I've Got a Woody...

...Guthrie album! Apologies for the seventh grade boner joke. And now, on to the review!When Woody Guthrie was dying, Bob Dylan used to go to his hospital room and play for him. Dylan has said he was essentially a living Woody Guthrie jukebox at that time. This probably tells you everything you need to know about Woody Guthrie's influence on not only folk music (Pete Seeger was another disciple), but also rock and roll. Woody Guthrie leads to Dylan, Springsteen, Mellencamp, Billy Bragg, CCR ("Don't Look Now (It Ain't You or Me)" could totally be a Woody Guthrie song)and many more. Pretty much any popular music in the folk or rock traditions with a political bent begins with Woody Guthrie. So a new live recording of Woody Guthrie in concert in Newark in 1949 is a really important find. There are only two other extant live recordings of Woody Guthrie, and since he made his living connecting with audiences, it really is a revelation to hear him in his element. The recording has been issued by the Guthrie Archive, and it's lovingly packaged with a beautiful and informative booklet. But, um, here's the thing. Is important the same thing as entertaining? This performance is, decades earlier, obviously, in the VH1 Storytellers vein. Woody's wife Marjorie serves as the emcee, and Woody talks about the composition of the songs. And talks. And talks. About half of the tracks are not songs, but, spoken word intros or stories. It's of great historical and artistic interest to hear about how Woody wrote his songs, and these little stories are pretty fun to listen to once. But I don't really see myself listening to them more than once.The first track, a spoken intro by Woody and Marjorie, lasts fifteen long minutes.You could almost perform "In a Gadda Da Vida" or, more to the point, "Alice's Restaurant" in that amount of time. What's cool about this is that in Woody's rap, you can hear not only how Arlo's voice sounds like his dad, but you can hear how Arlo's storytelling style developed from listening to his dad. I swear I half expected Woody to start talking about 8 by 10 color glossies with the circles and the arrows, etc. But, again, how often are you going to want to spend 15 minutes of your life listening to this? Still, it's kind of cool to see what the spoken parts reveal about Woody and Marjorie. (Marjorie: kind of annoying! Woody: kind of a dick!) Mostly it's heartening to hear how much genuine empathy and outrage fueled Woody's songrwiting. So all the spoken word stuff works very well as history and has pretty dubious entertainment value. The songs, on the other hand, are really quite good, particularly in the second half of the program, where the political songs really come out. What's great about these is that they aren't just earnest sloganeering; they put a human face on injustice. Because Guthrie never lost touch with the storytelling/balladeer tradition, his political songs are usually stories of how injustice affects actual people. Ultimately, though, the songs comprise only ten of the eighteen tracks here. "Tom Joad," "1913 Massacre," and "Jesus Christ" are all great, as is the track below, my favorite on the whole album. It's the dying words of miners trapped in a mine that's suffered a disaster brought on by the owner's greed and negligence. Sadly, though, the Guthrie archive isn't making individual tracks available for download, so if you want the cool songs, you'll have to shell out 30 bucks (!!) for the entire deluxe package. So I guess I can only recommend this to big fans of Woody Guthrie, serious music historians, or folks with a serious interest in recording technology. (Apparently the technology used to record the performance is some weird outdated recording thing that I got incredibly bored reading about after like two sentences.)The album is available only from "the Guthrie Archive":http://www.woodyguthrie.org.