"Alice's Restaurant Massacree", commonly known as "Alice's Restaurant", is a satirical talking blues song by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie. Released as the title track to his 1967 debut album Alice's Restaurant, the song is a deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft in the form of a comically exaggerated but largely true story from Guthrie's own life. While visiting acquaintances in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he was arrested and convicted of dumping trash illegally, which later endangered his suitability for the military draft. The title refers to a restaurant owned by one of Guthrie's friends, the artist Alice Brock. Although Brock is a minor character in the story, the restaurant plays no role in it aside from being the subject of the chorus and the impetus for Guthrie's visit.
The song inspired the 1969 film Alice's Restaurant, which starred Guthrie and took numerous liberties with the story. The work has become Guthrie's signature song and he has periodically re-released it with updated lyrics. In 2017, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Characteristics 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). This is bookended by a short chorus about the titular restaurant. Arlo Guthrie has used the brief "Alice's Restaurant" bookends and guitar backing for other monologues bearing the "Alice's Restaurant" name.
The track lasts 18 minutes and 34 seconds, occupying the entire A-side of the Alice's Restaurant album. Due to Guthrie's rambling and circuitous telling with unimportant details, it has been described as a shaggy dog story.
Guthrie refers to the incident as a "massacree", a colloquialism originating in the Ozark Mountains that describes "an event so wildly and improbably and baroquely messed up that the results are almost impossible to believe". It is a corruption of the word massacre, but carries a much lighter and more sarcastic connotation, rather than describing anything involving actual death.
Story
Prologue Guthrie introduces the song as "Alice's Restaurant", noting that the restaurant itself is not literally named Alice's Restaurant. He then sings the chorus, which is in the form of a jingle for the restaurant, beginning with "You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant" twice, and continuing with directions to it before restating the slogan once more.
Part One
Guthrie recounts events that took place in 1965 (two years prior to the time of the original recording), when he and a friend spent Thanksgiving Day at a deconsecrated church on the outskirts of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which their friends Alice and Ray had been using as a home. As a favor to them, Guthrie and the friend volunteered to take their large accumulation of garbage to the local dump in their VW Microbus, not realizing until they arrived there that the dump would be closed for the holiday. 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. Guthrie, stating "I cannot tell a lie" and with tongue in cheek, confessed that he "put that envelope underneath" the garbage. 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. There, Obie and a crew of police officers from the surrounding areas collected extensive forensic evidence of the litter, including "twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us" amid a media circus of local media trying to get news stories on the littering. The young men were briefly jailed, with Obie taking drastic precautions to prevent Guthrie from escaping or committing suicide. After a few hours, Alice bailed them out and held another Thanksgiving dinner.
Guthrie and his friend stood trial the next day. When Obie saw that the judge relied upon a seeing-eye dog, he realized that the officers' meticulous work had been foiled by a literal "case of American blind justice", as the judge would not be able to see the evidence. Guthrie and his friend paid a fine of to the court, and were ordered to pick up the garbage, in the snow.
Part Two
Guthrie then states that the littering incident was "not what I came to tell you about" and shifts to another story, this one based at the Army Building on Whitehall Street in New York City as Guthrie appeared for a physical exam related to the Vietnam War draft. 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.
After several hours, Guthrie was asked whether he had ever been convicted of a crime. He nodded, began to tell his story, and was sent to the "Group W" bench to file for a moral waiver. The other convicts ("mother-rapers... father-stabbers... father-rapers") were initially put off that his conviction had been for littering, but accepted him when he added "and creating a nuisance". When Guthrie noticed one of the questions on the paperwork asked whether he had rehabilitated himself since the crime, he noted the irony of having to prove himself reformed from a crime of littering when the realities of war were often far more brutal. The officer in charge of the induction process commented, "We don't like your kind", rejected Guthrie and sent his fingerprints to the federal government to be put on file.
Epilogue In the final part of the song, Guthrie explains to the live audience that anyone finding themselves in a similar situation should walk into the military psychiatrist's office, sing the opening line from the chorus and walk out. He predicts that a single person doing it would be rejected as "sick" and that two people in harmony would be rejected as "faggots", but that once three people started doing it they would begin to suspect "an organization" and 50 people a day would be recognized as "the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement". As he continues fingerpicking, he invites the audience to sing the chorus along with him "the next time it comes around on the guitar". When they do so, Guthrie claims that their singing "was horrible", and challenges them to sing it with him "with four-part harmony and feeling". Guthrie and the crowd then sing the chorus, and the song concludes.
Development 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.Doyle, Patrick (November 26, 2014). Arlo Guthrie looks back on 50 years of Alice's Restaurant. Rolling Stone. Retrieved November 22, 2018.Phaneuf, Whitney (November 23, 2016). Arlo Guthrie on Why ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ Has Endured: Listen to the Thanksgiving Classic. Acoustic Guitar magazine. Retrieved November 21, 2022. The song was written as the events happened over the course of approximately one year; 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). The earliest performance of a song bearing the "Alice's Restaurant" name was at Gerde's Folk City in July 1966; this song, though its chorus remained the same and bore a few elements of similarity, was otherwise a completely different monologue later dubbed "Alice's Restaurant Around the World" with a slower and more bluesy arrangement, a vocal style more explicitly mimicking his father Woody Guthrie (the advertising for the show identified him as "Woody's son"), and a monologue containing nothing about the littering incident or his draft board appearance, instead telling the story of the chorus going viral. The littering incident was added to the monologue by September 1966. 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 in December 1966. By February 1967, the draft story had been added, completing the song in its best-known form.
Response
1960s
Guthrie performed the finished song live on Radio Unnameable, the overnight program hosted by Bob Fass that aired on New York radio station WBAI, one evening in February 1967, following a year of Guthrie honing the song at various small venues.Fisher, Marc. Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation. Page 136. The initial performance was part of an impromptu supergroup at the WBAI studios that included David Bromberg, Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin' Jack Elliot. Guthrie performed the song several times live on WBAI in 1967 before its commercial release. By May 1967, the song had proved so popular that at one point Fass (who was known for playing songs he liked over and over again in his graveyard slot) started playing a recording of one of Guthrie's live performances of the song repeatedly; eventually the non-commercial station rebroadcast it only when listeners pledged to donate a large amount of money. (Fass subverted it and occasionally asked for donations to get him to stop playing the recording.)
"Alice's Restaurant" was performed on July 17, 1967, at the Newport Folk Festival in a workshop or breakout section on "topical songs", where it was such a hit that he was called upon to perform it for the entire festival audience. Faced with an increasing number of bootleg recordings of his performances achieving wide circulation, Guthrie's agent pressed him 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. Guthrie noted that the studio recording combined some of the worst elements of both studio and live recording, in that the audience chosen for the record had already heard him perform the song repeatedly, but because of the audience, he had to record the song and album in one take.
Guthrie sent a demo recording of the song to his father on his deathbed; it was, according to a "family joke", the last thing Woody heard before he died in October 1967. 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.