50 years on, you can get anything you want

November 26, 2015 6:36 AM

This Thanksgiving marks 50 years since the famous Alice's Restaurant Masacree. Guthrie still views the antiwar classic as an "anti-stupid" song. He has returned to the scene, the former church, which is now the Guthrie Center. Tonight PBS will air a 50th anniversary concert with Guthrie singing the song in its original form.

The song has some history (megapost) here, but nowhere more than in Mathowie's Community Blog, an epic comment fable written by It's Raining Florence Henderson and recorded by cortex.

posted by graymouser (22 comments total)

He performed it at the Winnipeg Folk Festival this year and it was delightful. My sister and I bonded with the people sitting behind us because we all obviously knew every single word and we were all lip-syncing and acting along to the whole thing.
posted by louche mustachio at 7:17 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

My kid is 6, and has listened to the entire thing every Thanksgiving.
At this point in her mind, it's as much of a tradition as cookies for Santa or teeth for the Tooth Fairy.

One of my proudest moments as a father was, when I told a dining companion they could get whatever they wanted from the menu, we heard, sotto voce from the other side of the table, "Excepting Alice".
posted by madajb at 7:58 AM on November 26, 2015 [28 favorites]

Listening to Alice's Restaurant is one of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions. Sad my TV died, I'd love to watch the concert tonight.
posted by angelchrys at 8:10 AM on November 26, 2015

Thank you for this. Hadn't listened in a few years.

Makes me wonder how the current generation views the Vietnam war, and if they understand that's what the song is about. The draft loomed large in my adolescence, and none of the wars we've taken on since then have made me feel better about our foreign interventions. I wonder, though, if eliminating the draft was a bad thing. Maybe we'd be less likely to commit troops with an everyman army rather than a volunteer one.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:21 AM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

I saw Guthrie in Boston this fall as part of this tour. One additional story he told was that for the movie, they got Officer Obie to play himself, his reasoning being that he'd rather make himself look like a fool instead of having someone else do the same.

Since Guthrie hadn't seen Obie since the original arrest, this was somewhat awkward, but after a couple weeks of filming, Obie told Guthrie that he was impressed with the work ethic of all the hippies on set, getting up at 5am and working all day, which ran contrary to his original expectations, and they became friends from then on. It was a nice story of reconciliation.
posted by A dead Quaker at 8:29 AM on November 26, 2015 [29 favorites]

I was listening to this song with my Queens-raised father, who mentioned that when he (like Arlo) got summoned to Whitehall Street, his draft notice had two subway tokens attached, so he had no excuse not to show up.
posted by jonmc at 8:49 AM on November 26, 2015 [8 favorites]

Has anyone considered that Alice might have been a hoarder? Or at least might have been a bit, unusual? I mean, you had to get out of the bell tower to go to the restaurant. How many ways could there be to do that without walking in or near garbage? And the smell. Ick.
posted by Splunge at 9:44 AM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder, though, if eliminating the draft was a bad thing. Maybe we'd be less likely to commit troops with an everyman army rather than a volunteer one.

Joseph Epstein made the case in the Atlantic a while ago. Some people liked it, some didn't.

Then there's always Bill Murray.
posted by BWA at 9:57 AM on November 26, 2015

Arlo Guthrie's politics actually run somewhat conservative these days. As the interview with him notes, he was a Ron Paul supporter. I don't see how his views on "stupidity" match up with that, but as he himself admits, he's been stupid sometimes too, as we all have been, he's just not stupid enough to want to go to war with people.
posted by JHarris at 10:40 AM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you haven't heard the 30 anniversary edition (which some delightful bonus versus about Nixon), here's your chance.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 11:07 AM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

My cranky alternative take: The song perfectly captures the baby boom generation. Two days of overeating interspersed with dumping a half ton of garbage on the ground because fuck it the dump is closed. Then getting bitchy when someone bothers to call them on their shit. Then trying to tell us it was actually about Vietnam while going on and on about themselves.
posted by humanfont at 12:08 PM on November 26, 2015 [28 favorites]

Wishing my friends on the Group W Bench a happy thanksgiving!
posted by TwoStride at 12:19 PM on November 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

JustKeepSwimming, I heard that version en route to my parents' house today. WMMR's Pierre Robert always plays "Alice's Restaurant" three times on Thanksgiving, and the second time is the 30th anniversary version.
posted by graymouser at 1:22 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

Arlo got arrested for littering and fined. Later, he was called in for the draft and found unfit for service because of the prior arrest. He wrote a song about the absurdity of both events. It's a classic rambling "Talking Blues" song and has become a Thanksgiving classic because, well, it's a song about Thanksgiving. The charm is all in the little details about the Group W bench and the 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and so on and so forth.
posted by graymouser at 4:08 PM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

He wrote a song about the absurdity of both events.

Well, I think more specifically it's a song about the proportionality of wrongdoing and the use of fairly arbitrary measures by those in authority to rationalize violence and decide what is worthy of punishment. The song explores the irony of being rejected (possibly) for service because of a "criminal history" when the tactics being sanctioned for use in Vietnam were themselves criminal, and far more serious than Guthrie's. That's the tie there, and why the stories are actually tightly related. It hinges on the "I mean, I mean, I mean I'm sitting here on the bench...because you want to tell me I'm not moral enough" etc..
posted by Miko at 5:23 PM on November 26, 2015 [6 favorites]

Tonight PBS will air a 50th anniversary concert with Guthrie singing the song in its original form.

I'm not sure how widespread this offering is on PBS.

Gah! It's a pledge drive show! Don't worry about missing it now, it will be shown over and over and over by your local PBS station for YEARS.
posted by briank at 5:24 PM on November 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I am right here watching this with my parents and brother and sister in law right now. My father has reminded me of a frequently-told story - that when I was about four, and Dad still worked at the blues club his friends ran, we stopped by during sound check at Arlo's gig and Arlo serenaded me with the theme to SESAME STREET.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:30 PM on November 26, 2015 [7 favorites]

they had to go sign up for the draft?

My father "signed up" for the draft in 1945 -- supposedly you'd receive a better deal that way, than if you waited for your draft notice to appear. Either way, you wound up in the conscription Army of the United States rather than the regular Army, and after reading The Boy's Crusade by Paul Fussell I'm grateful my father didn't get in until after the shooting stopped, else I might never have been born.

I never heard of anybody 'signing up for the draft' during Vietnam.
posted by Rash at 6:21 PM on November 26, 2015

I had to sign up for the draft during the Viet Nam war. Turn 18. Go to draft board. Sign up. Every male had to do this. This was registering for the draft. It didn't mean you were in the army. He got called in to be drafted. Hence the medical and psych exams.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:49 PM on November 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

All USian males are still supposed to sign up for the draft, and it's been that way since 1940. Between 1940 and 1973, men could be drafted whenever Army enlistment ran low, regardless of whether an active war was on. That ended in 1973 with the Vietnam withdrawal, but Selective Service remains in place and every man between 18 and 25 is supposed to be registered. The registration is what "signing up for the draft" means. If the government deems a draft necessary, they'll be called in to go through the same process Arlo writes about in the song: first, an order to report for a physical exam, second, an induction order - once inducted, you had been drafted.

There was some tinkering with the draft system during the Vietnam war because of a loud general protest that the children of the privileged could more easily avoid service (the song Fortunate Son expresses some of that rage, and it's why Clinton, George Bush, and other vets of that era get the side eye when they seem to have ended up somewhere else than basic training).
posted by Miko at 5:46 AM on November 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

I never heard of anybody 'signing up for the draft' during Vietnam

On rereading your comment, I think the word you're looking for is "enlisted voluntarily" or "volunteered." Or, he might mean that he volunteered to be one of the first called from the draft list, which was also something you could do at certain times, and at times that meant your term of enlisted service was shorter than someone drafted without having volunteered - it was a way to entice people to step forward and fill the ranks with less resistance and strain on the civilian population, since it meant that young men without their own kids might put themselves in line before, say, the only child of a family or a 25-year-old with three children. Some men also preferred just getting it over with to trying to live for an unknown period uncertain about whether and when you might be called up. In the end, whether you're drafted or volunteer, you get enlisted, but sometimes people use "enlist" colloquially to mean "volunteer" and sometimes they specifically "volunteered for the draft" even though everyone, theoretically, was already "signed up for" the draft.

Another thing people did was to try to voluntarily join a service branch they thought wouldn't see action - National Guard, Coast Guard, Air Force.

Despite perceptions, a lot of men enlisted to serve in Vietnam. My dad did - twice. Two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam enlisted voluntarily - the same percentage who did so during World War II. And many who were drafted in also did volunteer to be first in line for that draft. For my father, a big factor in his voluntarism was his respect for his father's choice to do so. When we look back today, we tend to see antiwar sentiment as pervasive. But, at least until the 70s, but choices about military involvement were as complex as they are today - though they directly involved many more people, impacting society at a more personal level.
posted by Miko at 6:02 AM on November 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

he might mean that he volunteered to be one of the first called from the draft list, which was also something you could do at certain times

Yes, that was his status. Sorry I muddled the waters here, Every male must "register" but that word didn't seem the same to me as "signing up." I guess they are equal; I just never heard people use the latter.
posted by Rash at 9:15 AM on November 27, 2015