Arlo Guthrie: A 1999 feature about ‘Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys’ (1973)

Colin H on Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (1973)

In 1999, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Arlo Guthrie (at a hotel bar in Belfast) for a ‘Mojo ‘Buried Treasure’ feature. Arlo gracefully retired last month, which prompted me to unearth it. Arlo’s ‘Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys’ album had long been a favourite – first heard on 8-track cartridge when I was 11 or 12, I think, circa 1980, and later bought on import vinyl from Caroline Music in Anne Street, Belfast, in the mid 80s. I loathed the 80s, and this record – from the music to the gatefold sleeve to the Reprise label’s sepia-tinted inner sleeve of photos from ‘old Burbank, California’ – seemed to be the gateway to a magical place in the recent, but irretrievable, past. It was fascinating to hear from Arlo, unprompted, that he too had been trying to capture, in 1973, a kind of magical, mythical place from the past at that time, when he recorded it. The album only came to CD in 1998, so that was the hook to hang this feature on. It remains a singularly brilliant album. Shortly after the interview, I sought out a (second-hand vinyl) copy of ‘Amigo’, the follow-up that Arlo reckoned to be the best of that period/run of big-budget albums… but it didn’t do anything for me. The magic had all been on ‘Brooklyn…’ Still, I must give it another go…

BURIED TREASURE (published in ‘Mojo’, some time in 1999)

ARLO GUTHRIE
Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys REPRISE

Tracks: Farrell O’Gara / Gypsy Davey / This Troubled Mind of Mine / Week on the Rag / Miss the Mississippi and You / Lovesick Blues / Uncle Jeff / Gates of Eden / Last Train / Cowboy Song / Sailor’s Bonnet / Cooper’s Lament / Ramblin’ Round

Currently available: Released on CD by Koch, 1998

Singles extracted: None

Producer: Lenny Waronker & John Pilla

Recorded: Warner Bros. Studios, Hollywood and Buck Owens’ Studio, Bakersfield 1973

Released: 1973

Personnel: Arlo Guthrie (vocals, guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica) and 36 heavy friends, including Ry Cooder, Clarence White and Jesse Ed Davies (electric guitars), Kevin Burke (fiddle), Doug Dillard (banjo), Jim Keltner and Gene Parsons (drums), and sundry oboes, bassoons, horns, etc.

‘We were going for a ‘feel’ here,’ says Arlo, side-stepping any suggestion of a ‘concept album’. ‘It wasn’t specific to an era exactly but I think the cover says it too: we were going for ‘that’, going for a mythical place somewhere that included all these things on the record. By 1973 we were beginning to see the end of the folk boom and the beginning of disco. I think we began to realise that we weren’t looking for radio play and, frankly, dealing with even the records we’d made up to that point we weren’t getting any either! So we just concentrated on making records that we loved listening to.’

And 25 years on, this wellspring of tender loving care, some great players and an obviously luxurious budget has proved its worth. ‘Virtually unknown, even in the States,’ as Arlo admits, and with a strangely beautiful cover shot of Arlo and wife Jacqui, this was artistically the most compelling outworking on one single disc of all his crazy, eclectic influences – here and there flashes of hillbilly hoedowns, old-time gospel reverence, ragtime frivolity, sensual Hispanic horns, and the delicate binding-spells of mystical thought and hazy nostalgia. Nostalgia, at least in part, for Ireland:

‘We went there, five or six of us just goofing off, in 1972 and ended up going just wherever the road went,’ he says, ‘until we found ourselves in Milltown Malbay, in Wilson’s pub. There was a young kid there who took out a fiddle and started playing with us. That day there was 50 people in the pub; we came back the next day and the whole town was just full of people. The third day you couldn’t get near the place. I mean, people came by busloads just ‘cos they’d heard some music was going on somewhere and the whole town just erupted into this spontaneous celebration, which we found overwhelming – just fabulous. When we couldn’t play from hurting, this kid showed us round – and he never stopped fiddling. I said, “Hey Kevin, if you’re ever in the States come look me up”, figuring “He’s never getting out of County Clare never mind Ireland.” Two weeks later the phone rings: “Arlo, it’s me, Kevin – I’m in New York. How do I get to your house?”!’

Thus, two years before the monumental first Bothy Band record – and little-known to trad chroniclers even today – Kevin Burke made his scintillating, evocative debut, playing Donegal reels against the ocean, on an Arlo Guthrie record:

‘He’d be fiddlin’ away on these cliffs,’ says Arlo, ‘with the wind and the surf, and we loved that so much that we put the sound of it in there – that was just for us, we didn’t care anymore! We just wanted to make records for ourselves, and that was such a nice time we put that ‘time’ in there and hoped that in some way it would draw people into that ‘place’.’

The sense of place is richly drawn, with each song glimpsing an episode of some unattainable dreamworld based on a mythic Old America – end of the Wild West, turn-of-the-century. The songs were the fabric, but some of the most sensational embroidery, for sheer atmosphere alone, was on a definitive reading of Dylan’s ‘Gates of Eden’, courtesy of one Ry Cooder whose own artistic star was still awaiting its ascendency:

‘I guess he probably made his reputation playing with us as much as anyone else,’ says Arlo. ‘He was part of a crew that lasted a long time at Warner Brothers. Ry and myself and Randy Newman were the folks that Lenny Waronker liked working with. Lenny went on to become the president of Warner Brothers and he stayed there a long time until just recently. So it was the cream of the crop that we got to play with and that was through his personal interest.’

Arlo credits engineer Don Landy – and arrangers Nick De Caro and George Bohannon – with much of the sound on the record, but it was clearly a team effort:

‘By this time we had the foundation of a great team of people making the records. The backing singers particularly – they were also on ‘City of New Orleans’ [a fluke US hit the year before] – and they were really just the best, the tops. I’d been working with some of these guys on the previous couple of records – the production team too. Lenny Waronker was in the driver’s seat and my friend John Pilla was working his way into becoming a professional producer. It wasn’t until three years later, with Amigo, that I think we really nailed a great record. We’d ironed out all the bugs by then – but of course for some people it’s the bugs that give the character. But this record was the beginning of that and we were all very pleased with it and I think also disappointed that our era was fading ‘cos we were just getting ready to make some good records.’

Material-wise, there was one Dylan, two Woody’s, two ‘trad. arr. Kevin Burke’s, four magnificent Arlo originals and a trio of bizarre oldies. ‘Troubled Mind’ had been a 1940s hit for Woody’s cousin Jack Guthrie, while ‘Miss the Mississippi’ was an obscure old Jimmie Rodgers tune and ‘Lovesick Blues’ a Hank Williams era yodelling exercise:

‘We also went a little bit out on a limb and did a piano rag I’d written and put some horns to it. This guy, George Bohannon, arranged it and actually we’re doing that one this year as part of a whole show with a big symphony orchestra – undoubtedly, it’ll become the next record!’

Few of the songs, sadly, remained long in the live repertoire: ‘‘Gates of Eden’ I’ve been doing for years’ though, he says. ‘It’s a little busy on the record but it was ‘busy’ with such great players I couldn’t bear to take ‘em out.’ And now it’s all there on glorious digital. Any good? ‘Er, I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t heard it…’

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