I think sometimes that Arlo Guthrie has a sense of humour slightly different from the rest of us. I mean what other performer would release a disc where he's accompanied by a full orchestra, and then promote it by going out on a "Solo Reunion Tour" called "Together Again At Last", where for the first time in some twenty years it's just him and his guitar.

Somewhere beneath all that white hair there's a little voice saying, that'll mess with them some. Well, I guess we can't expect much less from the man who expresses his disappointment at not turning out to be the threat to society that he had originally hoped. It seems somewhere along the line the dangerous hippie radical became a folk musician in the real meaning of the world and starting playing the music of the folk.

At a typical concert you'll hear his old opus about being better safe than sorry coming through Customs with illegal substances "Coming Into Los Angeles" while the very next song could well be his arrangement of an old traditional number like "St. James Infirmary" Of course, his dad Woody and his buddies were much the same; one moment singing songs about the plight of the dust bowl farmer and the next some traditional tune from a distant part of the globe.

So we probably shouldn't be surprised anymore at anything Arlo pulls out of his hat. Still that didn't stop me from being taken slightly aback when his forthcoming release on Rising Sun Records In Times Like These showed up in the mail: Arlo Guthrie and the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra performing a retrospective of his music.

Arlo Guthrie and a Symphony Orchestra just wasn't a combo that I had ever really considered likely, but according to Arlo's notes for the CD he'd been trying to make it happen for years now. As he explained in an interview I read, his mother had been an original member of the Martha Graham dance company and he had grown up listening to classical music and symphonic arrangements almost as much as he had folk so it was just as much part of his life as any other music.

The mixture of folk music and orchestration is not as far fetched as you might think; in fact it was quite common back in the 1940s and 50s. I've heard recordings of Pete Seeger, The Weavers, and others being accompanied by full orchestras from that period. Admittedly it was a bit disconcerting to hear something like "Follow The Drinking Gourd" with swelling strings et al, but you could get used to it, maybe.

I have to admit to some trepidation when I put the disc on, I don't think I would have been able to deal with Arlo Guthrie's voice accompanied by Las Vegas type strings or similar types of arrangements. I should have known better than to think that Arlo Guthrie would allow that to happen to his music. He couldn't have made that any clearer when he wrote in his booklet that this wasn't pop fluff arrangements that could be played on any synthesizer, but symphonic arrangements arrived at over years of work that will challenge the skills of senior orchestral musicians.