Alice?! Who the hell is Alice?

There is a Thanksgiving tradition that is far more interesting than bird meat and mashed potatoes.  One I hadn't learned of until way too late.  Every Thanksgiving day, Arlo Guthrie's musical monologue Alice's Restaurant Massacree (1967) is played on the radio.  Probably not on all stations, as I can't see the local pop station that plays LMFAO's I'm Sexy and I Know It or anything by Justin Beiber also playing music from more than 10 years ago (though they do seem to be stuck on Eminem's Lose Yourself lately).  For those who feel like they've heard the Guthrie name somewhere before, Arlo is Woody Guthrie's son.  Yes, that Woody Guthrie.

Alice's Restaurant is a song-story based on true events.  It is about, as Arlo tells us from the start, Alice and her restaurant.  The catchy refrain, accompanied by a lone ragtime guitar, draws you in and  you are eventually encouraged to sing along, with feeling (and four-part harmony). After the business of establishing a legit song is taken care of, the monologue continues over the guitar accompaniment.

Launching into the song about Alice, Arlo describes an instance of littering.  He and a friend had been visiting Alice, who lived in an old church that had been turned into a house, and noticed that she had quite a bit of garbage piling up.  Being the kind gentlemen they were, they decided to collect the garbage and haul it away to the dump.  The dump was closed on Thanksgiving Day, so the fellows drive away, with tears in their eyes, to find another place to put the garbage.  The garbage is dumped over a cliff, on top of another pile of garbage, because "one big pile is better than two little piles."  He is subsequently arrested for littering.

Arlo sings the rest of the tune in a way that can't be beat, so I'll let him do that, but the saga rounds in on itself as he relates a second story about the military draft.  After being "inspected, injected, detected, infected, neglected, and selected" he is interviewed about any run-ins with the law where he relates to the sergeant his litterbug tale.  The song does a good job of pointing out that no matter how inconsequential the crime, anyone convicted of breaking the law could make the offender ineligible for the Vietnam War draft.  Oh, the irony.

Join me now, in four-part harmony and feeling:

 You can have anything you want
At Alice's Restaurant (excepting Alice)
You can have 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 have anything you want
At Alice's Restaurant!