This RIG has long-haul potential [RIG at Guthrie Center (6/2/00)]
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., June 4, 2000)
CONCERT REVIEW This RIG has long-haul potential [RIG at Guthrie Center (6/2/00)] By Seth Rogovoy (GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., June 4, 2000) – There was an awful lot of history on the stage, in the air and in the room at the Guthrie Center on Friday night, when a group of third-generation folk royalty with names like Guthrie and Seeger performed traditional and new folks songs for an enthusiastic crowd of devotees.

Sarah Lee Guthrie, daughter of Arlo and granddaughter of Woody, has teamed up with Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, grandson of Pete, and her husband, Johnny Irion, to make for a kind of 21st-century version of the Weavers or the Almanac Singers. They call themselves RIG – an acronym made from their initials – and on Friday night, they demonstrated the potential for the long haul.

These twenty-something performers, to the manner born, threw themselves into a program including songs associated with their illustrious forebears, as well as contemporary songs in the tradition. They came out swinging with the labor anthem, “I’m Sticking to the Union,” and kept up in that vein for much of the evening, with other labor ballads and politically-minded tunes about the environment, spiced with more introspective, personal material by the songwriters.

Tao Rodriguez-Seeger has apprenticed with his grandfather for many years, and it shows. He was a charming frontman and boasts a strong stage presence. Like his grandpa, he has a gift for involving the audience in a song, wrapping it in narration, whether it’s a pirate tune he’s relating to the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, or Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan,” a Spanish tune made familiar by the “Buena Vista Social Club.”

He has a booming, resonant voice and he’s a fleet guitarist who doubled on banjo. He’d have made his grandpa proud, too, on full-throttle versions of the communist anthem, “I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister,” “Wabash Cannonball,” and a slightly risque ditty about a bird and body parts that can’t be mentioned in a family newspaper.

Sarah Lee Guthrie has inherited some of her grandfather’s spunk, her father’ s wit, but fortunately for her, neither of their voices! She boasts a pretty vocal instrument made for singing country music, one that variously recalled Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris and Lucy Kaplansky. She displayed a Woody-like simplicity in a few original children’s tunes, including “You Gotta Sing,” and a touch of her father’s surrealistic humor in “Big Square Walking.” Guthrie’s husband, Johnny Irion, brought the sensibility of the California rocker he formerly was to the group, with some mean slide guitar and dobro and songs about life on the road that harkened to Neil Young and the Eagles. He also got with the program on a touching ballad about the horrible plight of coal miners.

RIG was backed by a rhythm section that also boasted strong ties to the Guthrie/Seeger axis. Arlo’s son Abe, who regularly tours with his dad and sister, played keyboards which often filled in with bass parts. And drummer Terry “A La Berry” Hall, who toured for many years with Arlo Guthrie as well as Pete Seeger, gave the folk a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll kick in the pants. He also instinctively powered “Chan Chan” the polyrhythms that make the song roll.

While it served great sentimental purpose to have Abe Guthrie and Hall join RIG for this hometown performance, in the end the show might have worked better without them. The musicians confessed to having had little time for rehearsal, and the ragged, full-band arrangements occasionally overwhelmed the singers and the songs. This sort of thing can certainly work when carefully planned in advance, but in the bright, echoey cavern of the former Trinity Church, Hall and brother Guthrie nearly got in the way as much as they complimented the singers.

RIG is in its early stages, and the trio is a long way from the polished stagecraft of a Peter, Paul and Mary. What they lack in experience they certainly make up for in spirit and genetics. And on the basis of their rollicking version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line” that closed the night, they could well be the band to deliver old-fashioned folk to a young generation raised on rock, one that probably couldn’t tell Pete Seeger from Bob Seger, and one that probably hasn’t even heard of either.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on June 7, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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