Singers: A Joyful Happening

In Alice’s Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie tells the tale of how he once took a sack of garbage to the dump in Stockbridge, Mass., was arrested for littering, and wound up, much to his joy, rejected by the draft—because he had a police record. Ever since, Arlo has had an abiding belief in the benign power of fate. When he was married last week, the day had been carefully selected in advance by a medium in New York.

Sure enough, the rain had stopped the night before, the sky was blue, and the autumn sun was shining brightly through the red-on-red trees. Arlo saw to it that nobody bothered the pack of mongrel puppies that scampered freely among the guests. “One of my mystical friends told me that one of these puppies will some day save the life of one of my children,” he explained. “I don’t know which one it is, so I have to take care of all of them.”

Other than that, things were joyfully permissive as Arlo, now 22, was wedded to Jackie Hyde, 24, a gentle, lovely blonde from California. The event took place right in the middle of Arlo’s hilltop meadow in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. “It was the kind of wedding,” a friend said, “where nothing could go wrong. If it did, it was incorporated into the proceedings.” Arlo’s mother, the widow of the great dust-bowl folk singer Woody Guthrie, and 40 or so friends and relatives came up from New York by special bus. The bus was late, and could not make it up the last hill. No matter. Everybody, including Justice of the Peace Donald M. Feder, just waited happily, drinking champagne or beer and eating Alice Brock’s shrimp curry, turkey and roast beef, the same kind she used to serve in her restaurant in nearby Stockbridge. Arlo’s hippie friends wandered to and fro, the girls in their gowns and see-through blouses, the boys in beads and boots. “I feel like a flower child,” said Arlo’s mother. “You look like a flower child,” replied Arlo.

Sweet Fruit. For the ceremony, Jackie and Arlo placed crowns (plastic) of stephanotis and ivy leaves in their hair, and were attired in fairyland white—the bride in a shimmering velvet gown and train with lace trim, the bridegroom in a puffed-sleeve shirt and bell-bottom trousers. While the dogs barked a processional, Folk Singer Judy Collins sang Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne (“She’s touched your perfect body with her mind”). Arlo’s mother read a poem that Woody, who died in 1967, had written years ago for his son’s wedding: “May your gladness ripen as a yellow sweet fruit and the radiance of your thinking invigorate the world.” After the ceremony and a kiss, Arlo led the entire wedding party of 150 in his favorite hymn, Amazing Grace—How Sweet the Sound. Then everybody lined up to kiss the bride, who may have silently reflected on a fateful day last year when she told Joady Guthrie that she was going to marry his brother Arlo and would he please introduce them.

As for Arlo, he wandered off with a guest talking about a tree house he wanted to build in the woods. Alice’s Restaurant, the Arthur Penn movie based on his song, had opened the night before in nearby Pittsfield and had been roundly snarled at by two local critics. If Arlo knew, he didn’t care. He was a married man now, and what mattered was taking care of the roses, buying a plow for his four-wheel-drive truck and rounding up those puppies.