Alice's Restaurant
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"Alice's Restaurant" is a song by Arlo Guthrie, his most famous work. It is a story song, based on a true story, that lasts 18 minutes and 20 seconds, occupying the entire A side of Guthrie's 1967 debut album, also titled Alice's Restaurant. It was adapted into a 1969 movie, also titled Alice's Restaurant, which featured Guthrie as himself and Patricia Quinn as Alice, with the real Alice making a cameo appearance.
The song, a bitingly satirical protest against the Vietnam War draft, recounts a true (but exaggerated somewhat for humorous effect) Thanksgiving adventure that began at Alice's Restaurant, where "you can get anything you want (excepting Alice)". Alice, in this case, was restaurant owner Alice Brock, who lived in a former church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The song describes how Guthrie was hauled into court for illegally dumping some of Alice's garbage after discovering that the dump was closed for Thanksgiving, and because of the resulting criminal record he was eventually rejected as unfit for military service when he was called up for the draft.
The characters in the story, including both Alice and "Officer Obie", who arrested him, became famous in their own right as a result of the song. (The original "Officer Obie" also played himself in the film version, reportedly on the basis that making himself look like a fool was preferable to having somebody else make him look like a fool.)
"Alice's Restaurant" is regularly played on some radio stations every Thanksgiving. It is not often played apart from special occasions, because of its length.
The first recording of "Alice's Restaurant" was part of an album released in 1967 (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:0uogtq2ztu48) and rose to #17 (http://www.bsnpubs.com/warner/reprise/reprise6200.html) on the Billboard charts. The movie version of "Alice's Restaurant" was released on August 19, 1969 (http://www.mgm.com/title_title.do?title_star=ALICESRE), just a few days after Guthrie appeared at the Woodstock Festival.
"Alice's Restaurant" was revised and updated some years later to protest Reagan era policies, but the second version has not been released on a commercial recording. There are many parodies of the song as well. Guthrie himself wrote a (relatively short) follow-up recounting how he learned that Richard Nixon had owned a copy of the song, and jokingly suggesting that this explained the famous 18½ minute gap in the Watergate tapes.
In 1991, Guthrie bought the church that had served as Alice Brock's former home, which had been made famous by the song, and converted it to the Guthrie Center (http://www.guthriecenter.org), an interfaith meeting place that serves people of all religions.
External link
- Lyrics (http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml), on Arlo Guthrie's web site