Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 06:04, 1 April 2007

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (commonly referred to simply as "Alice's Restaurant") is singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie's most famous work, a talking blues based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie. The song lasts 18 minutes and 20 seconds, occupying the entire A side of Guthrie's 1967 debut record album, titled Alice's Restaurant (Warner Reprise Records). It is notable as a satirical, first-person account of 1960s counterculture, in addition to being a hit song in its own right. Guthrie is the son of folk music legend Woody Guthrie.

The song

Guthrie's talk-song, a satirical, deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft and widespread anti-hippie prejudice, recounts a true but comically exaggerated Thanksgiving adventure. "Alice" was restaurant-owner Alice Brock, who in 1964, using $2,000 supplied by her mother, bought a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Alice and her husband Ray would live. It was here rather than at the restaurant, which came later, where the song's Thanksgiving dinners were actually held.

On that Thanksgiving, November 28, 1965, the 18-year-old Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins, 19, were hauled into jail for illegally dumping some of Alice's garbage after discovering that the dump was closed for Thanksgiving. Two days later they pleaded guilty in court before a blind judge, James E. Hannon, as the song describes to ironic effect the arresting officer's frustration at the judge being unable to see the "27 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us." In the end, Arlo and Richard were fined $50 and told to pick up their garbage. The song goes on to describe Guthrie's being called up for the draft, and the surreal bureaucracy at the New York City induction center on Whitehall Street. The punchline of the story's denouement is that because of Guthrie's criminal record for littering, he is first sent to the Group W Bench (where convicts wait) then outright rejected as unfit for military service.

"Alice's Restaurant" is regularly played on Thanksgiving by many radio stations, especially in the New York City area. It is not often otherwise aired, due to its length. The original album rose to #17 on the Billboard chart.

Guthrie revised and updated "Alice's Restaurant" years later to protest Reagan-era policies, but this second version has not been released on a commercial recording.

Guthrie later wrote a follow-up recounting how he learned that Richard Nixon had owned a copy of the song, and he jokingly suggested that this explained the famous 18½ minute gap in the Watergate tapes. Guthrie rerecorded his entire debut album for his 1997 CD Alice's Restaurant also known as Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited, on the Rising Son music label, which includes this expanded version.

The real Alice's restaurant

"Alice" was restaurant owner Alice Brock, who with husband Ray Brock lived in a former church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the song's Thanksgiving dinners were actually held. She was a painter and designer, while Ray was an architect and woodworker. Both worked at a nearby private academy, the music- and art-oriented Stockbridge School, from which Guthrie (then of the Queens, New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach) had graduated.

Alice's restaurant (formally known as the "Back Room Rest.", named for its location down an alley behind a grocery store at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts) was roughly six miles from the church — though true to the song, it was "just a half-a-mile from the railroad track". Formerly Maluphy's Restaurant, it ran the length of the building from front to back along the side alley. Owned by Alice for only a year before she and Ray divorced, it was, as of 2005, Theresa's Stockbridge Cafe, where a hand-painted sign indicates its former identity. The building's front as of 2006 is The Main Street Cafe.

The song and a subsequent movie (see below) made both Alice and Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein ("Officer Obie"), who arrested Guthrie, marginally famous. Obanhein, in addition, had previously posed twice for the famed local artist Norman Rockwell, and appeared in print advertisements for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and for Goodwill Industries.

The movie

The song was adapted into the 1969 movie Alice's Restaurant, directed and co-written by Arthur Penn and starring Guthrie as himself, Pat Quinn as Alice Brock and James Broderick as Ray Brock, with the real Alice making a cameo appearance. In the scene where Ray and friends are installing insulation, she is wearing a brown turtleneck top and has her hair pulled into a ponytail. In the Thanksgiving-dinner scene, she is wearing a bright pink blouse. In the wedding scene, she is wearing a Western-style dress.

Obanhein played himself in the film version, explaining to Newsweek magazine that making himself look like a fool was preferable to having somebody else make him look like a fool.

In the DVD commentary track, Guthrie laughs about the melancholy ending of the movie, noting that things were so much happier in real life.

The movie version of "Alice's Restaurant" was released on August 19, 1969, a few days after Guthrie appeared at the Woodstock Festival.

The church

In 1991, Guthrie bought the church that had served as Alice and Ray Brock's former home, at 4 Van Deusenville Road, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and converted it to the Guthrie Center, an interfaith meeting place that serves people of all religions. The building had several owners in-between.

The Person

Alice Brock currently lives in Provincetown, MA and owns an art studio and gallery at 69 Commercial St. Her website has contact information and links to aspects of her studio and gallery. Alice illustrated the children's book, Mooses Come Walking, published in 2004 and authored by Arlo Guthrie.

See also

• List of counterculture films

External links

• The Guthrie Center
• Lee, Laura, Arlo, Alice & Anglicans: The Lives of a New England Church (Berkshire House Publishers, 2000; W.W. Norton, 2000 paperback ISBN 1-58157-010-4)
• Lyrics, on Arlo Guthrie's web site
• "Youths Ordered to Clean Up Rubbish Mess": contemporaneous news article reprinted in This is the Arlo Guthrie Songbook, p. 39 (offline)
• All Music entry for Alice's Restaurant (1967)
• All Music entry for Alice's Restaurant (1997)
• NPR: Arlo Guthrie, Remembering "Alice's Restaurant"
• Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities' Mass Moments: "Arlo Guthrie Convicted of Littering, November 28, 1965"
• World Music Central" Arlo Guthire
• Alice's Restaurant: The New York Times movie review by Vincent Canby (Aug. 25, 1969)
• IMDb: Alice's Restaurant (1969)
• IMDb: William Obanhein

References

1. http://www.bsnpubs.com/warner/reprise/reprise6200.html
2. http://www.guthriecenter.org
3. Link to book at Chronicle Books

• 1967 songs
• 1969 films
• Protest songs
• Stockbridge, Massachusetts
• Films set in Massachusetts