"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" (commonly referred to simply as "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, titled Alice's Restaurant (Warner Reprise Records). It is notable 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

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Alice'sRestaurantCD1997.jpg rerecording]] Guthrie's talk-song, a bitingly satirical, wryly deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft and widespread anti-hippie prejudice, recounts a true but comically 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 dinners were 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) "twenty-seven 8 by 10 color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us and Richard." In the end, the pair were each fined $50 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 Huntington's disease, was classified as fit (1A); however, his draft-lottery number did not come up.

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L.A. Times - Movie Reviews

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Rolling Stone Movie Reviews

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