Movies - Alice's Restaurant

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	Movies - Alice's Restaurant

"Alice's Restaurant" is singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie's most famous work, a talking blues based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie. The song lasts 18 minutes and 20 seconds, occupying the entire A side of Guthrie's 1967 debut record album, also titled Alice's Restaurant (Warner Reprise Records). It is significant as a satirical, first-person account of 1960s counterculture, in addition to being a hit song in its own right. Guthrie is the son of folk music legend Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, a one-time professional dancer with the Martha Graham Company and founder of The Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease.

The song

Guthrie's talk-song, a bitingly satirical, wryly deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft and widespread anti-hippie prejudice, recounts a true but comedically exaggerated Thanksgiving adventure. "Alice" was restaurant owner Alice Brock, who in 1964, using $2,000 supplied by her mother, bought a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Alice and her husband Ray would live. It was here rather than at the restaurant, which came later, where the song's Thanksgiving dinner was actually held.

On that Thanksgiving, Nov. 28, 1965, the 18-year-old Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins, 19, were hauled into jail for illegally dumping some of Alice's garbage after discovering that the dump was closed for Thanksgiving. Two days later they pled guilty in court — before a blind judge, James E. Hannon, as the song describes to ironic effect as the arresting Officer becomes extremely upset. To him, this case of american blind justice which precludes him presenting his (detailed in full multiple times for comic effect) "27 8 x 10 color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence against us " In the end, the pair were each fined $25 and told to pick up their garbage. The song goes on to describe Guthrie's being called up for the draft, and the surreal bureaucracy at the New York City induction center on Whitehall Street. The punchline of the story's denouement is that because of Guthrie's criminal record for littering, he is first sent to the Group W Bench (where convicts wait) then outright rejected as unfit for military service. In reality, Guthrie, though a carrier of the genetically inherited disease Huntington's chorea, was classified as fit (1A); however, his draft-lottery number did not come up.

"Alice's Restaurant" is regularly played on Thanksgiving by many radio stations. It is not often otherwise aired, due to its length. The original album rose to on the Billboard chart.

Guthrie revised and updated "Alice's Restaurant" years later to protest Reagan-era policies, but this second version has not been released on a commercial recording. There are many parodies of the song as well.

Guthrie himself wrote a follow-up recounting how he learned that Richard Nixon had owned a copy of the song, and jokingly suggesting that this explained the famous 18½ minute gap in the Watergate tapes. Guthrie rerecorded his entire debut album for his 1997 CD Alice's Restaurant a.k.a. Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited, on the Rising Son music label, which includes this expanded version.

The real Alice's restaurant

"Alice" was restaurant owner Alice Brock, who with husband Ray Brock lived in a former church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the song's Thanksgiving dinner was actually held. She was a painter and designer, while Ray was an architect and woodworker. Both worked at a nearby private academy, the music- and art-oriented Stockbridge School, from which Guthrie (then of the Queens, New York City neighborhood of Howard Beach, New York) had graduated.

Alice's restaurant (formally known as the "Back Room Rest.", named for its location down an alley behind a grocery store at 40 Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts) was roughly six miles from the church — though true to the song, it was "just a half-a-mile from the railroad track". Formerly Maluphy's Restaurant, it ran the length of the building from front to back along the side alley. Owned by Alice for only a year before she and Ray divorced, it was, as of 2005, Theresa's Stockbridge Cafe, where a hand-painted sign indicates its former identity. The building's front as of 2005 is The Main Street Cafe.

The song and a subsequent movie (see below) made both Alice and Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein ("Officer Obie"), who arrested Guthrie, marginally famous. Obanhein, in addition, had previously posed twice for the famed local artist Norman Rockwell, and appeared in print advertisements for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and for Goodwill Industries.

The movie

The song was adapted into the 1969 movie Alice's Restaurant, directed and co-written by Arthur Penn and starring Guthrie as himself, Pat Quinn as Alice Brock and James Broderick (father of actor Matthew Broderick) as Ray Brock, with the real Alice making a cameo appearance. In the scene where Ray and friends are installing insulation, she is wearing a brown turtleneck top and has her hair pulled into a ponytail. In the Thanksgiving-dinner scene, she is wearing a bright pink blouse. In the wedding scene, she is wearing a Western-style dress.

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