From the moment he and his band walked on stage, until he finished signing autographs and posing for pictures with people after the show almost three hours latter, he made everybody feel right at home and as if they were his special guest. It felt like he was constantly aware of each and every one of us in the audience and that he knew without us this evening wouldn't have been possible, so we were as important as he was to the proceedings.

Half the fun of an Arlo Guthrie concert is the stories that he tells as introductions to the songs. Some of them are funny and some of them are serious, but they all increase our connection to both the man and the song.

He tells us of being at his parents' home in 1961 and this funny-looking guy shows up at the door looking for his dad. Well, Woody was in the hospital by then, he spent most of the last 10 year of his life hospitalized with Huntington's disease, so Arlo invited him in and they hung out for a bit and played harmonica together before a young Bob Dylan went off to visit Woody.

He continued on to say that Bob visited his dad quite a bit for a while, and then four years later: "We starting hearing these great songs we'd never heard the likes of before... Maybe I should have visited my dad more often in the hospital." Then he and his band launched into "Mr. Tambourine Man".

It's been a long time since I've heard that song in its entirety, and because of the introduction I found myself paying close attention to it and let the sensations of the music and the lyrics working together affect me. I haven't taken recreational drugs in close to twelve years, so what I felt can't be put down to that. Arlo's personalization of the song allowed me to go inside it, travel with it as the lyrics say, and perhaps truly experience what Dylan had intended his audience to feel when he first wrote it.

So it went as the evening progressed. With each song's introduction revealing a little bit more about Arlo, allowing us to get to know him a little better, the songs became more and more personal messages from him to us. Songs like "Coming Into Los Angles" become funnier and in some ways more poignant when he talks of being searched four times while walking through the airport terminal. Especially when he tries to explain to the security personnel that "I've never become the threat I hoped to."

Of course some things have changed in this world in the past 40 years, and to prove it he recounted an incident where he and his son Abe were waiting in a departure lounge for a plane, and he noticed two very obvious Secret Service agents across the way. "Being a child of the sixties, of course my first reaction upon seeing them was uh, oh."