When famed folk singer Arlo Guthrie was cleaning out his old tapes -- everything from recorded conversations with his mother to a host of performances -- his children found one that was so special, they demanded he release it. The problem was there were no details labeled on the tape -- it was just a performance with songs Guthrie hadn't heard in almost 40 years, such as 'If I Ever Should See the Mountain,' 'Road to Everywhere' and 'Hurry to Me.'

"The only reason I have a timeframe was a total convoluted and spiritual coincidence," Guthrie tells Spinner. Guthrie received an e-mail containing photographs that had been digitized, including one he was certain was from the same era as this lost performance. Then, he happened to recognize the handwriting on one of the pictures as belonging to an old flame. "I called her up and said, 'Caroly, do you remember taking a photograph of me, somewhere on the west coast?' She interrupted me and said, 'You mean the one where you're holding a flower, overlooking the Pacific?' I just stopped and said, 'How can you remember that?' She said, 'I remember that day -- it was right after the Monterey Festival and we were standing outside taking some pictures in this field. You had some crazy hair.'"

Indeed, on the cover of Guthrie's forthcoming 'Tales of '69,' he's seen in a paisley-patterned shirt with a wavy-gravy flow hairdo. But Caroly also gave him some information on the actual performance. "I started to describe this tape to her and she said, 'Oh, I remember that gig. That show was on Long Island and the Grateful Dead were in the dressing room,'" Guthrie says. "That's all she could remember. She couldn't remember what town it was but remembers the Dead were in the dressing room and we were having a pretty good time."

Though the Dead aren't on this set -- it's just Guthrie and his standup bass player, Bob Arkin -- the fact that Guthrie had been having a little pre-show fun is quite apparent throughout. "From my point of view, from listening to it, I noticed there were a lot of stories within that one story ['Alice -- Before Time Began'] that went on and evolved into their own tales," he says. "I had never heard them all in one thing. So for me, it was funny. You forget how these things evolve."

'Tales of '69' is due August 18 via Guthrie's own Rising Son Records.