recent Vietnam-like experience in Afghanistan as a model for the need to heal those schisms.

For all the self-deprecating humor Guthrie applied to his music, there was an evident passion in much of his set. His father’s “I’ve Got No Home in This World Any More” seemed as timely as when it was composed in the Dust Bowl days: “The gambling man gets rich, while the working man gets poor, and I ain’t got no home in this world any more.”

Guthrie closed the set with an affirming bluesy version of “Amazing Grace,” during which he related the story of the song’s author. Slave ship captain John Newton had the song come to him in a dream, then turned his boatload of human cargo around back to Africa. Closing his performance, Guthrie echoed that anecdote with a quote from his father: “This world is your world. Take it easy, but take it.”

Local singer Jane Hardaway opened with a promising set chiefly of original folk songs. The slight singer displayed a pure, powerful voice that was easily up to the rigors of “Oh, Johnny,” an unaccompanied melismatic Scottish ballad that was the centerpiece of her set. Backed on most other songs by an atmospheric layering of acoustic guitars, provided by two backing musicians and herself, several of Hardaway’s songs seemed record-ready.

The standout of her originals was “American Cigarettes,” with a moody, modal arrangement offsetting a clever lyric likening the fast burn rate of domestic smokes to American men. The only part of the seven-song set to suggest that Hardaway is not yet a fully experienced performer was the blues “Handfulla Gimme,” in which her otherwise controlled voice gave way to overwrought phrasing and pitch-awry falsetto jumps.