Music Career and Critical Reception
The "Alice's Restaurant" song was one of a few very long songs to become popular just when albums began replacing hit singles as young people's main music listening. But in 1972 Guthrie had a highly successful single too, Steve Goodman's song "City of New Orleans", a wistful paean to long-distance passenger rail travel. Guthrie's first trip on that train was in December 2005 (when his family joined other musicians on a train trip across the country to raise money for musicians financially devastated by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, in the South of the United States). He also had a minor hit with his song "Coming into Los Angeles," which was played at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and success with a live version of "The Motorcycle Song."
Guthrie's 1976 album Amigo received a 5-star (highest rating) from Rolling Stone, and may be his best-received work. However, that album, like Guthrie's earlier Warner Bros. Records albums, is rarely heard today even though each contains strong folk and folk rock music accompanied by widely regarded musicians such as Ry Cooder.
A number of musicians from a variety of genres have joined Guthrie onstage, including Pete Seeger, David Bromberg, Cyril Neville, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins, John Prine, Wesley Gray, Josh Ritter, and others.
Read more about this topic: Arlo Guthrie
Famous quotes containing the words music, career, critical and/or reception:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect—this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”
—Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)