Album:
Alice’s Restaurant Massacree is on Alice’s Restaurant which entered the Kent album charts on 13 July 1970 and peaked at #21.
Songwriter:
Arlo Guthrie
Producer:
Fred Hellerman
Record label of Australian release:
Reprise
Arlo Guthrie talks about Alice’s Restaurant in a 2015 interview on WTMJ-TV Milwaukee:
Songfacts:
Running 18 minutes and 34 seconds, this song is based on a true story that happened on Thanksgiving Day, 1965. Arlo was 18, and along with his friend Rick Robbins, drove to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to have Thanksgiving dinner with Alice and Ray Brock. Alice and Ray lived in a church – the former Trinity Church on Division Street in Stockbridge – and were used to inviting people into their home. Arlo and Rick had been traveling together, Arlo working his way up in folk singing and Rick tagging along. A number of people, Arlo and Rick included, were considered members of the family, so they were not guests in the usual sense.
When Ray woke up the next morning, he said to them, “Let’s clean up the church and get all this crap out of here, for God’s sake. This place is a mess,” and Rick said, “Sure.” Arlo and Rick swept up and loaded all the crap into a VW microbus and went out to the dump, which was closed. They started driving around until Arlo remembered a side road in Stockbridge up on Prospect Hill by the Indian Hill Music Camp which he attended one summer, so they drove up there and dumped the garbage.
A little later, the phone rang, and it was Stockbridge police chief William J. Obanhein. “I found an envelope with the name Brock on it,” Chief Obanhein said. The truth came out, and soon the boys found themselves in Obanhein’s police car. They went up to Prospect Hill, and Obie took some pictures. On the back he marked them, “PROSPECT HILL RUBBISH DUMPING FILE UNDER GUTHRIE AND ROBBINS 11/26/65.” He took the kids to jail.
The kids went in, pleaded, “Guilty, Your Honor,” were fined $25 each and ordered to retrieve the rubbish. Then they all went back to the church and started to write “Alice’s Restaurant” together. “We were sitting around after dinner and wrote half the song,” Alice recalls, “and the other half, the draft part, Arlo wrote.”
Read more: www.songfacts.com/facts/arlo-guthrie/alices-restaurant-massacree
Lyrics:
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
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
Click for full lyrics
Also on Bang a Gong: The City of New Orleans by Arlo Guthrie
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