Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Listen while you read:  It's a Thanksgiving tradition!

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get 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 get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

~  Arlo Guthrie

Did you think I would type out the entire script? At 18 minutes and 34 seconds long, no way! I would like to believe that most of you know this song. If it's new to you, please, oh, please, listen to the entire thing! After all, it's a Thanksgiving tradition! (At least in my house it is.) Alice's Restaurant Massacree was released in 1967, two years after the Thanksgiving event that inspired it.

Arlo, of course, was Woody Guthrie's son, but he paved his own way through a time period far different from the one his father wrote and sang about. Part of the 1960s counterculture, Arlo was only eighteen when he received a citation for littering in Massachusetts on Thanksgiving 1965. That event snowballed into the hysterically funny draft board scene which makes up the main content of the song's story. It is amazing that we could find humor in something as horrendous as a draft that sent young men into war.

I'm sittin' here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the Army -- burn women, kids, houses, and villages -- after bein' a litterbug."

About a decade ago, I got to see Arlo and his family at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis. Although it wasn't Thanksgiving yet, he did perform this classic. Can you imagine delivering this lengthy monologue over and over and over again? But everybody loves it, and Arlo obliges.

I hope you can find 18 minutes in your day to enjoy this 50-year-old treasure. I guarantee it will make you smile!