Sixty Years Ago Arlo Penned the Thanksgiving Anthem of a Generation

 

The Thanksgiving song of Baby Boomers was Alice’s Restaurant, which WFMT and WXRT in Chicago both obligingly play each Turkey Day.  Plenty of ageing hippies cue up their venerable vinyl, dig out a CD or even pop in ancient cassette tape into a surviving player.  Some of them will even know how to find it on apps and mysterious platforms. 

 

Arlo Guthrie, the son of legendary Woodie Guthrie and modern dance teacher Marjorie Mazia, was only 18 years old at Thanksgiving in 1965. He was trying to stake out his own identity independent of the long shadow of Woody, who was already hospitalized in the last stages of Huntington’s Chorea.  He was away at college in faraway Montana while acolytes, notably Rambin' Jack Eliot and Bob Dylan sat by his dad’s bedside and appropriated his musical mantle.  Arlo was bored and restless at school.  He was playing and singing around campus and local coffee houses but had no reputation of his own when he decided to hitch hike back East for a possible last visit to his father and to settle into communal living in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. 

The Hippie Thanksgiving feast at the old church in Stockbridge as seen in Arthur Penn's 1969 film Alice's Restaurant.

 

He attended a joyous holiday feast in the old church building where he and many others were crashing, Alice Brock, the former librarian of a boarding school in town that Arlo once attended, and the proprietor of a new counter cultural restaurant, supplied most of the food. 

 

After dinner Arlo and a pal, loaded what described as “half a ton of garbage” into a ramshackle truck to take it to the town dump which they found closed for the holiday weekend.  Not knowing what to do, the pair simply dumped their load in a ravine just off the road, not uncommon then in much of America.  But when the local constable found a letter addressed to Arlo in the mess, he arrested him, took him to jail, and charged him with illegal dumping.  He was convicted by a Justice of the Peace, fined, and ordered to clean up the mess. 

  

All of which Arlo did with more or less good humor, amused that he was now a convicted criminal for what he called littering.  By the end of the decade many hippies, swept up in the emerging ecological movement, including Arlo himself, recognized that the offense was far more serious than it seemed at the time.  But that was all in the future. 

Arlo in line for his induction physical.

 

Having dropped out of college and losing his student draft deferment, Arlo was called up for induction into the Army while the Vietnam War was raging and being drafted had serious, even fatal consequences.  Arlo showed up for his induction physical with no real plan for what to do and a cheeky, irreverent attitude.  The scrawny kid who had a good chance of inheriting his father's fatal genetic condition somehow passed.  Then his criminal record turned up and he was rejected as unfit for military service for that one conviction. 

  

All of which Arlo described in detail in a rambling 18-minute story song, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree which he began to perform at his small gigs around the Northeast.  Boston WBAI Public Radio host Bob Fass got a hold of a tape of the song from a live performance and played it repeatedly on his overnight broadcasts.  It became an instant word-of-mouth countercultural phenomenon and led to Arlo being signed to a major record label—Warner Bros, which released the song as the entire A side of Arlo’s debut album Alice’s Restaurant in 1967.  It became an instant classic.  Two years later, in 1969 director Arthur Penn adapted the song into a movie with Arlo playing himself. 

  

Arlo quickly became a major star on the folk/pop festival and concert circuits.  He performed Alces’s Restaurant at almost every performance until the end of the Vietnam War made it less relevant.  He also realized, “I would never sing the song to a virgin audience again.”  He stopped performing it by the mid-’70s and resisted all pleas or demands that he do it again. 

Arlo shortly before his retirement.

 

Eventually, he decided that he would include it on the 10th anniversary of the song. Then he revived it for the 30th,40th, and 50th anniversary tours.  His last public performance was at his annual Thanksgiving concert in 2019.  After the Coronavirus pandemic cancelled his planed 2020 farewell tour and a series of strokes impeded his ability to walk and play guitar up to his own standards, he announced he would no longer book any new shows. 

 

Meanwhile, there are an active campaigns to have Arlo named for the Kennedy Center Honors and inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.   A lot of us geezers think it is well deserved.