Alice's Restaurant
[3] The song consists of a protracted spoken monologue, with a constantly repeated fingerstyle Piedmont blues ragtime guitar backing and light brush-on-snare drum percussion (the drummer on the record is uncredited).
[4] Guthrie refers to the incident as a "massacree", a colloquialism originating in the Ozark Mountains[5] that describes "an event so wildly and improbably and baroquely messed up that the results are almost impossible to believe".
They eventually noticed another pile of trash that had previously been dumped off a cliff near a side road, and added theirs to the accumulation before returning to the church for Thanksgiving dinner.
The next morning, the church received a phone call from the local police chief, "Officer Obie", saying that an envelope in the garbage pile had been traced back to them.
He and his friend drove to the police station, expecting a verbal reprimand and to be required to clean up the garbage, but they were instead arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the scene of the crime.
The young men were briefly jailed, with Obie taking drastic precautions to prevent Guthrie from escaping or committing suicide.
He tried various strategies to be found unfit for military service, including getting drunk the night before so he was hung over, and attempting to convince the psychiatrist that he was homicidal, which only earned him praise.
The officer in charge of the induction process commented, "We don't like your kind", rejecting Guthrie and sending his fingerprints to the federal government to be put on file.
Guthrie cited the long-form monologues of Lord Buckley and Bill Cosby, and the movies of Charlie Chaplin, as inspirations for the song's lyrics, and a number of different musicians (in particular Mississippi John Hurt) as inspirations for the Piedmont fingerstyle guitar accompaniment, noting that he took about "two seconds" to come up with the accompaniment because he wanted something easy to play mindlessly while narrating the story.
[7][8] The song was written as the events happened over the course of approximately one year;[9] it grew out of a simple joke riff Guthrie had been working on in 1965 and 1966 before he appeared before the draft board (the opening was originally written as "you can hide from Obanhein at Alice's restaurant", which is how the restaurant got tied into the original story), and he later added his experience before the draft board to create the song as it is known today.
[10] Additional portions of the song were written during one of Guthrie's many stays with the English songwriter and music journalist Karl Dallas and his family in London.
[10] Because of the song's length, Guthrie never expected it to be released, because such extended monologues were extremely rare in an era when singles were typically less than three minutes.
)[14][15][16] The initial performance was part of an impromptu supergroup at the WBAI studios that included David Bromberg, Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin' Jack Elliot.
The song's success at Newport and on WBAI led Guthrie to record it in front of a studio audience in New York City and release it as side one of the album Alice's Restaurant in October 1967.
This version, backed with "Ring Around the Rosy Rag" (a cut from the Alice's Restaurant album), peaked at #97 on the Billboard Hot 100,[21] and #64 in Canada.
[22] Because the single did not reach the popularity of the full version, which did not qualify for the Hot 100 because of its length, Billboard officially classifies Guthrie as a one-hit wonder for his later hit "City of New Orleans".
In 1969, for instance, he performed a 20-minute rendition of the song that, instead of the original narrative, told a fictional story of how Russian and Chinese military operatives attempted to weaponize "multicolored rainbow roaches" they had found at Alice's restaurant, and the Lyndon Johnson administration orchestrated a plan for the nation to defend itself.
[7] In 1984, Guthrie, who was supporting George McGovern's ultimately unsuccessful comeback bid for the Democratic presidential nomination,[28] revived "Alice's Restaurant" to protest the Reagan Administration's reactivation of the Selective Service System registrations.
[29] Guthrie rerecorded his entire debut album for his 1997 CD Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited, on the Rising Son label, which includes this expanded version.
[30] The 40th anniversary edition, performed at and released as a recording by the Kerrville Folk Festival, made note of some parallels between the 1960s and the Iraq War and George W. Bush administration.
[32] The tour ended in 2019 and was later confirmed to have been Guthrie's last; he suffered a career-ending stroke in November of that year and announced his retirement in October 2020.
Both worked at a nearby private academy, the music and art-oriented Stockbridge School, from which Guthrie (then of Howard Beach, a neighborhood in Queens, New York City) had graduated.
Alice Brock operated a restaurant called "The Back Room" in 1966, at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, located behind a grocery store and directly underneath the studios of Norman Rockwell.
[46] A tear-out record was included in the book with Brock and Guthrie bantering on two tracks, "Italian-Type Meatballs" and "My Granma's Beet Jam".
The annual "Garbage Trail Walk", retracing the steps of Arlo and folksinger Rick Robbins (as told in the song), raises money for Huntington's disease research.
[36] He also said the real reason there was no toilet seat in the jail cell was to prevent such items from being stolen, not as a suicide deterrent as Guthrie had joked.
The lyrics: "They got a building down New York City, it’s called Whitehall Street, Where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected."
A compact disc reissue on the Rykodisc label presents this version in full and adds several bonus tracks to the original LP.
