Alice's Restaurant

There was a time when "classic rock" radio stations always played Arlo Guthrie's epic song/monologue "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" on Thanksgiving. It's perhaps the only song in the classic rock genre that specifically refers to the holiday, and in the 1970s, when I came of age, the scruffy rebelliousness that Guthrie represented was still in vogue. I distinctly remember the first time I heard it, before I had any idea who Arlo Guthrie was. I must have been about fourteen, because I remember the bedroom I was in and wondering, as I listened, "What is this? It's great!"

The story behind the song is terrific. Guthrie, the twenty-year-old son of folk troubadour Woody Guthrie, debuted the song at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967. He played it three times, each time at a successively larger audience, until he closed the festival with it. It was recorded and became an instant sensation, for it's unique combination of cracker-barrel folksiness and pointed protest against the Vietnam War. In 1969, Arthur Penn made a film of it, with Guthrie starring as himself. I watched the film for the first time in a long time on Tuesday night, and then listened to the song on my drive out to Gettysburg yesterday.

The song, for those who haven't heard it, is an 18-minute talking blues number (the length, Guthrie would later point out, matched the length of the gap in Nixon's White House tape). He tells the story of how he visited his friends Alice and Ray in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, and ended up getting arrested for littering. He gently mocks authority, in this case the local constabulary, by detailing how they went nuts over the crime, with the "27 eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one was," and then, when put in the cell, how Officer Obie removed the toilet seat and the toilet paper so Arlo couldn't "knock myself over the head and drown, or bend the bars and roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll, and make an escape."

But then, halfway through the song, he makes a sharp turn. My friend Bob and I, when we change gears suddenly in a conversation, still pay homage to Guthrie by quoting him: "But I didn't come to talk you about that. I came to talk to you about the draft." For that is Guthrie's mission here--to relate how, when he was processed for military service (he went to Whitehall Street, where he was "injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected") he was asked whether he had rehabilitated himself after his arrest for littering to be in the military. After all the twinkly cornpone of this song, he tells the sergeant, pointedly, "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself...you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."

The song made Guthrie famous, which resulted in the film, which is unfortunately very dated. It's very reminiscent of a certain style of 60s filmmaking, with abrupt cuts, muddy colors, and amateurish acting (Guthrie comes off better than some of the professional actors). It expands the story to really focus on Ray and Alice, two fortyish people who seem to live their lives through the hippies they watch over, and is overall a drama which seems to suggest the emptiness of the hippie lifestyle. We also get a subplot involving the death of Woody Guthrie, who succumbed to Huntington's Chorea when has 55. There's a great scene where Arlo visits him in the hospital to find Pete Seeger there, and they perform Seeger's song, "Car, Car." Just to show that there were no hard feelings, Officer Obie plays himself.

Guthrie would never match the success of that song, though he still performs today. I listened to it on The Best of Arlo Guthrie, which also contains his rock hit, "Comin' into Los Angeles," which is about drug smuggling, and the lovely cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans," one of my favorite songs of all time. I also own a wonderful live album of he and Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall, which is well worth checking out.

So, this Thanksgiving, remember: "You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant. You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant. Walk right in, it's around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track. You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant."