Arlo Guthrie's 'Coming Into Los Angeles' Is a Trip

‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt

Photo byRising Son Records

As Arlo Guthrie returned on a flight home to Los Angeles from London in the mid-’60s, he discovered that his friends had slipped a small amount of drugs into his gifts. Guthrie’s fear of getting busted by US Customs inspired the song “Coming Into Los Angeles.” Guthrie admits that his lyric “Coming into Los Angeles / Bringing in a couple of keys” exaggerated the size of his stash.

Guthrie recorded “Coming Into Los Angeles” for his 1969 album Running Down the Road and performed the song at the 1969 Woodstock festival. The film of the event used Guthrie’s song over a montage of pot-smoking hippies.

“I know I did ‘Coming Into Los Angeles,’ but the one on the record, the one that you see in the movie, is not the ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’ that we did,” Guthrie revealed in Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock.

“That’s the one that they took from another recording somewhere and snuck it on there — which is why you never see us playing in Woodstock ’cause they couldn’t synch it up. They always have pictures of people smoking dope or something like that, you know. That was a shame too, because they took the worst possible recording of some terrible night we did somewhere in the city, and stuck it on there, and I was always horrified at that.”

PETE SEEGER AT THE BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ON THE US CAPITOL GROUNDS, WASHINGTON, DC, 2000.Photo byLIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

Guthrie performed for several years with Pete Seeger until the legendary folk singer died in 2014. “We sort of developed over time this routine that we would have of our songs challenging the next one,” Guthrie explained in American Songwriter. “In other words, ‘I’m doing these songs. Now, what do you have to say about that?’ And I always found his responses to my three songs interesting. I think he found my responses to his songs equally interesting.

“I would do ‘Coming Into Los Angeles.’ He hated that song. And he always would follow it with a song called ‘Garbage.’ To make a point.

“It didn’t have enough social significance for him. But he also recognized that he was doing songs that likewise had no social significance. It was just a question of his preference.”

"Coming Into Los Angeles" by Arlo Guthrie

Guthrie told the Los Angeles Times that in 2003 he attracted the attention of two federal agents at Boston’s Logan Airport. “Now, people like me, we have a chemical reaction to people like that. One of them walks over and says, ‘You Guthrie?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he looks at my bag and goes, ‘You got, uh, a couple keys in there?’ Then he just smiled and asked for an autograph. Hah! The times have changed, haven’t they?”

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs and 200 Greatest 70s Rock Songs.