Back in the day, says Arlo Guthrie, a rock or folk singer just hit the road and toured. And that was that.

No fancy names. No commercial tie-ins. No "event" aura.

"It was always just, 'oh, here he comes again' or something like that," says Guthrie, who hit the big 6-0 this past year.

These days, though, the bearer of one of the most hallowed family names in American music knows a tour can't just be a tour.

At least if it's going to stick out and get some attention from our short-attention-span culture.

"The kind of venues we've graduated to were demanding that we have a poster that identified the show in some way," he continues.

Hence, his currently titled "Arlo Guthrie's Solo Reunion Tour: Together at Last," which takes to the stage of the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts at 7:30 p.m. Friday (with another area stop tonight at Springfield's Sangamon Auditorium).

The acoustic tour, featuring Guthrie sans backing band or special guests, began a year ago and ends in June. It's been his first "long solo tour" since, he insists, "around 1965."

That's so far back in the mists of time that it pre-dates his signature anthem - the famously extended 18-minute epic, "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (penned in 1967, for the record).

"It seemed like a good name at the time," he says of the current tour's soubriquet. "That's the only rationale I can give you."

In fact, he said he came up with the name of the tour before he decided exactly what that tour would be.

Among other recent tour names was "The Guthrie Family Reunion Tour," which, needless to say, was not a solo project, notes the man who has sired (with wife Jackie) an entire brood of musicians.

Among them: son Abe, daughters Sarah Lee and Cathy, Sarah's husband Johnny Irion, Abe's son Krishna and other family members who came and went as the tour progressed.

Lording it over the tour was the spirit of Guthrie family patriarch Woody, the legendary Depression folk troubadour who succumbed to Huntington's Disease the year (1967) his son's career first came into its own.

Another recent tour name was 2005's "Alice's Restaurant 40th Anniversary Tour," commemorating the Thanksgiving Day episode from 1965 that inspired the song. It marked (Guthrie swears) the first time he had performed his most famous song in concert in several decades.

Really?

"Really," says Guthrie. "I figured early on that I didn't want to go through that whole Ricky Nelson thing," a reference to Nelson's lone post-teen idol hit, 1972's "Garden Party," which dominated his later career to the exclusion of all else.

"I tried to abandon any idea of becoming a trained seal routine a long time ago."

Didn't turning his back on his most famous song translate into turning his back on the audience that had paid to hear it?

"My feeling was, this is my life, this is me - this is the music I like. So, yeah, there were people who didn't come back as a result," Guthrie admits.

The tide turned, he says, around the time he noticed attendance at his concerts was comprised of about 30 percent of what he calls "new victims" - under-25 music lovers for whom the anti-Vietnam-war anthem's message still has relevance.

Never mind that the song was inspired by Guthrie being arrested 42 Thanksgivings ago. That's when he was charged with littering and creating a public nuisance following a festive feast at the Great Barrington, Mass., restaurant of Alice and Ray Brock, housed in a de-consecrated church.

When Guthrie and pal Richard Robbins found the city dump closed for the holiday, they dumped their refuse anyway and wound up arrested and fined $25 each. That "criminal record" ended up disqualifying Woody Guthrie's boy from the draft after his number was called up. He was deemed "unfit for military service."

With another war in progress and bureaucracy just as nuts as it was 40 years ago, the song's general themes remain timeless, even if its incidentals are nearing ancient history.

Several years ago, recalls Guthrie, "This 15-year-old kid came up to me after a concert and said, 'dude, I LOVE 'Alice'!"

This was before the 40th anniversary tour and served as a wake-up call that maybe there was something more to the song than as the basis for a trained-seal act. "So I had to re-learn the song and put it back in the show."

And there it has remained, "because I don't mind doing it for them" (that is, his "new victims").

When a reporter mentions he revisited the 1969 film version of "Alice's Restaurant" the night before the interview and found it unexpectedly sad and moving, Guthrie says that's why he doesn't really care for the film.

Never mind that he plays himself in his only movie starring role.

"No, I've never actually liked it much," he confesses, despite the film's critical ranking high in the canon of its director, Arthur Penn, fresh off his historic 1967 film, "Bonnie & Clyde." "And it was for that reason - that it was kind of melancholy, which are the parts of the movie I like least."

Those parts include a number of moving scenes with dying father Woody (played by an actor), which, Guthrie says, misrepresent his father's last days as being completely bed-bound and unable to communicate. "He wasn't that way at all."

There's also a key character with a drug problem, as well as assorted alliances and misalliances among the characters, all based on people who were still alive and well at the time, including the titular Alice Brock (played by Pat Quinn).

"That's what made everyone uncomfortable, in that we were using real names to portray events, some of which were true, some of which were not. That made life hard after friends and neighbors looked at the movie and said, 'I didn't know you had an affair with this person.'"

Guthrie says the parts of the film he likes best are those lighthearted ones that stay true to the spirit of its song and the actual Thanksgiving Day events.

"The song, I think, ends up with a lot of hope and humor, and it's a positive, upbeat piece," he continues. "The film ends up a kind of sad and melancholy and unhappy piece. It became a take on what the generation of my parents thought of us - that we wouldn't, in the long run, be able to realize the hopes and dreams that they thought were unrealistic."

Guthrie has proved the film's stance wrong in the decades since: many of his dreams and hopes, he says, have been fulfilled over the years, even if some came later than sooner.

For example, the church that housed Alice Brock's restaurant was up for sale at the time he was being filmed for a TV special at the site, in 1991.

"We were filming outside the church, and the people who owned it came out and said, 'look, it's Arlo Guthrie - let's get him to buy it.' The last thing a folk singer needs is another mortgage, but it had become an icon and symbol of the times, so we formed a non-profit organization and were able to raise enough money to put a down-payment on it."

For the past 17 years, the Guthrie Foundation has flourished at the historic site as an interfaith meeting place serving people of all religions.

Today, the real Alice is alive and well and making art in Provincetown, Mass., and she and Guthrie have maintained their ties (they even collaborated on an award-winning children's book some years back).

Meanwhile her namesake eatery has become so legendary that it was recently re-created as an attraction at the Hard Rock theme park in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

"It makes some sense since it has become a part of the culture, but I don't know if it makes enough sense for Alice to embrace it. It's iffy with me."

He pauses for a moment, then reconsiders.

"My favorite quote comes from Marilyn Monroe, who said 'Ever notice that "what the hell" is always the right decision?"

He adds, with a chuckle, "So what the hell."

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Arlo a la carte

Following are some selected menu items from the 40-year musical banquet of the man who made "Alice's Restaurant" a household name:

• Full name: Arlo Davy Guthrie (yes, Davy, not Dave or David)

• Full parentage: Folk icon Woody Guthrie, Martha Graham dancer Marjorie Mazia Guthrie

• Birth date/place: July 10, 1947; Brooklyn

• Always around the Guthrie house: Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, The Weavers, Sonny Terry and most everyone who was a part of the East Coast folk scene

• Defining moment: Arrested for littering on Thanksgiving Day 1965, following dinner at Alice Brock's restaurant in Great Barrington, Mass.

• Net result(s): Disqualified from the draft; penned the 18-min.-34-sec. ballad, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," in 1967

• A very good year: 1969, when AG performed at Woodstock and starred in the film version of "Alice's Restaurant."

• Banned in L.A., and elsewhere: AG's Woodstock anthem, "Coming into Los Angeles."

• Trial run: Called to testify at the 1969-70 Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial, per a 1968 meeting with defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin

• Not a bad year, either: 1972, when AG scored his lone pop radio single, a rendition of Steve Goodman's steam-engine classic, "The City of New Orleans."

• Band of the hands: AG's group Shenandoah goes public in 1975 and continues for the next 15 or so years.

• Arlo's restaurant: Purchased the church that housed Alice Brock's restaurant in 1991 and turned it into the interfaith meeting center, the Guthrie Institute, which thrives to this day.

• At long last: More than 30 years after he sang its praises, AG set foot on the City of New Orleans train for the first time ever as part of a two-week Hurricane Katrina relief concert tour in 2005.

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Arlo Guthrie's Solo Reunion Tour

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts, 110 E. Mulberry St., Bloomington

Tickets: $27.70 to $40.50

Box office number: (866) 686-9541

Elsewhere: 7:30 tonight at Sangamon Auditorium, Springfield