Alice's Restaurant (music)

"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[1]"

Alice's Restaurant is the name of a 1967 album by Arlo Guthrie. The lead song on the album is officially named "The Alice's Restaurant Massacree", but is frequently also called "Alice's Restaurant".

The song is talking-blues-style with a sung refrain,[2] recounting the long-winded (18 minutes!) and exaggerated but basically true story of how a young Arlo Guthrie did a simple favour for his friend Alice that indirectly resulted in him being judged morally unfit to be shipped off to Vietnam to kill people who'd never done him any harm. There is a long-standing tradition of listening to the song on Thanksgiving Day, since the song takes place on that holiday (and it marks the transition between regular radio programming and Christmas music programming).

The song was originally intended to be one of a series (none actually titled "Alice's Restaurant"), but apart from follow-ups to the Massacree -- of which there have been several, including one reporting that Richard Nixon is said to have owned a copy of the original album and noting the coincidence that the famous missing section of the Watergate tapes is also 18 minutes long -- there has only been one released, the even longer "Alice's Restaurant: Before Time Began" (aka, depending on the album, "The Alice's Restaurant Multi-Colored Rainbow Roach Affair").

A 1969 film, also called Alice's Restaurant, was based on the song.

"The Alice's Restaurant Massacree" provides examples of:
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Or in this case, mother-rape, father-stabbing, father-raping... and littering.
    • ...and creatin' a nuisance.
    • Also when Arlo tells the sergeant his objections:

Cos you wanna know if I'm moral enough to join the army and burn women, trees, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug.

  • Artistic License: Law: The court hearing is two days after Thanksgiving - which is to say, Saturday, when most courts do not hold session.
  • Audience Participation Song: "And remember, you wanna end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud, okay?"
  • Axe Crazy: Arlo acts this way in an attempt to get the army psychiatrist to exempt him from duty:

I walked in and said, "Shrink, I wanna kill..."

  • Based on a True Story
  • Bedsheet Ladder: See Crazy Prepared below.
  • Brick Joke: Any character in the story who speaks directly to Arlo addresses him as "Kid." Even the form that the occupants of the Group W bench have to fill out.
    • In truth, the whole song is one long Brick Joke. Arlo starts out telling an amusing, but seemingly pointless, tale about getting arrested for littering before moving on to talk about his draft experience. And when he finally meets the "last man" at his draft induction, he's told they have one final question: "Have you ever been arrested?" Which requires him to go back to the very beginnning ...
  • Confess to a Lesser Crime: "Yes sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie: I put that envelope under that garbage."
  • Crazy Prepared: Officer Obie takes the toilet paper out of Arlo's cell so that he can't "bend the bars, roll the paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape."
  • Double Standard Rape (Male on Male): Incidentally; Guthrie mentions that other people judged unfit to serve included "mother rapers... father stabbers... father rapers". On the live recording, this gets a laugh.
  • Draft Dodging: Not actually what Guthrie does in the song, but the only reason he's telling this story is so that you'll know how to dodge the draft.
  • Insistent Terminology:
    • The "twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures 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."
    • The "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction."
  • Literal Metaphor: The judge that Arlo and his friend are called before is vision-impaired, making this, as Arlo puts it:

a typical case of American blind justice.

and it was about four or five hours later that Alice -- remember Alice? This is a song about Alice -- came by.

  1. ↑ excepting Alice
  2. ↑ The refrain, confusingly, is introduced with the words, "This song is called Alice's Restaurant"...
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