"Alice's Restaurant" - A Thanksgiving Eve Tradition

52 years ago (Nov. 29, 1965) the Berkshire Eagle printed a little article about two young men being fined 25 bucks for dumping trash. Little did we know at the time that the incident, which ran on page 25, would become the basis for Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. Here's our original story from 1965: Source

"Alice's Restaurant" - A Thanksgiving Eve Tradition on American Pastimes

Tom Leonardi

According to his biographer Joe Klein, “one of the last things that Woody Guthrie did before he died was to listen to a recording of his son Arlo singing a long, convoluted talking blues about how he’d been arrested for littering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and how he’d parlayed that ‘criminal record’ into a means of dodging the draft and avoiding the war in Vietnam.” Whether Woody could actually comprehend the story or even knew it was Arlo singing and story telling will never be known. He was in the final stages of the neurologically debilitating Huntington’s Disease and would succumb to it within a few short weeks.

Because of Arlo's recording however, fame came to Woody’s oldest son much earlier in life than it came to him. Arlo Guthrie was raised in Howard Beach in Queens, New York. He had just graduated from the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge Massachusetts where he had met Alice & Ray Brock who both taught there. The couple lived in an old church and served large meals for friends and family. On Thanksgiving Day in 1965, 18-year-old Arlo and his classmate Rick Robbins were arrested in Stockbridge by police officer William Obanheim for dumping trash left over from Thanksgiving dinner at the Brocks. The two had originally planned on taking it to the town landfill but it was closed for the holiday. In court a few days later they pled guilty. 

Courtesy of the Guthrie Center

The judge, the Hon. James E. Hannon was actually blind. And as Arlo points out, “in a typical case of American blind justice” he found them both guilty, fined them $50, and made them collect their garbage. Guthrie and Robbins hit the road as performers immediately afterward. According to Robbins, “we followed the footprints of Woody and Cisco [Houston].” The original song “Alice’s Restaurant” was a fauxadvertising jingle that Arlo had composed for the Brocks. He began to include it in his stage repertoire and during performances he started telling the story of their arrest and conviction and its effect on his Viet Nam era draft status: "you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, and villages.... after being a litterbug?"

But it wasn’t until 1967 that the song and story reached a larger audience. That year he performed it at the Newport Folk Festival and then during a WBAI radio broadcast. WBAI is the New York City Pacifica station; a non-profit community station. Arlo’s performance was hugely popular and often requested by the station’s listeners but WBAI only played the tape during fund-raising pledge drives. Its popularity in New York served to get Arlo a record contract and the song was released in 1967 on a long-playing album (at 18 minutes long the song and monologue couldn’t fit onto a 45 rpm single). The album reached #17 on the pop charts. A 45-rpm single called "Alice's Rock 'n Roll Restaurant" was also released by the record company but predictably it tanked.

In 1969 United Artists and director Arthur Penn released a film version of the story that featured Hollywood actors as well as Stockbridge locals including Officer Obanheim. Said Officer Obie: “If anyone is going to make me look like a fool, it will be me." 

Officer Obie

As Arlo performed “Alice’s Restaurant” throughout his career he would periodically change the monologue to reflect current social concerns and political situations. A few of these other versions have been released on CD. "Alice: Before Time Began" was first recorded in 1969. Its satirical account of cockroach armies took on the military. A version recorded in 1990 at the Kerrville Folk Festival addressed policies of the first President Bush.

In 1997 Arlo re-recorded his entire debut album for CD: This recording, "Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited" includes an updated narrative that involves a visit to Jimmy Carter’s White House and a discovery there related to Richard Nixon. One version or another of “Alice’s Restaurant” has been featured on American Pastimes every Thanksgiving Eve since KZFR has been gracing the airwavs.

Arlo purchased the old Trinity Church in Stockbridge in 1991. The church, formerly owned by the Brocks and site of the infamous 1965 turkey dinner has been developed into The Guthrie Center, a non-profit interfaith church foundation dedicated to providing a wide range of local and international services.

Alice Brock went on to open a variety of restaurants and has written a number of cookbooks. Officer Obie was forced into retirement after over 30 years on the Stockbridge police department. He evidently beat up another peace officer.

Rick Robbins, Arlo’s friend and co-conspirator in garbage dumping continued to sing and tour into the late 1970’s when he settled down and became an architect and house builder. In the mid 1990’s he began to perform again, recording a number of CD’s with musical support from Rory Block, Eric Weisberg, John Sebastian, Garth Hudson, and others. In recent years he has toured extensively with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.  SOURCE:

The secret Jewish history of “Alice’s Restaurant”

You want to feel old?

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the song “Alice’s Restaurant,” by Arlo Guthrie.

Well, sort of. The song was released on the album of the same name in September, 1967. The events that the song commemorates actually occurred two years before that, on Thanksgiving, 1965.

But, nevertheless, if you are of a certain age, nothing says Thanksgiving more than “Alice’s Restaurant.”

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, here is a Cliff’s Notes version.

“Alice’s Restaurant” consists of Arlo Guthrie delivering a long, guitar-accompanied monologue (a talking blues, really — an art form that his father, the iconic American folk singer, Woody Guthrie, had perfected) about his arrest for littering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, by the Stockbridge chief of police, William Obanhein, a.k.a. Officer Obie.

At the time, Arlo was living with Alice and Ray Brock in a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (more about that later).

Ultimately, as the song’s second part tells us, Arlo’s arrest record was at least partially responsible for preventing him from being drafted and serving in the war in Vietnam.

Two years later, the movie “Alice’s Restaurant” was released. It stars Arlo as himself.

Jewish geography lesson: For many years, I spent summers in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, where the song takes place. For me, and for so many, the Berkshires are a magical place — the only place where I ever truly relax.

The discerning tourist can find all of the places mentioned in the song (with the exception of the scenes at the draft board, which take place on Whitehall Street in New York City).

• In Stockbridge, you can visit the original location of Alice’s restaurant; it is, in fact, “around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track” off Main Street.
• For many summers, I used to dump our trash at the Stockbridge town dump, which is probably where Arlo should have dumped his trash in the first place. I could do that, legally, because I had a sticker from the “master garbologist.”
• Officer Obie’s extended family still lives in the area; he was a well-known and beloved figure.

As for the church, it is still there, as well. It serves as the Guthrie Center, a wonderful concert venue, and home to the Guthrie Foundation, a permanent memorial to the legacy of Arlo’s late parents.

(Check out this song about Woody’s legacy, written and sung by my friend, Doug Mishkin).

Which brings me to the Jewish stuff.

Arlo Guthrie is Jewish, through his mother, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. 

Fun fact: when Arlo celebrated becoming bar mitzvah, at the Howard Beach Jewish center in Queens, the presiding rabbi was none other than Meir Kahane.

Kahane would go on to become the leader of the Jewish Defense League, and then, in Israel, of the extreme right wing, anti-Arab Kach party.

Kahane was assassinated in 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair, who was linked to Osama bin Laden — thus becoming the first American victim of Al Qaida.

Arlo Guthrie and Meir Kahane — together. Think of it.

Back to Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was not Jewish, and yet, he wrote a bunch of Hanukkah songs. This one is one of my favorites.

Guthrie’s guitar was adorned by a simple message, placed there in 1941: “This machine kills fascists.”

As we prepared to enter World War Two, it was the right message.

And, while we are not fighting foreign wars against fascists right now, the anti-fascism sentiment still stands.

One last thing about Woody Guthrie.

When Guthrie lived in Brooklyn, he lived at the Beach Haven apartments, which was a property that had been developed by Fred Trump — as in the father of the current president.

As others have noted, the older Trump was not particularly interested in having blacks rent his properties.

Which would lead Woody Guthrie to write a song about Fred Trump:

I suppose Old Man Trump knows

Just how much racial hate

he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed that color line

Here at his eighteen hundred family project.

The spirit of protest, birthed by Woody Guthrie and sustained by Arlo, is still alive in our time.

And for this, we surely must give thanks.   SOURCE

Woody Guthrie's Hanukkah Songs

Joshua Eli Plaut

Here is a recent American tale of old wine in new vessels. Part of our national folklore reveals that Woody Guthrie, the iconic American folk troubadour and songwriter, composed Hanukkah songs. In a 2003 concert, the Klezmatics, a popular Grammy Award-winning Klezmer band, performed Hanukkah songs showcasing lyrics written from 1949 through the early 1950s by Woody Guthrie. The lyrics had laid fallow and long-forgotten in Guthrie’s archives until their discovery in 1998 by Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. Nora asked the Klezmatics to write original music for the lyrics, which fuses strains of Klezmer music with American folk and bluegrass. The 2006 album, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka,” comprises many different songs, including “Happy, Joyous Hanuka” and “Hanuka Tree.” Two of the eight songs, “The Many And The Few” and “Hanuka Dance,” had lyrics and melodies penned entirely by Guthrie. The songs were in part biographical. Woody was married to Marjorie Mazia, a Jewish dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company who was the daughter of Aliza Greenblatt, an activist and Yiddish poet. Nora remembers “For Hanukkah actually, we had a hat—we didn’t get presents—but we had a hat with different amounts of Hanukkah gelt, and every night we’d pick out five cents or twenty-five cents of gelt. My mother played piano, and we used to sing and dance every night.”*

At the 2003 debut concert with the Klezmatics at the 92^nd Street Y in Manhattan, folk legend Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and Nora’s brother, joked that as children they would dance “around the Hanukkah tree.” "Happy Joyous Hanuka" counts down each candle on the menorah (“Seven for the sons of Hannah that died/Six for kings and the tricks they tried/Five for the brothers Maccabee”), while “Hanuka Tree” has a lively simple melody (“Round and around my Hanukah tree/Round and around I go/Round and around my Hanukah tree/Because I love you so”). According to Nora, most of Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs seem to have been written in November or December within five days of each other “because he had bookings in December for children’s Hanukkah parties in assorted Brooklyn community centers.” As was his wont, Woody would “write songs only for the gig a few days before and then go on to other songs for other gigs.” For the Guthrie family, a family of improvisers not of traditions and for whom the approach to religion was “all or none,” the tree was a “Christmas tree, a Hanukkah tree, and a holiday tree. It was a fluid thing!”

Indeed, the popularization of Woody Gutherie's Hanukkah songs by the Klezmatics demonstrates the vital role that music plays as an intrinsic cultural force contributing to the Americanization of this Jewish holiday, as it coexists with Christmas.

*Telephone interview with Nora Guthrie, August 17, 2011.

SOURCE:

Aliza Greenblatt (Yiddish: עליזה גרינבלאַט‎, September 8, 1888 – September 21, 1975) was an American Yiddish poet. Many of her poems, which were widely published in the Yiddish press, were also set to music and recorded by composers including Abraham Ellstein and Solomon Golub and were recorded by Theodore Bikel and Sidor Belarsky, among others.

Her daughter Marjorie, a dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, was for a time married to folk musician Woody Guthrie. Greenblatt was the grandmother of folk musician Arlo Guthrie

Alice Brock: An Artful Life

JUNE 7, 2017 5:00 AMVIEWS: 198

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Alice Brock is no washashore. “I was conceived on Long Point,” she says, smiling. “Oh, wait, you don’t want to start that far back?”

It doesn’t matter how far back you begin in Alice Brock’s life; it’s all interesting, as attendees at the Heritage Day that will be celebrated in her honor at the Provincetown Public Library on June 13 will get a chance to hear.

Maybe it started out on Long Point. Or maybe it started during the summers her father worked for Peter Hunt and the family lived on Commercial Street—“the best summers of my life,” says Brock. She decided then that she wanted to live in Provincetown forever.

There were a couple of rather famous detours on her way back here, however. Brock got married and headed out to Stockbridge to teach at a prep school run by a left-leaning scholar whose assumption was that everyone—faculty, staff, and students—were equals. “It was the mid-sixties,” Brock remembers. “My husband played the guitar, kids would come and hang out at our house on campus all the time. We were bohemians…or maybe beatniks.”

One of the kids who played and sang with Brock and her husband was Arlo Guthrie.

Brock’s mother bought the couple a church as a wedding present; her husband, an architect and sculptor, turned it into living quarters. It was a magical place, complete with bell tower and an arch made by New Bedford shipbuilders who simply reversed their usual approach to curves and space. Parents trusted Brock and her husband, as they were teachers, and more and more kids came to stay, to play, to talk. “But there I was, cooking for all those voracious teenagers!” says Brock. “That had to stop.”

Her mother found the solution: “She said, ‘there’s a diner in Stockbridge that’s for rent. I’ll help you, and you can get paid for your cooking.’” Brock smiles. “I always leap before I look, so I said, why not?”

That leap eventually brought about her extraordinarily popular cookbook, Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook, not to mention a song that became an anthem for the age, Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war hymn, Alice’s Restaurant. It was a golden time. “I loved it; it was all a lot of fun. Arlo’d been called up for the draft and that’s when he came up with the song…We were just all these hippies against the war. We lived as if the world was the way we wanted it to be.” She pauses. “That’s the way we still live.”

It was time to go to Provincetown. “I’m very lucky, because I don’t care about money,” says Brock. “When I run out of money, some more comes in, somehow. I spend the money on other people, and as it goes out it makes room for more to come in.”

Although she never took an art class, Brock had always been making things. “I love to recycle objects,” she says. “I even used to carve little figures out of sticks of chalk. I made a movie out of a roll of adding-machine tape, with narration. I always felt I was an artist, but I never saw it as a way to make money, it was all very personal. Before moving here, I had one art show in the Berkshires. Everything got sold—and I felt completely bereft! Then I came to Provincetown and I was part of a fall arts festival. I hung things for the first time—for the first time, I had a gallery. And I loved having a gallery!” She had that gallery for the next forty years. “I always enjoyed talking with all the people who came in…you have to understand, the sixties, it was a wonderful time for most people, and they love going back to that time. And so I sold art!”

And she has continued to sell art. Her stones, adorned with pictures of women and of cats, can be found literally all over the world. While she no longer has a gallery on Commercial Street—“this is the first time that I don’t have a view of the water”—this summer on weekends she’ll be in one of the art shacks on MacMillan Pier, where everyone will have the opportunity to take home an Alice Brock painting, stone, or book.

Though she now has emphysema and requires oxygen, Alice Brock is still creating, and still in love with the place where she was conceived. “I love Provincetown with all my heart,” she says. “Every day I feel blessed to be here.”

Alice Brock will be the guest of honor at this year’s Provincetown Heritage Day celebration at the Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St., on Tuesday, June 13 at 6 p.m. The event will feature a Q&A with Brock and is free and open to the public. For more information call 508.487.7094 or visit provincetownlibrary.org.

69 Commercial Street

 

Alice Brock Studio | R & R Place

Anyone of a Certain Age will almost certainly share the author’s quiet pleasure in knowing that Alice M. (Pelkey) Brock, the Alice of Alice’s Restaurant, wound up practicing her delightful art right here in Provincetown. She moved to Cape Cod in 1979 and declared three decades later that she was grateful for every “beautiful day in paradise” (Jane Roy Brown,  “After Alice’s Restaurants,” The Boston Globe, 24 February 2008). “Thank God for the National Seashore,” she said. “There’s still the beautiful light, and there are still a few crackpots left. I never want to go anywhere. People say, ‘Don’t you want to go away in the winter?’ The only place I would want to go would be a place like this, and I’m here now.”

 

In fact, she had been here before. Though Brock is closely associated in the popular mind with Stockbridge, Mass., her Provincetown bona fides are exceptional. Her parents were Mary Dubro Pelkey (±1909-2010) and Joseph F. Pelkey (1911-2010), who met here. As Brock herself notes, she was conceived here. And even though she was born in Brooklyn, her arrival was announced in the pages of The Advocate. Pelkey, a professional silkscreener and alumnus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, had made a name for himself locally working with Peter Hunt, managing the Christmas Tree Shop at 443-445 Commercial Street. Pelkey also ran the Art Mart on a wharf near the center of town, 251-253 Commercial, known variously as Jot Small’s, Heinrich Pfeiffer’s or Charley Cook’s. And he was an Advocate contributor.

The Pelkey family — father, mother, two girls and one dog — spent summers in Provincetown, living in a big room behind the Christmas Tree Shop. There is a charming picture of Alice and her sister, Zina, seated outside Hunt’s Peasant Village complex at 432 Commercial Street. Harry Kemp dedicated a poem to Pelkey in 1944; one of his better ones, in fact. “Last Word,” it is titled.

Brock’s name entered the national lexicon in 1967 with the release of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. “Alice’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that’s just the name of the song,” Guthrie said at the beginning of an 18-minute talking blues ballad about his arrest for illegally dumping debris from Ray and Alice Brock’s home after discovering that the Stockbridge town dump was closed on Thanksgiving. The jauntily meandering song is, by and by, a lampoon of the police and the Selective Service System and the stupidity of officialdom in general; popular enough in its time that it inspired a movie, Alice’s Restaurant (1969), in which Pat Quinn played Alice. The song is still broadcast on radio stations around the country as a Thanksgiving Day anthem.

Brock got out of the restaurant business long ago. With Davis E. Gates, she purchased 69 Commercial Street in 1983 from Francis P. and Elizabeth A. Kelley. The house was constructed around 1860 and was the property of William A. Couilliard at the turn of the 20th century, when it was denominated 52 Commercial Street. Adeline and Emil Souda acquired it from Couilliard in 1942. Adolphe Robicheau, who acquired it from Marie Souda in 1962, undertook some astonishing changes, many of which Brock inherited.

Robicheau, a ballet dancer and instructor from Nova Scotia, operated 69 Commercial as a boarding house. He also transformed it into a dramatic expression of Catholic piety, drawing on his talents as a set painter for the Boston Ballet. He built a private chapel on the third floor that was consecrated by the bishop of Fall River, Brock said. He installed a pipe organ, an altar, stations of the cross, a baptismal font, a prie-dieu and icons. A lot of them. “The whole house was filled with icons,” Brock recalled, “including martyrs with their eyes gouged out.” She removed almost everything but a stained-glass window.

Brock divided the property into condominium interests in 2007 and sold the bottom part of the house to Richard Allan O’Reagan (b 1963). He is one of the Rs in “R & R Place,” as the sign says over the side entrance to his unit. The other R  is Richard Allen Hanson II, whom O’Reagan married in 2011.

No. 69 is now the Alice Brock Studio, where Brock sells her artwork. She is the author or  illustrator — or both — of Mooses Come Walking, written with Guthrie (Chronicle Books, 2004), How to Massage Your Cat (Chronicle Books, 2003), My Life as a Restaurant (Overlook, 1976) and Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook (Random House, 1969).

“I never formally studied art or took lessons, but all my life I have made things, drawn pictures and illustrated stories,” Brock said in an artist’s statement. “Being an artist was never a career choice. It’s my survival technique. Until recently, I rarely showed my work in public”

“I am a serial painter. One is never enough. There are so many possibilities. I want to explore them all. I enjoy repeating images in various configurations. The dynamics of relationships intrigues me. In my mind, objects have personalities, shapes can convey emotions and every carrot has a story.

“One of my favorite materials is the common beach stone. I draw on them and then I put them back on the beach. I also put them along the bike paths, behind the baked beans in the supermarket, on fence posts and in flower pots. And I sell them.”

Found by serendipity (when not purchased), the stones have wound up being placed in or carried to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Louvre and the Hermitage; the top of Denali and the bottom of the Grand Canyon; and beaches in New Zealand and Venezuela. One was tossed over the Great Wall of China. I like the idea that Alice Brock found her way back home to Provincetown after many years of journeying and now dispatches little bits of Provincetown — and herself — on journeys of their own.

---

This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the restaurant.
But Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song, Alice's Restaurant.

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

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant, but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog.
And livin' in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be.
An' havin' all that room, seein' as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn't have to take out their garbage for a long time.

We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump. So we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the city dump.

Well, we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying, "Closed on Thanksgiving."
And we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.

We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage.
And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down.

That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie.
He said, "Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of ab' a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it."
And I said, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."

After speaking to Obie for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said, that we had to go down and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the police officer's station.
So we got in the red VW microbus with the shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the police officer's station.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at the police station, and the first was he coulda given us a medal for being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and we didn't expect it, and the other thing was he coulda bawled us out and told us never to be see driving garbage around the vicinity again, which is what we expected, but when we got to the police officer's station there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said "Obie, I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the patrol car."

And that's what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote. 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, but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars, being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hangin' around the police officer's station. They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten 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. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention the aerial photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail. Obie said he was going to put us in the cell. Said, "Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt." And I said, "Obie, I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you want my belt for?" And he said, "Kid, we don't want any hangings." I said, "Obie, did you think I was going to hang myself for litterin'?" Obie said he was making sure, and friends Obie was, cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown, and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars roll out the - roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape. Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice... Remember Alice? It's a song about Alice... Alice came by and with a few nasty words to Obie on the side, bailed us out of jail, and we went back to the church, had a another thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to court.

We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said, "All rise." We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. And we was fined fifty dollars and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but that's not what I came to tell you about.

Came to talk about the draft.

They got a building down in New York City, it's called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. 'Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, kill, kill, kill." And I started jumpin' up and down yelling, "Kill! Kill!" and he started jumpin' up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "Kill! Kill!" And the Sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

Didn't feel too good about it.

An' I proceeded on down the hall gettin' more injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they as doin' to me at the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things and I was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no part untouched. Proceeded through, and when I finally came to the see the last man, I walked in, walked in sat down after a whole big thing there, and I walked up and said, "What do you want?" He said, "Kid, we only got one question. Have you ever been arrested?"

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's Restaurant Massacre, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that and all the phenome... - and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, did you ever go to court?"

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W, now kid!"

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committin' your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Litterin'." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin' about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargent came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said.

"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

("Kid, have you rehabilitated yourself?")

I went over to the Sargent, said, "Sargent, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin' here on the Group W bench, 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington."

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant." And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar.

With feeling. So we'll wait for it to come around on the guitar, here and sing it when it does. Here it comes.

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

That was horrible. If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud. I've been singing this song now for twenty five minutes. I could sing it for another twenty five minutes. I'm not proud... or tired.

So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time with four part harmony and feeling.

We're just waitin' for it to come around is what we're doing.

All right now.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant (Excepting Alice)
You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant
(I said) 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

Da-da da-da da-da da-dum
At Alice's Restaurant

Alice's Restaurant - Original 1967 Recording