Arlo Guthrie / Running Down the Road (Remastered 2004) / 1969
Coming into Los Angeles
jittery, comic, loose-limbed nonchalance masking nerves
A talking-blues style vignette about a traveler landing at LAX with contraband drugs in his luggage, nervously bantering his way through customs. The song turns the anxiety of smuggling into a loose, funny character sketch of the airport itself, full of oddballs and paranoid asides.
drug culture paranoia and nerve counterculture vs. authority 1960s travel and airport life performance of cool under pressure
Who's speaking
First-person narrator speaking directly to the customs officer, with a wandering eye toward fellow passengers; the voice is self-consciously cool but clearly anxious, making him an engagingly unreliable narrator of his own composure.
What happens
The song opens mid-flight, with the narrator arriving from London in a slightly surreal airborne scene, then shifts to the terminal where he addresses the customs officer directly, trying to keep his bags unexamined. Interspersed are glimpses of other travelers -- a strangely dressed man claiming to be a fictional hero, a woman stumbling through the airport in a daze -- who mirror the narrator's own out-of-place, overstimulated state. The chorus keeps returning like a nervous tic, the same plea repeated as if rehearsed.
How it's built
A simple verse-chorus talking-blues form with no bridge or resolution; the chorus functions almost as a refrain-mantra that interrupts each new character vignette, giving the song a circular, looping shape that mimics walking through an airport line over and over.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Chicken flying everywhere around the plane”
The flight-in-progress scene establishes a woozy, slightly hallucinatory tone before any mention of contraband, suggesting the narrator's heightened, jittery state of mind even before he reaches the ground.
First chorus
“bringing in a couple of keys”
The casual tone of the admission -- paired with the polite request not to be searched -- creates the song's central comic tension: open confession delivered as small talk, daring the authority figure to react.
Lone Ranger verse
A stranger's absurd self-identification as a fictional cowboy hero reads as a wink at countercultural costume and performance, and perhaps a mirror of the narrator's own act of playing it cool while hiding something.
Escalator verse
The disoriented woman and the man misreading her attention sketch the airport as a stage of mutual misperception, where everyone is slightly off their footing, extending the song's theme of altered states and misread signals.
Final chorus and return to flight
Looping back to the opening flight imagery before closing on the refrain gives the song no resolution -- the narrator is left still mid-transaction, still hoping to pass through unchecked, which suits the song's refusal to moralize or conclude.
Craft
- refrain as anxious repetition
- The chorus repeats the same plea to the customs officer nearly verbatim each time, functioning less as a musical hook than as a nervous tic -- the narrator rehearsing his line to stay calm.
- absurdist imagery
- The image of chickens flying around the cabin destabilizes the scene from the start, signaling that reality is slightly off-kilter, which primes the listener for the equally odd characters encountered later.
- deadpan characterization
- The Lone Ranger impersonator and the dazed woman are sketched in a few lines each, treated with the same flat, bemused tone as the narrator's own smuggling, implying everyone at the airport is a little strange or compromised.
- direct address
- Speaking straight to the customs official personalizes an impersonal bureaucratic encounter, turning a power dynamic into something closer to a one-sided conversation, almost a plea for mercy disguised as casualness.
Reading it
The most straightforward reading treats this as an autobiographical-feeling anecdote about the casual, almost blasé drug culture of the era, with the comic tone defusing what would otherwise be a tense smuggling narrative. A secondary reading treats the whole airport as a loose allegory for 1960s American arrival -- returning from abroad into a surveillance-conscious, uptight homeland where even ordinary oddballs are objects of suspicion, and the narrator's banter is a broader commentary on performing innocence for authority.
Context
The song fits Arlo Guthrie's loose, storytelling style of talking blues, inherited from his father Woody Guthrie but applied to countercultural, drug-era subject matter rather than Depression-era hardship. It originally appeared on his 1969 album Running Down the Road and became a minor touchstone of era drug-culture humor; some later live or radio versions reportedly softened or altered the explicit drug references, though I'm not certain of the specifics of those edits.
Listen for
- the flat, deadpan delivery that keeps danger sounding like small talk
- the recurring chorus functioning almost as a nervous mantra
- the surreal opening image of animals loose on the plane
- the way side characters mirror the narrator's own altered, uneasy state
- the lack of any resolution or consequence by song's end
About Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie is an American folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father, Woody Guthrie.
b. 1947 / United States
Full biography and catalogue