Every year around Thanksgiving, I start thinking that maybe I should write a column about “Alice’s Restaurant.” Every year for the past quarter-century, for one reason or another, I’ve failed to do that. Now it’s time. Because Alice Brock, who owned the restaurant made famous in the refrain of the cult classic song, died exactly one week before Thanksgiving this year. She was 83.
If you’re of a certain generation, meaning mine, you likely don’t need an explanation of what “Alice’s Restaurant” is. But if you didn’t come of age during the Vietnam War, you might know of it only vaguely or not at all. Arlo Guthrie–son of Woody Guthrie, who wrote some of the most wonderful protest songs of all times, including “This Land Is Your Land”–wrote and performed “Alice’s Restaurant,” which was released in 1967. It’s an 18-minute-long “spoken blues” tale loosely based on the true story of how a conviction for littering changed Arlo’s life.
Because the number of words in the song is far greater than the words I’m allotted for this column, I’ll recap it only briefly.
In 1965, on Thanksgiving, Guthrie was a house guest in a deconsecrated Episcopal church in western Massachusetts where his friend Alice Brock and her husband lived. Just down the street was the soon-to-be-famous café Alice owned. Because a lot of holiday garbage had piled up and because he wished to be helpful, Arlo loaded the garbage into his van to haul it to the dump. Finding the dump closed, he threw the garbage into a ditch instead. He was outed, interrogated and arrested by the local police. Eventually, he was found guilty and fined 50 dollars.
But that’s not where the story ends. Later, while Arlo was in New York City undergoing a government-mandated military draft physical, he was asked if he’d ever been arrested and convicted of a crime. He said yes.
That’s how Arlo Guthrie avoided military service in general and Vietnam in particular. And how his rambling, absurd, shaggy dog story became a favorite for many of us who grew up in the 1960s and 70s. The “song” is actually a protracted spoken monologue, accompanied by ragtime guitar, that wanders all over the place and is occasionally interrupted by these words:
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
Here’s the thing. Listeners tend to find “Alice’s Restaurant” either irritatingly nonsensical and unpatriotic—an opinion held by many of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation—or one of the most brilliant pieces of songwriting EVER. For almost fifty years, it’s been the feeling of many of us in the latter camp that Thanksgiving just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” all the way through at least once.
I like to believe that those who dislike the song simply don’t understand satire. I know that my daddy, who was extraordinarily bright but definitely not a student of literary devices, was clueless when it came to satire. Back in the days when we watched “MASH” together on TV, he’d go on and on about how it wasn’t like that in Korea and he knew because he’d been there. When I’d explain that MASH was satire, intended to expose absurdities about the war in Vietnam and wasn’t really about the Korean War at all, he stared at me as though I’d just arrived from another planet.
As far as I know Daddy never once listened to “Alice’s Restaurant,” which is probably just as well.
Arlo Guthrie himself has said that though his song is definitely an anti-war anthem, it’s also a protest against stupidity. Yet another reason it’s worth twenty minutes of my time each and every Thanksgiving.
(December 7, 2024)