Time to Run

Song 272: This week's playlist track turns out to be Running Down the Road by Arlo Guthrie, who also wrote the song. Somehow I got to a pretty high playlist number before posting an Arlo track, so I'll need to make sure his second appearance on the list comes along sooner than later, but for now, this week's cut about running follows last week's song about walking. (If you haven't guessed what's up for next week, I'll just give you a hint that it's an instrumental track.) All I knew of AG in the late '60s was the chorus to Alice's Restaurant -- I didn't hear the record, but only heard a couple of people sing the chorus and play it on guitar. It sounded old-timey to me, and a bit quaint in the context of Break on Through, Born to Be Wild and similar songs of the era. I didn't get the joke, and I also knew nothing about Arlo's father -- my mother sang songs like This Land is Your Land and Do Re Mi but I doubt she had any idea who wrote them, any more than I did. When I landed at Northwestern in the fall of 1969, one of the first things I planned to do was to begin collecting LPs, and a couple of months into that plan, I made the mistake of joining a record club, which led to receiving a few albums in the mail that I hadn't actually wanted. One day, Arlo's latest LP Running Down the Road arrived, even though I had mailed in my card telling the club not to send it, and so I had to own it, whether I wanted it or not. I played it through once or twice, and I decided I didn't want it, but I had to pay for it, so I wasn't going to throw it away. When I mentioned to Hank Neuberger, who lived in the dorm room across the hall from me, about my frustration at getting a record I didn't want, he told me he'd like to have the album, and so I sold it to him right then and there. Over the next few months, I started listening to more singer/songwriter music, and started moving more in that direction as a musician, plus I heard more of Arlo, and learned more about him and his father, to the point that, by the fall of 1970, I was wishing I hadn't sold the LP to Hank, and I ended up getting another copy at the local record store. As soon as I got it back to my apartment, I had it on the turntable, and it would take many spins there in the coming years, leading me to ask myself more than once how I could have misjudged the album so badly. I had become quite picky in my listening, and on some records I would only play certain cuts, so I really appreciated LPs like RDtR where I could enjoy every track from start to finish. Some albums put the best track first, which in the CD era happens more often than not, but in the LP days, sometimes the last cut would be the best, and in this case, the title track that closes the album always had my vote for number one.