‘Coming Into Los Angeles’: the terrifying plane ride that inspired Arlo Guthrie’s generational 1969 hit
Sometime in the late 1960s, a teenage Arlo Guthrie found himself on a flight, headed from London to Los Angeles, that would remain in his memory for years to come and inspire one of his most well-known songs.
Guthrie had somewhat happened into a music career; though of course, being the son of Woody Guthrie meant that the singer-songwriter tradition was passed down, but it was an instance of a run-in with the law that would prompt him to write his best-known song, ‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacre’. The song got him his first recording contract in 1967, when he was about 20 years old, and granted him a name of his own.
But that fateful flight to Los Angeles would inspire yet another one of Guthrie’s tunes: the aptly-titled ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’. “It was one of those bumpy flights where the whole plane just drops,” Guthrie recalled some-40 years later, to The Los Angeles Times, “and you feel like you’re in a car that just bottomed out on the road.”
It was the turbulence that thwarted Guthrie’s flight into chaos. In his lyrics, he recalls “chickens flying everywhere around the plane,” a reference to the shakiness aboard that was so overwhelming that the stewardesses were accidentally dropping the passengers’ chicken dinners from their trays. “Could we ever feel much finer?” Guthrie asks.
He also remembers, in a panic, the issue of the “gift” that his friends back in London slipped into his suitcase: “Coming into Los Angeles / Bringing in a couple of keys,” he sings, exaggerating the amount of illegal substances that he was carrying. “I’m a teller of tales,” he later explained. “In this case, the reality wasn’t nearly that tall.” His paranoia of being caught by United States Customs inspired the verse, as he sings, “But don’t touch my bags, if you please / Mister Customs Man.”
In Guthrie’s retelling of his bizarre travels, he encounters a strange, smiling man proclaiming to be “The Lone Ranger,” travelling to Mexico. He also watches on as a “hip woman” as she stumbles across the moving walkway and escalator, to the enchantment of another man watching: “She’s blowing his mind,” Guthrie sings, “Thinking that he’s already made her.”
‘Coming Into Los Angeles’ appeared on Guthrie’s 1969 sophomore album Running Down the Road, and he included the song on the setlist for his appearance at the Woodstock Festival that same year. Despite its frightening origin story, the song became synonymous with the counterculture in its own way.
For as long as he continued to perform live, until his retirement from touring and performing on-stage in 2020, Guthrie would include ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’ from time to time – much to the annoyance of Pete Seeger, with whom Guthrie frequently performed until his passing in 2014.
“He hated that song,” Guthrie revealed to American Songwriter, in discussion of how the pair would choose their setlists to curate a conversation between one another on-stage. “And he always would follow it with a song called ‘Garbage’. To make a point. And it was fine that he did that, because I looked forward to it because I knew that there were some in the audience that related to my material and some that related to his.”
While Seeger may not have resonated with the story of ‘Coming Into Los Angeles’, plenty of listeners did, and the song became one of Guthrie’s classics.
