Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys

Arlo Guthrie | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 21, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Koch Records
• ASIN: B000001SN4
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,031 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Farrell O'Gara

2. Gypsy Davy

3. This Troubled Mind Of Mine

4. Week On The Rag

5. Miss The Mississippi And You

6. Lovesick Blues

7. Uncle Jeff

8. Gates Of Eden

9. Last Train

10. Cowboy Song

11. Sailor's Bonnett

12. Cooper's Lament

13. Ramblin' 'Round

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I like Arlo..., October 11, 2005

By 

James E. Duckworth "oahu-street" (Clinton, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (Audio CD)

I like Arlo. After first hearing him 30 years ago I still put him on in the morning with my coffee. He is one of those artists that I buy over again when a new format comes in style (such as LP verses CD). I have never listened to any of his albums (no matter how many times) without either laughing, crying, singing along, dancing, or feeling that I have learned something new about humanity. I like him just as much and more than most artists I listen to. That includes Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Wilco, Modest Mouse, Neal Young, Ben Harper, Nine Inch Nails, The wallflowers, Radio Head, Ten Years After, The Beach Boys, Johnny Cash, Kieth Urban, and so on. This album is a great one -- I cannot put this on my player without singing along from the beginning to the end. If you like folk music Arlo is the modern master. He's a humble man and a great artist.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Arlo classic album, August 31, 2003

By 

R. Bauer "theodore999" (FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (Audio CD)

A gem of a album by the under-appreciated Arlo Guthrie. Buy this along with Amigo (my favorite CD by him), Hobo's Lullabye and both Alice's Restaurant CD's and you're off to a great start enjoying a great performers works.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Once-Red Barn In The Heartland: Arlo Guthrie's, September 18, 2005

By 

level42fan (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys (Audio CD)

"Last of The Brooklyn Cowboys" occupies a space where AM and early FM radio once stood in America. The album plays like a 1970s radio station playlist, shuttling smoothly and unapologetically from Irish reel to Caribbean pop to classic country to Americana ragtime to hobo, then back again. Exquisitely mastered, Arlo Guthrie's "Brooklyn Cowboys" is as delicious to the ear as a fine caramel to the tongue. After probably ten-thousand listenings, I still find this album gorgeous, fresh, and in many places, haunting.

"Farrell O'Gara" begins with distant cries from seagulls and pounding surf churning on some distant Irish shore. Fiddles duel for conquest. It sounds sweet, nostalgic and standard -- but about one minute before the song's end, the chords and key take a sudden swerving detour into one of the most powerful tours through the power of the suspended fourth I think I have ever heard. Warning, SPOILER AHEAD:

The song ends on a sudden, jagged stop, unresolved, like a beautiful maiden who was standing behind you on a cliff, you turn, and she's gone. Did she jump? Did she fall? There are no answers; her impossible sudden absence is all that's left to you, and "O'Gara" leaves you just as empty-handed. Only the gulls and the tide remain: one of many stunning, evocative mixing choices that will warm you to this album.

"Gypsy Davy", the sweetly haunting tale of a plantation mistress who flees wealth, husband, and -- somewhat startlingly, considering the era in which it was written -- even her baby, for freedom, song and love, creeps in after "Farrell O'Gara"'s abrupt finish on some of the warmest sonics I've heard recorded, and what lies ahead is a tasty serving of pure musicianship, ending with a completely riotous, joyous jam session of vibraphone and celebration. As a child listening to this album (and staring hypnotized at its mysterious twilit cover), I imagined a blond woman running free at last across a darkening meadow with the lover of the title. My attitudes towards marriage were formed then and there, with her lyrical defiance: "I'll go my way from day to day..."

"This Troubled Mind of Mine" is classic country that will drag a complicit, grinning YEE-HAWWW! from your mouth before its ending, brightly played and sung. Arlo Guthrie, the prototype sensitive folkie male, does a very decent job of getting across what will read as unusually female lyrics. I still cannot shake the impression this was written as a woman's song... "Got me a baby that's got some dough / when ya gotta go, ya gotta go..."

Next comes "Week On The Rag", a charming piece of Americana that evokes images of early 20th century baseball, soda fountains and small town bandstands. Not a lyric is sung; a spare, agile ragtime piano holds court elegantly, and alone.

"Miss The Mississippi And You", an elegiac look at what bright lights and fame cannot replace, comes in on a slow, shuffling 6/8, with somber choral voices trilling behind Guthrie's thin, reedy, heartfelt contralto, as they will also in "Last Train To Glory" (which see).

"Lovesick Blues" is pure Hank Williams (not Junior, either), with Arlo's yodel cartwheeling and somersaulting exuberantly over this bright major key recital of missing your baby once she's gone. Rousing, jaunty and fun, this song will put you in a good mood. I personally hate country, and this is the only country album I can bear. I dare you not to like this song, even if you loathe country. It's a smilebringer.

"Uncle Jeff" streaks through like a meteor on fiddle and banjo, with Arlo Guthrie literally rapping country-style about how his (or Woody's?) talented "Uncle Jeff Guthrie" handed him a fiddle and told him to fiddle like a fiddle should be fiddled. Seemingly not the most memorable song, it's in and out so quickly you barely notice it, but you'll find yourself humming it days later.

The album's masterpiece, bar none, is Arlo's tribute to Dylan, "Gates of Eden". Thirty-four years after I first heard it, this remains my favorite Bob Dylan song, and most of the reason why can be attributed to the spare, completely stirring instrumentation choices and mixing of this rendition. Delicate, with Ry Cooder's razor-slice slide guitar stylings here and there like brushes of fine gold in the corners of a dark painting, "Gates" tells a simple, timeless story even more haunting today with its intimations of human failings and the quest for the eternal in the materialistic and ephemeral. The lyrics read like images stolen from a dream; Guthrie channels Dylan's own singing voice but lends it a deeper, throatier, more square-on-the-mark midrange. The results touch the soul.

"Last Train" is a chorus-backed reflection on mortality, all major key, but with minor key lyrics. Arlo Guthrie returns to his father's traditional Socialist hobo storytelling, lending dignity to the faces who fall between the cracks of life.

The somber, heartsore paean to loneliness, "Cowboy Song" paints a picture of a careworn, experienced outsider gazing on a world he can never belong to, but whose song will outlast all that he cannot share around him. Guthrie proves on this cut once again how although his father's soul was 100% folk, his own youthful soul spoke country with the greatest sincerity and fluency. An instinctive country and western emotionalist, Arlo lends the anguished, longing lyrics immense extra sadness.

A second Celtic reel, "Sailor's Bonnett", whirls into the ear on pinwheeling fiddles round and round, dervishing gaily from start to finish.

"Cooper's Lament", another faintly Socialist-themed song, shows Arlo speaking to Everyman, telling us "You've got to be there, brother, yes you do", challenging us to reach out to the poorer other whose needy hands reach out to us. A lively background chorus of female voices add spoonfuls and touches of soulfulness in places, but at moments Arlo's voice seems to struggle to stay at the top of them, one of the rare and only miscues on an otherwise expertly mastered album.

"Rambling Round" ends the album on a winsome 6/8 study of the hobo life. Arlo Guthrie sings from the point of view of a lifelong homeless man who "rambles" from city to "your town", picking apples and doing other itinerant day labor for pennies to earn just enough to ramble on to the next trainstop. It's an intriguing portrait of an America vanished from the front seats today in our noisy, Ikea-cluttered culture, like glimpsing the pinked out shambles of what was once a bright red hay barn on golden grass from the cool interior of your modern car as you pass it: for a moment, you and America's history were one -- but then, the barn is a mile behind you, your eyes are ahead, and you're thinking of what to buy where, to eat.

Miles and years later, the album will be seeped well into your sinew and blood, and you won't forget the barn or its shocking once upon a time red.

Arlo Guthrie's "The Last of The Brooklyn Cowboys" taught me, as a child, how important "mastering" was. Listening to it on the turntable, I noticed at age five how rich the sound was compared to other albums I had heard. I opened the double-cover, which was fashioned like a book and had illustrations inside it, and eagerly read the production credits. It was then and there I learned someone had "mastered" the album. I followed that phrase for years until I finally cut an album of my own, an amateur one of course. I learned then mastering was the final touch, the oil and powder an album's sonic experience for you is brushed and dusted with to make it, at last, for your ears and your enjoyment, perfect.

I also learned what "haunting" felt like, musically. I first heard this album in the fall of 1973. When my sister finally found it in 2004 at Amoeba in Los Angeles and sent a CD of it to me, I literally popped champagne in celebration. That's enough of me ranting as a stranger in cyberspace about this album. I can only recommend it to you. But be warned: it will stay in your system forever, like a glimpse of a red barn.

Barry Feldman was this album's executive producer. It was mastered -- exceptionally -- by a man whose name was wrongly, eerily somehow, omitted from its CD reissue covers. It was credited inside the "book cover" of the 1973 LP version.