...An eclectic mix of local Politics, Education, Community Affairs, Environment, History, Birding,Jamaica Bay, Ridgewood Reservoir, Forest Park, and other assorted items of interest...
Concentrating on the Borough of Queens in New York City...and the neighborhoods of Ozone Park, Howard Beach, Woodhaven, Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park...and Community Boards 5, 6, 9 and 10...
Spending on arts supplies and visits by cultural institutions has dropped drastically at city schools over the last three years, even as overall education spending has grown, a new report shows.
While education spending increased by about 13% between 2006 and 2009, funding for arts supplies, musical instruments and other equipment fell by 68%, the report by the Center for Arts Education found.
Spending on partnerships with city cultural institutions decreased by 31% - although the system did hire 139 more full-time arts teachers.
By some measures, the result has been a reduction of arts classes. The percentage of high school students taking three or more arts classes dropped to 28% last year from 46% during the 2006 school year, Education Department data show. And only 39% of elementary school students met state arts education mandates.
Arts advocates say the drop is linked to the Education Department's 2007 decision to stop requiring principals to spend a specific amount of their budget on the arts.
"Given the extreme pressure schools are under to raise test scores, and the greater autonomy principals have over school budgets, it is not surprising that we are witnessing a shift away from the arts," the report states.
The Education Department vigorously disputed the report's conclusions, saying more students are getting at least the basic arts requirements. For example, 84% of high schools offered the mandated two semesters of arts to students last year, up from 76% during the 2006 school year, agency data shows.
"We firmly believe that the investment in licensed teachers of arts is where schools should be headed," said Paul King, director of the Education Department's arts program.
The report's author, though, remains concerned about the state of arts next year.
"These declines and this lack of compliance happened during a period of historic school budget growth," said Doug Israel of the Center for Arts Education. "Now we're seeing real cuts. What comes next?"
A LESSER-KNOWN version of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup,” found on the bonus disc of the new reissue of the band’s 1972 album, “Exile on Main St.,” seems to me the best thing the Stones ever did.
It’s country gospel gone lurid, and it seems to rise up out of a nap. Nicky Hopkins’s piano chords circle around a G at slow tempo in an echoey room. Charlie Watts starts pumping a bass drum at the third beat of the second bar; he’s either late or early, but finding his way. Piano and drums roll up to the D chord at the beginning of the first verse, and Mick Taylor bends two guitar strings under Mick Jagger’s opening line: “I’m the man on the mountain — yes, come on up.” Onward, Mr. Watts weaves around the beat, smashing down on his high-hat, forming weird and clattering snare-drum fills. He both shapes and follows the group’s euphoria and the music’s subtle acceleration. The Stones gather around the song like pickpockets, jostling and interfering with it. Keith Richards, playing rhythm guitar and singing backup, quits harmonizing and starts to shout.
This performance represents to me the sound of “Exile” in idealized form: a dark, dense, loosely played, semiconscious tour through American blues, gospel and country music, recorded in a basement in France. “Exile” was made around the Stones’ creative peak and in unusual circumstances: they were tax exiles, forced to live away from home.
It is often called one of the best rock records ever made, and framed as an after-the-fact concept album: a wise horror show, an audio diary of rock stars finally facing the rigors of marriage, children and addiction. (“ ‘Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them,” the critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972. “The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.”) The notion of the record as story also comes from the strong documentary images around its creation— Dominique Tarlé’s black-and-white pictures of the Stones at Villa Nellcôte, shirtless and dazed in the stifling air of a basement in the South of France. These images dot the 64-page booklet and the DVD film included in the reissue’s deluxe edition and have been part of the avalanche of press around the reissue, released by Universal on Tuesday.
Recently, thinking about this alternate “Loving Cup” and why it’s not on the original album made me wonder what the ideal of “Exile” really is. I find most of “Exile” good, but not great. (That era of Stones music, fantastic. The album, not so much.) I can’t see it as a masterpiece, not only because I distrust the idea of masterpieces, but because I especially don’t want one from the Stones, who make songs and albums like birds’ nests — collaborative tangles with delicate internal balances — and have a history of great triage work, assembling bits and pieces recorded over a long period. But “Exile” remains the preference of the most judicious Stones fans. Why? What is its essence?
It’s a tricky question. “Exile” can seem like a unity of sound, place and time; much has been made of the fact that one of its greatest songs, “Ventilator Blues,” was inspired by the discomfort of the basement studio at Nellcôte, Mr. Richards’s rented mansion on the French Riviera, with its one small air vent. You can make yourself hear that heat, if you want.
But the recordings for “Exile” didn’t all happen in that basement. They stretched from 1969 to 1972, across the making of two other excellent and, to me, superior records — “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.” It’s not always the band you know and, perhaps, love: there are a number of “Exile” tracks whose parts are not played by the usual suspects. (That’s Jimmy Miller, the producer, playing drums on “Happy” and “Shine a Light,” not Mr. Watts. That’s Mr. Taylor, or Mr. Richards, or Bill Plummer playing bass on about half the record, not Bill Wyman.)
As it happens, the “Loving Cup” described above was not recorded in Nellcôte’s basement but at Olympic Studios in London in the spring of 1969. (The album version — more laid back, not as good — comes from Los Angeles, after the French sojourn.) The Nellcôte experience was important to “Exile,” there’s no question. But the work of several Stones researchers indicates that more than half the album was recorded at other places, under more normal working conditions.
The new reissue both enshrines “Exile” and questions it. The first disc — a sharper version of the album itself, sounding far better than its last remastering in 1994, with deeper bass and greater detail — strengthens the idea of “Exile” as an inviolable document, dense and atmospheric and brilliantly post-produced, a thing unto itself. But the second bonus disc blows that idea apart, with new vocal tracks by Mr. Jagger over old instrumental tracks of “Exile”-related provenance, and other material that seems to come from the general era. So now you’re getting “Exile” from two perspectives: first as a finished 18-track entity, a masterpiece, if you want; then as something broader and more amorphous. If I’m reading the signs correctly, these two perspectives have some relation to how Mr. Richards and Mr. Jagger think about the album.
Mr. Jagger, who has criticized the album’s production over the years and wondered aloud about the strength of its songs, is more willing to dispense with Nellcôte as the album’s central force.
“You mean what is the album’s esprit?” he asked, rephrasing a question in a recent telephone conversation. The idea of Nellcôte as the album’s unifier is “three-quarters true,” he explained.
“It wouldn’t be the same record without Nellcôte,” he added. “But then it wouldn’t be the same record without what we did in London. Nellcôte was more hothouse, it was more living-in-the-studio. But what would the difference have been if we recorded ‘Ventilator Blues’ at Olympic or at Nellcôte? Who knows, and who cares?”
Miller, the album’s producer, died in 1994. So Mr. Jagger commissioned the producer Don Was to investigate extra studio material from the period. (“When Mick first called me about it,” Mr. Was said, “it was like he was asking me, ‘Can you do me a favor, man? Can you take the garbage out?’ ”) But then Mr. Jagger got caught up in the search himself, trying to determine what other tracks might qualify as extra matter for “Exile.” Mr. Jagger said he thought only in terms of time period, not by style, sound, location, or any other criterion. For him, “Exile” is less a specific sequence of tracks than an era of recording, starting with that “Loving Cup” at Olympic Studios.
“It’s a good story to say that what was created at Nellcôte was a result of the incredibly decadent atmosphere,” Mr. Jagger said. “Well, yeah: it’s probably true that the atmosphere affected the feeling of the music, and the sound of the studio. But you’ve no idea how much or how little. And in the end, it’s just a sort of myth, really.”
Can he hear the sound of the Nellcôte studios when he listens to the album?
“I’ve no idea which is the Nellcôte stuff and which isn’t, to be honest.”
Ah.
Mr. Richards feels differently. “All of the bone and the muscle of the record was done down in that basement,” he said when asked the same question. The rest of the work he considers “fairy dust.”
It’s the opposite interpretation, but if you read the literature — particularly Robert Greenfield’s book “Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones” (Da Capo Press) — it makes sense. Nellcôte was Mr. Richards’s house, and he was one of its mainstays that summer, with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon. The other band members came and went; Inasmuch as “Exile” has an esprit of place, Mr. Richards lived in it, and Mr. Jagger visited.
“I don’t think we were conscious of making a record that was gonna be about that place and the way we felt at the time,” Mr. Richards said in a phone interview. “But the word ‘exile’ does describe pretty much the atmosphere and the conditions that we were recording in. I mean, we’d all had to leave our places in England. Not that the Stones were particularly patriotic — I know better than that — but it was really a jerk, when you’re working with a team of guys and you all have to uproot at once.”
Mr. Richards contributed little to the extra tracks on the bonus disc and distrusted altering even the outtakes and unused tracks; as he said to another reporter earlier this year, “I didn’t want to interfere with the Bible.”
“My job was to enforce the no-fiddling rule,” he told me. “I didn’t want to play around with it at all. It’s all analog, and of course the remixing involved a change to digital, but otherwise, if anybody came up with a bright idea, I said no.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Jagger heard him. He put new vocals on four of the bonus tracks: “Plundered My Soul,” “Following the River,” “Dancing in the Light” and “Pass the Wine.” In “Plundered” — after some newly tracked guitar in the opening by Mr. Taylor — you hear a 66-year-old voice singing recent lyrics: an aging aristocrat describing a younger man’s appetites, over what appears to be the Stones sounding worn and wracked in their 20s.
Mr. Was believes that nobody, not even the Stones themselves, can remember when the backing tracks for “Plundered My Soul” were recorded.
The strange thing is that “Plundered My Soul” is very good: the most soulful and energetic Stones track I can think of in almost 30 years. Until recently, the Stones have been reluctant to release their unheard archives. Perhaps that’s because they’re so good at putting old scraps into new patchworks — the then-three-year-old songs retooled in 1972 for “Exile,” the then-nine-year-old songs ( “Tops” and “Waiting on a Friend”) given new vocals and new life in 1981 on “Tattoo You.”
The rest of the bonus disc is very good, too, patchwork, mysteries and all. According to Mr. Was, two tracks come from Nellcôte — a petulant shuffle called “I’m Not Signifying” and an alternate version of “Soul Survivor,” sung by Mr. Richards. One other, a nasty R&B instrumental called “Title 5,” came from a tape box marked “1969,” though Mr. Was suspects it was made earlier. So do I.
I don’t know if a great album must serve as an accounting of where the band members’ heads were at, or where they were geographically, or when they made it. But in the Stones’ case, I do want to hear the group sound, as much as possible. I want a minimum of detours, absences and static longeurs, with introductions and bridges and codas. The Stones wrote and arranged carefully, but this is a record that favors jamming over composing; though only one track is longer than five minutes, many quickly drag from indirection: “Happy,” “Casino Boogie,” “Stop Breaking Down,” “Shine a Light” — half the record, really.
Still, because of its rolling eccentricity, “Exile” always wants to be heard in full, or at least in small groupings, including the two great segues: the hard “Rocks Off” into the harder “Rip This Joint”; the angry gnarl of “Ventilator Blues” into the menthol drift of “I Just Want to See His Face.” Throughout, I love Mr. Jagger’s yapping voice, determined to be heard, feeling its way through cultural appropriation. I think Mr. Richards’s limping rhythm in “Tumbling Dice” is one of the great energies in popular music, even if I’ve never worked up much love for the song.
But back to the alternate take of “Loving Cup,” which still seems like the star of the whole enterprise.
I asked Don Was what he thought. “There’s a sound that’s identified with ‘Exile’ that’s become part of the vocabulary for every rock ‘n’ roll musician subsequently,” he said. “And this is the ultimate track of the style that characterizes ‘Exile.’ It’s not sloppiness; it’s width, in terms of where everyone feels the beat. You’ve got five individuals feeling the beat in a different place. At some point, the centrifugal force of the rhythm no longer holds the band together. That ‘Loving Cup’ is about the widest area you can have without the song falling apart.”
What leapt out was the phrase “the style that characterizes ‘Exile,’ ” especially in connection with a track that’s not actually on the record. For me, “Exile” works best as a suggestion, not a fact.
NEW YORK (AP) — Dan Fogelberg, the singer and songwriter whose hits "Leader of the Band" and "Same Old Lang Syne" helped define the soft-rock era, died Sunday at his home in Maine after battling prostate cancer. He was 56.
His death was announced Sunday in a statement by Anna Loynes of the Solters & Digney public relations agency, and was also posted on the singer's Web site.
"Dan left us this morning at 6:00 a.m. He fought a brave battle with cancer and died peacefully at home in Maine with his wife Jean at his side," it read. "His strength, dignity and grace in the face of the daunting challenges of this disease were an inspiration to all who knew him."
Fogelberg discovered he had advanced prostate cancer in 2004. In a statement then, he thanked fans for their support: "It is truly overwhelming and humbling to realize how many lives my music has touched so deeply all these years. ... I thank you from the very depths of my heart."
Fogelberg's music was powerful in its simplicity. He didn't rely on the volume of his voice to convey his emotions; instead, they came through in the soft, tender delivery and his poignant lyrics. Songs like "Same Old Lang Syne" — in which a man reminisces after meeting an old girlfriend by chance during the holidays — became classics not only because of his performance, but for the engaging storyline, as well.
Fogelberg's heydey was in the 1970s and early 80s, when he scored several platinum and multiplatinum records fueled by such hits as "The Power of Gold" and "Leader of the Band," a touching tribute he wrote to his father, a bandleader. Fogelberg put out his first album in 1972.
Fogelberg's songs tended to have a weighty tone, reflecting on emotional issues in a serious way. But in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1997, he said it did not represent his personality.
"That came from my singles in the early '80s," he reflects. "I think it probably really started on the radio. I'm not a dour person in the least. I'm actually kind of a happy person. Music doesn't really reflect the whole person.
"One of my dearest friends is Jimmy Buffett. From his music, people have this perception that he's up all the time, and, of course, he's not. Jimmy has a serious side, too."
Later in his career, he would write material that focused on the state of the environment, an issue close to his heart. Fogelberg's last album was 2003's "Full Circle," his first album of original material in a decade. A year later he would receive his cancer diagnosis, forcing him to forgo a planned fall tour.
(Bethpage, N.Y.) On December 8, 1980, a deranged man named Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon multiple times, causing him to collapse and lie helplessly in his own blood to his death. John had spent an otherwise uneventful day leading up to meeting his fate. Earlier in the day, John and Yoko Ono were interviewed for over 4 hours by a programmer of a radio network. One of John’s quotes within the interview sounded quite simple, however in retrospect is quite chilling. John indicated how it was great that we all survived the sixties, and that we should all stop worrying whether the Apocolypse is going to come will not do us any good. He also was hopeful that as the eighties went onward, people would see the positive side of life again. His most poignant quote was “While there is life, there’s hope”, unbeknownst to him that in just a few short hours he would meet his fate many years too early. These quotes as well as many other fascinating details of John’s life can be found in a book I am currently reading entitled Lennon Revealed written by Larry Kane, a former NY and Philadelphia news reporter who traveled with the Beatles in the early years and became good friends with John.
John also posed for what would become the last photo of him alive. Later in the afternoon, John spent some time at the recording studio to finish mixing a new single from his recently turned Gold album called Double Fantasy. John had spent the last few years in obscurity, and out of the public eye. He dedicated himself to his home life and the raising of his young son Sean with Yoko. This album was the first in a few years, and I believe John was truly enjoying himself, and his new lease on life after some troubled years.
On the afternoon of December 8, the same Mark Chapman had asked John for his autograph, which John obliged. It was typical that people would often hang around the Dakota apartments hoping to catch a glimpse of John. John was a true New Yorker, one who would always frequent many of the establishments which the city had to offer. Fortunately, failed attempts by the Nixon administration to kick John out of the country enabled John to keep New York City as his home. The Nixon administration stated the reason for the action was due to a marijuana conviction in England back in the sixties. The truth of the matter was that they wanted him deported because they felt he was a disruption due to his anti-war stance and could even disrupt the Republican Convention. I am sure Nixon had better things to worry about than John’s stance on the war. Fortunately, John won his battle and was granted his Green Card in 1976. As for Nixon, well we know what happened.
Just hours after signing the autograph John returned home from the recording studio to call it an evening. At approximately 10:50PM, the deranged Mark David Chapman, carrying the book “Catcher in the Rye” in a most cowardly fashion, fired 4 or more shots in the back of John. John was pronounced dead at approximately 11:10PM at Roosevelt Hospital after endless efforts to save him.
As for myself, well I was a 14 year old, sick at home with the flu. I was lying in my bedroom watching Monday Night Football, when the dreaded news was announced by Howard Cosell. Upon hearing the news, I sat up in disbelief and just stared at the TV. Yes, although just 14 years old, the news shook me. I always had a huge musical interest, although never sang nor played an instrument. The Beatles were always one of my favorite bands, and was also a fan of the solo work of each band member. The next morning, I was home from school, and listened to the radio and watched the endless coverage of John’s death on TV. The endless coverage became a learning experience for me, as I learned so much about John and the Beatles, more than just the music. The following Sunday, there was a silent vigil, in which radio stations went silent for 10 minutes in honor of John. I don’t believe this ever happened prior to this event, and may never happen again.
On the 20th anniversary of John’s death, I finally made it down the Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Thousands of people from all over the world were there, lighting candles, telling stories, and singing songs in celebration of John’s life. Many brought their guitars and drum sets, entertaining us all to hours of sing-a-longs. At precisely 10:50PM, the entire park went silent without being provoked. We all stood for a moment or two of silence, and then everyone in unison sang “Imagine”. For me, the experience was chilling. Just think, an entire park going silent at once, and then all of us singing Imagine together. It was truly emotional, and I knew that I had witnessed something wonderful. It was my way of attaining closure. We were all united as one. People still visit Strawberry Fields each anniversary, and this year will be no exception.
Perhaps many of you reading this are not fans of John. That’s fine. It’s what makes the world go around. We may or may not always agree with some of John’s comments, but what he did always believe in was peace and love, which most of the world lacks. I often think about what John would say if he were here today. Those of you who are fans, try to take a moment or two, or perhaps all day and celebrate what John has left us. John may not be here physically, but he is here in spirit. His music will live on forever. For those of you who are teachers, tell your students about this day. Those of you who are parents, tell your kids about John and what he believed in.
John, we all miss you. As for Mr Mark David Chapman we all hope you rot in the very jail cell you live in today.
July 16 (Bloomberg) -- The next Bruce Springsteen may have the original to thank.
Music for Youth, bolstered by a Springsteen tribute concert that raised $150,000 for the foundation, is giving $350,000 to 14 music education programs for underprivileged students in New York City.
Springsteen, who grew up and lives in neighboring New Jersey, made a surprise appearance at the Carnegie Hall concert in April and sang ``The Promised Land'' and ``Rosalita'' with guest artists such as Ronnie Spector and Pete Yorn. Springsteen also donated an unspecified amount to Music for Youth, a division of UJA-Federation of New York.
``Bruce's philanthropy and his music are a beacon to people,'' said Jon Marcus, Music for Youth's director. ``They respect him as artist, and the performers were just thrilled to pay tribute to his music.''
Among the programs receiving $25,000 grants are the New York Pops' Salute to Music, which provides free Saturday music lessons to 125 junior-high school students; the Harlem School of the Arts, which helps needy music students attend college, and the Young People's Chorus of New York City.
The Bloomingdale School of Music, Bronx House Jewish Community Center Music School, Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy and Opus 118 Harlem School of Music also will receive money.
``This grant really helps support a program that's costly to run,'' James Johnson, executive director of the New York Pops, said in an interview. Johnson said the money will cover about a third of the $75,000 needed to provide weekend classes this year.
Scholarships
Opus 118 Harlem School of Music provides after-school instruction in voice, violin, guitar and piano to about 150 children. Philip Willis, the program's executive director, said the grant will fund scholarships for students who can't afford to pay $1,000 for the lessons.
``There's virtually no one here who is paying full price,'' Willis said in an interview.
Music for Youth, founded in 1995, is trying to fill the gap left by the cutting of music classes in public schools. In the 2001-02 school year, about 75 percent of third-graders in U.S. urban areas received weekly music instruction, down from about 85 percent when they were first-graders, according to a U.S. Department of Education study published in 2006.
``Schools choose not to offer music because they don't understand how important music education is,'' said Charles Feldman, Music for Youth's chairman and vice president of writer-publisher relations at BMI, which represents composers and publishers. ``If children learn how to play a musical instrument, it helps their cognitive ability.''
Music for Youth receives support from leading record labels, including Arista, EMI and Capitol.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Cole in New York at pcole3@Bloomberg.net .
CONEY ISLAND — Arlo Davy Guthrie was born in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn on July 10, 1947, son of legendary folk song singer/writer Woody Guthrie. Arlo was a name taken from a character in a story that his mother had read in her childhood. She was a dancer and teacher with the Martha Graham Company, and later, she ran a children’s dance school in Sheepshead Bay.
The modest Guthrie household in Coney Island, and later in the Howard Beach area of Queens, where the family moved when he was six, was usually filled with music, and Arlo grew up in the presence of such folk artists as Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Lee Hays, Jack Elliott, and Leadbelly. He remembers from his early years — before the onset of his father’s terminal illness (Huntington’s chorea) in the mid-’50s — the beach walks and family games with his parents and songs like “Goodnight, Little Arlo,” that his father made up.
A somewhat shy boy, Arlo was poor at sports, but his musical talent became evident in his early childhood. By the age of three he was playing the harmonica, and by six he had learned the rudiments of guitar playing from his mother.
Brought up in his mother’s Jewish faith, Arlo was Bar Mitzvahed in his mother’s Lower East Side dance studio. The loft was filled with ritual blessings, square dancing, harmonica playing and songs performed by “The Weavers” and other folk groups. The ceremony has been described as the first and only hootenanny Bar Mitzvah in history.
When Arlo was in the sixth grade, he entered the Woodward School, Brooklyn’s progressive educational institution. He sang before an audience for the first time at ten, when Cisco Houston brought him onstage at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. In his early teens he began to write songs, and during his high school years he played with a folk/bluegrass band.
Arlo was just past his teen years when in 1967 he burst onto the folk scene with an 18-1/2 minute story-song called “Alice’s Restaurant.” It was a year that the antiwar movement embraced young and old, and most of its members lived in traditional communities. But for a growing number of disillusioned young people, opposition to the war was an impetus to seek out “alternative” lifestyles. “Alice’s Restaurant” was a timely ballad which perfectly encapsulated the mood of the time. It also demonstrated Arlo’s unique perspective and contagious twinkle-in-the-eye humor. The recording earned Arlo a gold record for sales exceeding $1 million.
For a time Arlo retired “the long one,” as “Alice’s Restaurant” was called, from his concert performances, saying that he had forgotten the words. But as the thirtieth anniversary of his now infamous garbage dumping arrest approached, he began to perform it again. He seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the tale. As he began playing the song to thunderous applause, he quipped “You may have heard this one before. I know I have!”
Through the course of repeated performances, as many of his tales do, “Alice” grew longer. Arlo recorded an updated version of his most famous anthem. The same revamped album includes Arlo’s famous “pickle” ditty “The Motorcycle Song.”
The new version was recorded live at The Guthrie Center, Guthrie’s spiritual center and church, which is located where the events of “Alice’s Restaurant” took place. (Yes, there really is an Alice; her last name is Brock). It’s the same place from whence he took out the garbage and dumped it over a hillside. His arrest for littering not only prevented him from being drafted for service to Vietnam, but also provided the plot for “Alice’s Restaurant.” In 1991 Arlo was able to buy Alice’s church building and establish The Guthrie Center in Housatonic, Massachusetts, as an interfaith spiritual center with programs for children who are recovering from abuse. “I’m just your average small town monk with a church … have been for years,” he says.
“Alice’s Restaurant,” starring Arlo was made into a movie and released in 1969. American Classics Movie Companion reviews it as follows: “A finely wrought, and often strikingly funny, cinematic snapshot of the 1960s. After illegally dumping a load of garbage, a young man gets tangled up with both the local police and the draft board.”
Arlo’s book “Mooses Come Walking” includes his poem by that name which he performs at concerts. Alice Brock did illustrations for the book. He dedicated the book to his two grandchildren and received a favorable review from the New York Times. “I’ve been a record, a movie, a performer and part of a TV show, but I have never been a book about a moose. I’m thrilled.” he says.
Arlo has recorded many other successful albums. His newest “Mystic Journey” contains all new material. Arlo appeared on the TV family drama “Byrds of Paradise.” He played the role of Alan Moon, a warmed-over hippie and 45-year-old high school student. The show ran from March to June 1994. In the last episode he performed his “Moon Song” which is included in the “Mystic Journey” album. When the series ended, according to Arlo, a Hawaiian (locale of the series was Hawaii) asked him what he was going to do next. “Oh, I guess I’ll just go back to singing,” he said. “You sing too?” asked the friend. Like his father Woody, Arlo became the spokesman for a generation of many young Americans who felt alienated from society. He has given benefit performances for the Black Panthers, the American Indian movement, and many other causes. A cause especially close to Arlo’s heart is the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease, which he helped his mother establish. He has had to live with the 50-50 possibility of contracting his father’s affliction later in life.
He performed at Carnegie Hall in 1981 with Pete Seeger. Arlo converted to Roman Catholicism in 1977, and subsequently became a member of the 3rd Order of St. Francis, the lay auxiliary of the Franciscans. He is a vegetarian, and on his farm he and his family have a menagerie of pet ducks, dogs and other animals.
Arlo owns a church, spends most of the year making personal appearances, writes poems about mooses, sings half-hour long songs, plays a middle-aged high school student on TV, and records the same album twice. Quite a record for “just your average guy” as he describes himself! Brooklyn’s opinion of its native son Arlo is definitely not that of “an average guy.” He was crowned 2001’s King of Brooklyn at the Welcome Back to Brooklyn festival on June 10. As usual with newly crowned “royalty,” Arlo was also given his spot on the Celebrity Path at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. His daddy Woody was honored with his place in 1986.
Photo above Arlo & Bob Guthrie
Attention: Governors Island Show July 28th:
Ribbon of Highway/Endless Skyway: A Tribute in the Spirit of Woody Guthrie, 1:30 pm
This is a show specifically designed to showcase Woody's songs, words and spirit. The show, originated by singer-songwriter Jimmy Lafave, focuses on the entire scope of Guthrie's career so that all of his music, known and unknown, recorded and unrecorded, can be experienced by the audience.
