NOTE: This is a pre-production transcript and may not match the final show precisely.
Welcome back to the next episode of How Good It Is, a weekly podcast that takes a closer look at songs from the rock and roll era, and we check out some of the stories behind those songs, and the artists who made them famous.Â
My name is Claude Call, and this may be the first episode that isnât as long as the song itâs about.
Hey, donât forget to check out the website: How Good It Is Dot Com, where you can find some stuff that I found interesting, and some other stuff that doesnât necessarily fit well into the podcast.
Also, go follow and âLikeâ the showâs Facebook page, which has some other stuff that keeps everyone busy. You can find it at Facebook dot com, slash, How Good It Is Pod.
Did you ever delete a podcast youâd planned on saving, and then realized, aw. Now you have to download it again.You know, if you have the Podcast Republic app, you donât have to worry about it. Podcast Republic has delayed deletion, so you have an entire day to change your mind. Go check out Podcast Republic in the Google Play store, or click  on the link on my page.
This weekâs episode is about Arlo Guthrie and his song called Aliceâs Restaurant Massacree, but to tell this story, we need to start somewhere else.
[PRETTY BOY FLOYD]
Now, a lot of people know who Woody Guthrie is, but I make no assumptions on your part, Dear Listener. Woody Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter who was a seminal figure in the folk music genre, and his compositions have been covered by dozens of musicians, including Bob Dylan,Harry Chapin, Tom Paxton, Bruce Springsteen, and Johnny Cash, and all of them have cited Guthrie as a major influence on their own style. Woody is also responsible for the 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads, which most music publications list as one of their 100 most influential albums ever. In fact, most people consider Dust Bowl Ballads to be the very first concept album, in the sense of a collection of songs bound together by a common theme.
Woody Guthrie was also well-known for protest songs; in fact there are many photographs of him performing with a guitar that has the slogan âThis machine kills Fascistsâ printed on it. He was considered a Communist sympathizer, although it doesnât appear that he belonged to any Communist groups, and he wrote whatâs probably his most famous song,
[THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND]
âThis Land is Your Landâ, in response to his belief that the song âGod Bless Americaâ was getting played too often on the radio. And that kind of makes sense, since âThis Land is Your Landâ does have a whiff of Communism in the chorus…
And Woody Guthrie was married three times, and had eight children before he died in 1967 of complications from Huntingtonâs Disease. His second wife was Marjorie Mazia, who was a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. And it was in 1947 that they had one of their babies, who Marjorie named after a character in a series of childrenâs stories. That boyâs name was Arlo.
Remember Arlo? The showâs about Arlo. And his song.
[KARAOKE]
At any rate, Woody and Marjorie were a little worried that Arlo might get some hassles with having a bit of an odd name, so they gave him a more conventional middle name that he might choose to use. And thus, their son was named Arlo Davy Guthrie, the âDavyâ coming from Davy Crockett. So far as I know, only Arlo and his sister Nora were involved in any way with the music business. Nora is a record producer and the president of the Woody Guthrie Foundation, and she maintains her fatherâs musical legacy. And, of course, Arlo is a popular performer.
Arlo was only 13 when he did his first public performance in 1961, which is when the folk scene really started heating up. And it was in 1965, when Arlo was 17 years old, that he and his friend Rick Robbins drove up from New York City to the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to have Thanksgiving dinner with some of his friends. Until the events of this particular weekend, Stockbridge was probably best known for being the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum and the historic Red Lion Inn. But history was about to take a turn.
Rick and Arlo were going to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their friends Alice and Ray Brock. Alice and Ray lived in a deconsecrated church in Stockbridge, and their hospitality was well-known. And because Arlo and Rick were very close friends, they practically counted as family.
So on Thanksgiving morning, Rick and Arlo cleaned up the church, which was a genuine mess, and they put the trash into the back of a Volkswagen microbus, and they brought it to the dump, which was closed. So they drove around with the trash until Arlo remembered a side road near a camp heâd attended that was close by, and they drove up there and dumped the garbage,which, letâs face it, wasnât the best idea in the first place.
A little later, Ray got a call from the Stockbridge Chief of Police, William Obanhein. Obanhein had found the trash, and while looking through it discovered an envelope with Ray Nobleâs name on it. Eventually the truth came out, and the three of themâRay, Rick and Arloâfound themselves taking a ride in a police car back to the site, where photos were taken and later marked “PROSPECT HILL RUBBISH DUMPING FILE UNDER GUTHRIE AND ROBBINS 11/26/65â, and Rick and Arlo were taken to jail. They went before a judge,pleaded guilty and fined $25 each and ordered to pick up the garbage, at which point they all returned to the church and started to write the song together. As Alice Brock recalled once, âWe were sitting around after dinner and wrote half the song. And the other half, the draft part, Arlo wrote.â
And thatâs one of the other fun attractions of this song, the fact that there are two vastly different stories in this song which have an odd connection to one another and a similar overarching theme.
The second part of the song tells a story of Arlo being called up for the Vietnam War draft and initially being accepted but ultimately rejected because his arrest and conviction for littering made him too immoral to join the army to kill people. Folks, Iâm here to break some bad news to you:while the story of the littering and arrest is mostly trueâincluding the part about the judge being blindâthe second half of the song is almost entirely fictional. Guthrie was, in fact, eligible for the draft, but his number never came up so he never had to go to Whitehall Street.
Arlo Guthrie first performed the song publicly about a year later, on public radio station WBAI in New York City. Now, at the time WBAI had a reputation for being what one person described as an Anarchist Circus. The song appeared on an overnight program called âRadio Unnameableâ, hosted by Bob Fass. Guthrie played the song a few times on that station over the next couple of years, and Fass got a recording of one of Guthrieâs live performances and heâd play that repeatedly on his show. The song proved popular enough to listeners that the station was able to hold it out as a reward for receiving pledges from listeners. Guthrie once said in an interview with Smithsonian Magazine that theyâd play it only when they got enough pledges, then he joked that âEventually they were playing it so often, they took pledges to stop playing it, andâŠraised even more money.â
Guthrie performed the song in 1967 at a breakout workshop for the Newport Folk Festival, and it proved so popular that he was compelled to perform it again for the entire festival audience of close to 10,000, by far the largest audience heâd ever faced. In that Smithsonian interview, he noted that there were a lot of big names on the stage with him, and they were put there specifically to support him because he was young and inexperienced. It was this success that finally led him to record the song in front of an audience and release it as the entire A side of an album. That audience was already familiar with the song, so some of their laughter is anticipatory in nature, and it gave Guthrie a little bit of a tough time because, as he put it, it didnât have the sparkle of performing for a group that hadnât heard it before.
The song is, of course, the title track of the album,although I should note here that while the album is called Aliceâs Restaurant, the proper title of the song is âAliceâs Restaurant Massacreeâ. âMassacreeâ is, in fact, a real word that derives from the Ozarks. Itâs a corruption of the word âmassacreâ but doesnât have as dark of a meaning behind it. A âmassacreeâ is defined by the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture as “an event so wildly and improbably and baroquely messed up that the results are almost impossible to believe”.
Now, while the song is identified mostly as an anti-war song, and perhaps specifically an anti-Vietnam War song,itâs really more of a call to question authority in general. Or, as Guthrie once put it, itâs an âanti-stupidityâ song. But I think this is part of the songâs timeless appeal. Weâve all had to deal with people who were so locked into a specific path of action that what they do winds up having a certain level of irony to it, and both of the first two parts of the song have a pretty tasty dose of irony to them, from the police officer taking things way too seriously, to the idea that having a littering conviction makes you unfit for military service, not to mention a pariah among hardened criminals.
Which leads us into the third part of the song, where Guthrie suggests that if you, or someone you know, finds themselves facing the draft, they should just march into the military psychiatristâs office, sing the first part of the chorus and walk out again.And if enough people do that, itâll become known as “the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement”. Because once again, if a big enough group is doing something, then itâs gotta be the right thing to do.
We donât know for sure what Woody Guthrie thought of the song, but Arlo says he sent a demo of the recording to his father shortly before it was released. Woody was on his deathbed at that point, and the family joke is that it was the last thing Woody heard before he died.
For whatever reason, radio stations nationwide have chosen to play this song exclusively on Thanksgiving. In fact, the website Radio Survivor dot com usually publishes an annual list of radio stations where the song is being played, but I strongly suspect that itâs not a comprehensive list. So why is the song so popular on Thanksgiving Day?
I have a couple of guesses, and I think theyâre pretty good guesses at that. The first is that we here in America donât have a lot of songs that center on Thanksgiving Day the way other holidays do. Christmas, of course, has a million songs, and Easter gets âEaster Parade,â and Independence Day has all kinds of John Philip Sousa songs, and even Halloween has the âMonster Mashâ, but there isnât really a popular song dedicated to Thanksgiving. When I was a kid, âOver the River and Through The Woodâ was framed as a Thanksgiving song, and in fact the original title of the poem that spawned the song was âThe New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Dayâ, but that one seems to have fallen out of favor. So the only song we have that even mentions Thanksgiving is âAliceâs Restaurant Massacreeâ. The other reason is that radio stations usually have a skeleton crew going on during the holidays, and sometimes the on-air staff want to relax a little bit, so theyâll play a lot of long songs. And at eighteen minutes and thirty-four seconds, this one qualifies as a long song. Guthrie once joked that eighteen minutes and thirty-four seconds is exactly the same amount of time of the audio gap in the Watergate Scandal tapes, and that âAliceâs Restaurantâ is what was deleted.
So whatâs the real story of Alice and the Restaurant?
As I noted earlier, Alice Brock was a real person, and she and Ray Brock did own a restaurant, called âThe Back Room,âbut it was after the events of the song, and only for a couple of years. She and Ray divorced in 1968 and she did go on to open a couple of more establishments in the 70s, but left that business by the end of that decade.Until a couple of years ago, she owned an art studio and gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. After the divorce, Ray Brock moved back to his home state of Virginia and died in 1979.
The Back Room later became known as âTheresaâs Stockbridge CafĂ©â, and the sign out front also read âFormerly Aliceâs Restaurantâ. The cafĂ© closed a couple of years ago, and unfortunately I havenât been able to learn whatâs in that space now.
The microbus that was used to transport all that garbage is no more. According to Guthrie in a 2015 interview with the Boston Globe, itâs been relegated to history.
The former church changed hands several times over the years until Arlo Guthrie himself bought the property. Itâsnow the home of the Guthrie Center, a nondenominational, interfaith meeting place, and itâs also used as a performance space.
Of course, Arlo Guthrie is still performing and recording, although he only plays this song on special occasions, and he says he has to re-learn the song every time, saying, âitâs not like riding a bicycle.â Heâs also updated some of the lyrics to fit with modern-day events and changes to acceptable language. So in the spot near the end where he uses the line âtheyâll think youâre faggots,â heâll change it to something less offensive and more topical, such as âtheyâll think theyâre trying to get married in some parts of Kentucky,” or “they’ll think they’re gay; not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
And if youâre interested, the song was also turned into a feature film in 1969. It was directed by Arthur Penn,who coincidentally was living in Stockbridge when he heard the song for the first time, and decided he needed to make a film about it, although there are a lot of fictional scenes added. Guthrie plays himself in the film and you can also see Officer Obie and Judge James Hannon playing themselves.
[LAST CHORUS]
And Alice herself has a cameo in the film, though not as herself. The Alice character is played by Pat Quinn, opposite James Broderick playing RayâŠ
And, thatâs it for this edition of How Good It Is.
If you want to get in touch with the show, you can email us at HowGoodPodcast@gmail.com,
Or you can follow the show on Twitter at How Good It Is Pod.
You can also visit, like and follow the showâs Facebook page, at facebook dot com, slash How Good It Is Pod.
Or, you can check out the showâs website, How Good It Is Dot Com, where you may find a few extra bits.
Thanks, as usual, to Podcast Republic for featuring the show.
Next time around, weâre going to find out How Good It Is to add another brick to The Wall.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you then.