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orn July 10, 1947 in Brooklyn, NY, Arlo Guthrie, son of folk legend Woody Guthrie, grew up surrounded by performers like Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, who brought him onstage at Gerde ’s Folk City for an impromptu performance at the age of ten. Arlo dropped out of college after only six weeks, just in time for Thanksgiving dinner. After eating at a restaurant housed in a deconsecrated church owned by friends Alice and Ray Brock, Arlo and a friend offered to dispose of the Brocks ’ garbage, found the landfi ll closed, and decided to throw the trash down a hillside. They were arrested for littering. The incident kept him out of Vietnam and inspired “Alice ’s Restaurant Massacree, ” the song that launched his career, landed him on the main stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 and created the basis for his highly successful debut album later that year. Arlo went on to release many other albums, dipping into folk, country, blues and rock, along the way performing at Woodstock, writing a children ’s book and founding his own record label, Rising Son Records. In recent years, Arlo has toured extensively with his own son, Abe, represented on the 2007 live album In Times Like This. Arlo describes his most recent release, Thirty-two Cents Postage Due, as “not a normal record for us, ” an effort which remained unreleased for over ten years as a result of technical problems. “My dad had been turned into a postage stamp that was worth 32 cents, so we thought on the occasion of him being a stamp, we would go back and record some of the songs that had made him popular to begin with. ” New Woody Guthrie songs were coming to light as Wilco, Janis Ian and Eliza Gilkyson put music to his lyrics. “We recorded Thirtytwo Cents in Branson and brought the ADATs back, and nothing was in sync. Finally the technology changed enough over the last ten years so we could put the stuff back the way it was recorded. Abe added chatter between the songs, to make it a sittin ’-around, pickin ’ kind of record, not something we ’d never done before, sort of live-in-the-studio. ” (See review in On the Record.) Arlo also currently devotes his energies to philanthropy, founding the Guthrie Center and the Guthrie Foundation, which address issues as diverse as the environment, education and Huntington ’s disease, which took his father ’s life. These charities are now housed in the same church in Massachusetts where Arlo once ate a very fortuitous Thanksgiving dinner. Born September 5, 1969, and originally named Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa after his father ’s bandmates (the hospital wouldn ’t allow an unusual name like Dweezil —how times change), Dweezil Zappa is the second child of composer Frank Zappa. In the 1980s, he did a stint as an MTV VJ, had a few movie roles and put out his first album, Havin ’ a Bad Day, at age 16, followed two years later by My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama. His third album, Confessions, was released in 1991. Dweezil released two albums with his brother Ahmet under the band name Z, and did not release another solo album until 2000 ’s Automatic. In recent years, Dweezil ’s focus has shifted.

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