Behind the Times

Anything you want (excepting Alice)

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Michael Ballway
Filed Under Arts et cetera, Lancaster, Mike's posts |

Regardless of whether Arlo Guthrie launches into his 20-minute epic “Alice’s Restaurant,” he should be an interesting headliner for the first-ever Nashua River Valley Folk Festival — if for nothing else than to see the reaction of any young fans who show up.

Guthrie’s an accomplished folksinger in his own right, with scads of bona-fide folk songs in his repertoire, but he’s best known for two things: being the son of Woody Guthrie, he of “This Land is Your Land” fame; and being the author of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” a song heard everywhere on Thanksgiving — and almost nowhere anytime else.

You don’t hear it often because the song is 20 minutes long — just a bit longer than most radio cuts. Put another way: You can listen to Don McLean’s “American Pie” two and a half times in the time it takes to get through “Alice’s Restaurant.”

Both songs are worth it, though: “American Pie” for the sheer inscrutability of the lyrics (follow that link above for a good try at an explanation, though), and “Alice’s Restaurant” for the opposite — a very user-friendly and folksy account of small-town life, which quickly turns into an anti-Vietnam War demonstration song (the bridge, about halfway into this third-of-an-hour opus: “That’s not what I came here to tell you about … I came to talk about the draft.”).

Here’s what always boggles my mind about Guthrie and “Alice’s Restaurant”:

I want tell you about the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this happened here. They got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car.

“This happened here” in 1965, as another famous artist was winding down his career in that same town, Stockbridge. I’ve always found it amazing that in such a small village, the hippie folksinger Arlo Guthrie and the buttoned-down Americana illustrator Norman Rockwell were walking the same streets, shopping at the same stores …

… and, I learned today, making art out of the same police chief. When you hear Arlo singing about Officer Obie (and his 27 8×10 color glossy photographs, and his irrational fear that his prisoner will “hang myself for littering”), remember that you’ve probably seen his picture dozens of times — as the kindly cop talking to Rockwell’s “Runaway.”