"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant--except an Alice"

Last Thanksgiving, after eating way too much turkey and gravy, I was sitting in my living room with a bunch of 60-year-olds. One of them said, "Oh! We should listen to Alice's Restaurant." He said that it was a Thanksgiving tradition to listen to the song, and if it wasn't our tradition, it should be. He pulled out his phone and started playing it.

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a rambling 18 and a half minute long song about a Thanksgiving misadventure of Arlo Guthrie. The song is a very humorous account of how Guthrie visited his friend Alice for Thanksgiving (she had a restaurant, but that is largely irrelevant to the story). 

Alice lived in a decommissioned church, and she had a lot of trash sitting in her house. Guthrie, being the good friend that he is, decided to take Alice's trash to the local dump. Guthrie put all the trash in his VW microbus (an iconic symbol of the 60s) and drove to the dump. Unfortunately, the dump was closed for Thanksgiving, so instead, Guthrie dumped the trash down a hill. Then, he came back to Alice's and had thanksgiving dinner.

The next day, Guthrie received a call from chief of police William "Obie" Obanhein. Guthrie admitted to dumping the trash and went down to the police station, where he was immediately arrested. Because the town he was in was very small, this littering crime was the biggest crime they'd had in years, so the cops used all the cop equipment they had, including "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." Alice then bailed Guthrie out of jail, and they had another Thanksgiving dinner.

Guthrie then went to court, where the police proudly displayed their "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." Unfortunately, the judge was blind, so the "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" were obsolete. Guthrie was fined $50 and that was the end of that.

At this point in the song, Guthrie says, "but that's not / What I came to tell you about / [I] Came to talk about the draft." Of course. 

Guthrie tells how he was drafted for the Vietnam war, and he went to get his physical examination (or as he says, to "get injected, inspected, detected, infected, / Neglected and selected"). The song starts becoming tangibly anti-war at this point; Guthrie says that he wanted to convince the psychiatrist he was not mentally fit to serve, so he started jumping up and down and screaming, "KILL!" Guthrie then says that the sergeant came and told him, "You're our boy."

It goes on, and it turns out in the end that the only reason Guthrie wasn't actually selected for service was because he was a criminal: his littering fine was a crime on his record.

The song ends with Guthrie encouraging listeners to protest against the draft and the war. The particular form of protest he suggests is reciting some of the chorus of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree."  He says, "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."

Here we finally get to the political heart of the song, as Guthrie says, 

"if... 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 won't take either of them

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in

Singing 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."

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is not even really a song. It's mostly a monologue, an anti-war narrative told by Arlo Guthrie and punctuated by a chorus of "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant." But at last Thanksgiving, I sat between a group of Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians, all of whom were singing along happily to the song. Even though the music of the 60s counterculture was created to serve the purpose of the counterculture, good music is enjoyed by everyone. 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant_Massacree

https://genius.com/Arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-massacree-lyrics