Emerald City Video

Now it all started 60 Thanksgivings ago, was on – 60 years ago on
Thanksgiving, when Arlo Guthire and a friend went up to visit Alice at the
restaurant, but Alice doesn’t live in the restaurant, she lives in the
church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and
Fasha the dog. And livin’ in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of
room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Havin’ all that room,
seein’ as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn’t
have to take out their garbage for a long time.

The titular Alice died last Thanksgiving but, we still celebrate the time that Officer Obie showed up to court with twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back.

That garbage is what got musician Arlo Guthrie in trouble with the law, and inspired a Thanksgiving classic. For those of you that didn’t have NPR-listening family members growing up, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” is a satirical anti-war folk song that was released in 1967. Folk musician (and son of Woody) Guthrie traveled to Massachusetts to visit friends on Thanksgiving in 1965, and ended up “helping” his friends by cleaning the trash out of the old church they were living in…only to find out that the dump was closed on Thanksgiving.

In the song, Guthrie explains that they found another bunch of trash off the side of the road, and decided to just add to that pile. The next day, they got a visit from the local police.

After a court appearance, garnering him an official criminal record, Guthrie and a friend had to clean up the trash. That criminal record would save him years later, when his number was called for the military draft to go to Vietnam.

According to a newspaper clipping that surfaced online years ago, Guthrie’s court date took place on the Saturday following Thanksgiving in 1965 — making today the 60th anniversary of his life-altering conviction.

The song released in the 1967, near the peak of American troop involvement in the Vietnam War, when the U.S. had 485,000 troops occupying the nation. “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” spent 16 weeks on the Billboard charts — which is pretty shocking for a song that is 18 minutes long.

You can listen to my favorite version of the “talking blues” song — an extended version that explains how he came to find out that Nixon had a copy of the record, and how it might explain a notorious missing 18 minutes of audio tape.

In 1969, Arthur Penn turned the story into a movie starring Arlo as himself, with a special appearance by Stockbridge police chief William Obanhein. The cop, better known as “Officer Obie,” was also immortalized in the Norman Rockwell sketch “Policeman With Boys,” which you can see below.

You can Penn’s film adaptation of Alice’s Restaurant on YouTube, as oddly it’s not streaming for free anywhere else on Thanksgiving!

Support ECV and get the DVD on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4pbrQsG

On B&N https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-alices-restaurant-arthur-penn/3623203

Or you can check out our holiday gift guide to support independent artists and some of our favorite pop culture writers.