Arlo Guthrie playing Alice’s Restaurant, Newport, RI 1967

 

Alice’s Restaurant Just in Time for THANKSGIVING! One good turkey deserves another.
Photo & reporting By Lenny Lensworth Frieling

Bob Dylan Part

As it has for so many years, Newport, Rhode Island hosted the Newport Folk Festival. Famous for presenting days of the best of the best in folk music extant, it played host to a long list of Boulder musicians over decades. International Fame was enhanced when in 1965, a young Bob Dylan took the stage. He’d played the folk festival before, in 1963 playing Blowin’ In The Wind. His 1965 acoustic set was enthusiastically greeted.

THEN Mr. Dylan broke a rule of Folk Music. You don’t use electric guitars. And here was the ultimate folkie coming out strapped behind a Fender Stratocaster. I imagine, I don’t really remember this, that he played with his back to the audience, as he almost always has done over the years.

Not only did he come out playing an electric “Maggie’s Farm,” he had the further foresight to be joined by a band including Michael Bloomfield, one of the superstars of electric blues guitar, Al Kooper, organist of unmatched talent and fame, and some member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The best of the best. They were, and they were! Simply amazing. Too good to be totally true.
It is true. While many of us were cheering and clapping in awe, a large part of the audience was booing! At the time it seemed like the boo’s outnumbered the cheers by quite a bit. I was mortified. Horrified. And baffled! Bob Dylan also did not react well, leaving the stage. Apparently, backstage, Peter Yarrow talked him into taking the stage again, which he did, sans Strat acoustically, playing Mr. Tambourine Man followed by It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.

The Arlo Guthrie Part


This article is not about Bob Dylan, but he’s always worth writing about. It is however about Arlo Guthrie! Loved in Boulder for so many great reasons including Boulder Theater concerts and so much more.


The Newport Folk Festival was the weekend of July 17, 1967. The format of the Newport Folk Festival has been “workshops” in the afternoon and concerts at night. That has evolved over the years, with there now being multiple stages. In 1967, a workshop could be anything from a mini-concert, a lesson, or anything else. Arlo performed “in concert” for close to an hour. He had been listed in the program as “Topial Songs.” Which happily included “I don’t want a pickle, I just wanna ride on my motorcycle.” The Motorcycle Song.


I was at the afternoon workshop, along with Jan Zeff, my then girlfriend, then wife, then friend again, and got this picture, (actually photographed, developed it and printed it myself) and years later gave the prints to my then wife. She had been with me for the festival, including at the workshop and concerts. She kept the photos, lending them back to me so I could scan them. The small group was perhaps 60 people, including Jan and me, and another loved-in-Boulder entertainer, Judy Collins. So now we have two people who would be Boulder lifetime residents quite soon, moving here in 1975, and two entertainers close to the heart of Boulder, gathering as Boulderites will, in wonderful places for great music!


Boulderites who have performed at the Newport Folk Festival include our own Greg Brown, Elephant Revival, the Lumineers, and Nathaniel Rateliff. [list boulder musicians who have played Newport]

                                         Arlo at the Boulder Theater, Lensworth leaning on the stage to take this pic.

Arlo played every minute of every bar of Alice’s Restaurant. 18 minutes 34 seconds if you were trying to remember! It was jaw-dropping brilliant. As a beginning fingerstyle folk student, I was drooling and jealous.  He’d been working on the song for two years before playing it for a group this large. Then, at night, on the big and only stage, he played it “for the first time in front of people.”  The New York Times reports a slightly different sequence. They say we saw the workshop, that it was such a hit he did the main stage in the afternoon the next day, 3500 people and at night for 10,000 people. Perhaps the Times is right, but I think we saw him the same night that we saw him at the workshop. I am pretty certain that I was there!


What did we do right? We showed up!
Love
Lenny

Leonard Frieling
  • Senior Counsel Emeritus to the Boulder Law firm Dolan + Zimmerman LLP : (720)-610-0951
  • Former Judge
  • Photographer of the Year, AboutBoulder 2023
  • First Chair and Originator of the Colorado Bar Association’s Cannabis Law Committee, a National first.
  • Previous Chair, Boulder Criminal Defense Bar (8 years)
  • Twice chair Executive Counsel, Colorado Bar Association Criminal Law Section
  • NORML Distinguished Counsel Circle
  • Life Member, NORML Legal Committee
  • Life Member, Colorado Criminal Defense Bar
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  • Chair, Colorado NORML, 7 years including during the successful effort to legalize recreational pot in Colorado
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  • Board member, Author, and Editor for Criminal Law Articles for the Colorado Lawyer, primary publication of the Colorado Bar Assoc. 7 Years, in addition to having 2 Colorado Lawyer cover photos, and numerous articles for the Colorado Lawyer monthly publication.
  • LEAP Speaker, multi-published author, University lectures Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, Denver University Law School, Univ. of New Mexico, Las Vegas NM, and many other schools at all levels.
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