★★★★★
Arlo Guthrie provides a very useful role model for the children of famous parents. He's respectful but not overshadowed; proud of the connection but not afraid to be his own person; within the same tradition but moving it onwards. In short, when people think of laidback Arlo Guthrie, the most likely thing to come to mind is Alice's Restaurant, The Motorcycle Song or City Of New Orleans, rather than an image of his gaunt and driven dad...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
In the summer of 69, folk music's second most famous Guthrie played a historic show on a farm in upstate New York. This live album isn't from that particular concert but recorded at an undisclosed Long Island venue just prior to it. Most Arlo Guthrie fans don't need another version of seminal smuggler warning Coming Into Los Angeles or Alice's Restaurant, both included here, but that's not the selling point...
- nowtoronto.com
2009-11-07
★★★★★
Easily his best and most musical album, thanks to production-of-the-year by Lenny Waronker and Van Dyke Parks. Contains two absolutely superb cuts: "Running Down the Road," which features a guitar freak-out by some studio musicians who ought to send 20 white blues bands scampering back to the tars of India, and "Coming into Los Angeles," which embodies almost perfectly what it means to be young, hip, and temporarily on top of it in 1970 Amerika.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
A best-of with a theme: The Rehabilitation of a Smart-Ass. Side one leads with "Alice's Restaurant Massacre," retrieved from Arlo's otherwise amateurish debut, and then reprises two tuneful if soggy religious numbers...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
If somebody's gotta make exploring-the-folkie-mind-set records, oh Lord let it be somebody with a strong sense of history as well as a weakness for nostalgia. "Ukelele Lady" sounds positively intelligent backing one of Woody's heaviest antiscab ballads, and if the new ones about trains and booze seem slightly outmoded, well, that's part of the point, right?
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
★★★★★
That the folkie mind set dwells in the recording studio these days is a truth only new folk-rock songs as original as "City of New Orleans" can make me like. Instead, the best new tune here, Arlo's celebration of the Guthries' fiddling tradition, sounds suspiciously like a traditional fiddle tune. And I never had much use for "Gates of Eden" in its, er, authentic version.
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-07-10
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