Alice's Restaurant Massacre
I believe the last thing someone wants to do is spend 18 minutes of their lives listening to an active protest about the Vietnam war. Especially post-war, but that's exactly what you'll unknowingly be doing when you listen to "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie.
I was probably 10 when I first heard this song. I remember being annoyed when my dad forced us to listen to it in the car on our way to visit our grandparents. Surprisingly it's a song that has stuck with me my entire life, the catchy "you can get anything you want at Alices Restaurant" called to me as a kid. But now I see that catchy phrase as a symbol of community, particularly during a time period when belonging, freedom, and shared values were called into question. The line definitely suggests "you'll find something here, something that you won't get from the "government" system".
To give you a bit of a backstory, the song is a mostly-true satirical retelling of his Thanksgiving arrest for littering which ended up making him ineligible for the Vietnam war draft. The irony of the whole deal is that a system who is willing to send young men into a massively controversial war is deeply concerned about a single instance of trash in the woods. If you're willing to give it a listen, it's a valuable insight to what men may have been experiencing emotionally during this time frame.
The most interesting thing about this particular song to me is that it challenges the system in more ways than one. It's a song... but not really. It's more like a folk storytelling session, and at 18 minutes in length it definitely challenges the social norms of music expectations. It does follow Hadju's ideas about music becoming the soundtrack to a crises: Alice's Restaurant reflects Vietnam War anxiety, draft resistance, and a generational distrust of institutions. But the most important question that the song asks today, post-war? If you can get anything you want at Alive's Restaurant, what does that say about what we're missing everywhere else?
Emma, this was a really interesting post! I had never heard the song, but you inspired me to take a listen. I can see as a kid completely missing the context, as I had to look for the context as I read the lyrics with the song.
ReplyDeleteThis song and your post make me think of several other songs that also fall into this same time frame and are easily misunderstood for similar reasons. I grew up loving the "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" song without any understanding of what it meant. Every year as Christmas songs started to play on the radio, I would sing with it, and it wasn't until high school that I realized its messaging was entirely different than I had suspected. It's definitely incongruent. While the message is an anti-war message, the melody and Christmas base make it easy to miss. So many songs are that way, and it's interesting that several of them are around the Vietnam war.
In response to your question, this idea that we can have anything we want seems to come down to being a distraction. He sings it over and over again, knowing he will just wait until it comes around again. And then claims, toward the end he claims can get anything you want from Alice's kitchen, except Alice. So, I suppose the idea is a distraction from what actually matters, and at that time, it was the Vietnam war. Interesting song, and even more so interesting post! Thank you for sharing!