Here’s one thing about Arlo Guthrie, at least as he was 30 years ago: his distinctive, sometimes squeaky voice was exactly the same in person as on his recordings, as you might hear on “Alice’s Restaurant.” Other than that, I don’t remember a lot about the concert, not even whether he sang-spoke that particular song. He probably did. It’s also likely he did “City of New Orleans” and some of his father’s songs.

He also went on a short tirade about the metric system after telling a possibly true story about encountering a Canadian who didn’t understand the line in “The Garden Song” that goes, “Inch by inch, row by row, I’m going to make this garden grow.” Remarkably, there’s an ’80s clip of him in Austin singing that song, and sure enough, he tells the story about the Canadian (a border guard). In the show I saw, I remember him proclaiming, “There’s no poetry to the metric system!”

I’ll go along with that, but he needn’t have worried too much; the customary system still abides in the U.S. some 30 years later. Americans aren’t sophisticated about some things, but we are sophisticated enough to use and understand two systems of measurement at the same time.