Who's that?
Alice from "Alice's Restaurant"!
Oh, they had an Alice's Restaurant in my hometown. Didn't they even have one on the Malibu Pier? Always homey inside, with barnboard and healthy food...
NO!
That was all in the wake of the song, the movie and...
The sixties are over, but once upon a time there was a counterculture.
"Alice's Restaurant" came out in the fall of 1967. If you were living in San Francisco or New York, you heard the entirety of the eighteen minute song on the radio. If you lived in the hinterlands...I don't know, I didn't live in the hinterlands.
When did the sixties begin?
Earlier than you think. Everybody focuses on the late sixties, Humphrey, Woodstock, but the wheel turned much before that.
But you had to be paying attention to know.
It started with civil rights. I remember our rabbi taking the bus down south to protest. This was when it was less of a herd mentality and a personal desire, a personal need, you had to stand up, you thought the issue was black and white, you needed to make a statement, and you thought it made a difference.
And somewhere along the line people became aware of the Vietnam War. First there were advisors, then we were in a full scale conflagration. Which most people thought we would win easily, after all, weren't we the United States?
And while we were just living a life, hippiedom began in San Francisco. And after the Beatles wiped the radio deck clear of everybody but the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, and the Mamas & the Papas and Jefferson Airplane and so many came in their wake... It was clear, something was happening here.
"For What It's Worth came out in '66, after the Sunset Strip riots. No, the title was not in the song. But this was at the advent of acts having power. And in truth, the labels were starting to blink, they wondered if they truly knew what was going on. They all hired house hippies to steer them.
So by '67...
Well, '67 was the Summer of Love. But those outside the metropolis, those not hip, and you could tell by the clothes and the hair, still weren't clued in, but eventually they got on the same page. There was just too much excitement. There was a vibe, an underpinning. Every young person was a Democrat back then, you could point out the Republicans, they were so rare. The youth were aligned. But then came Kent State and you could no longer tell someone's values by the length of their hair and Nixon resigned and Reagan legitimized greed and everybody sold out to the almighty dollar and we truly haven't had the spirit here since 1969.
But back then...
There was an alternative. And it was just a matter of when you got hipped. And in the suburbs, in Fairfield, Connecticut, fifty miles from New York City, we got hipped early.
My mother was a culture vulture.
But so was Mrs. Hurley, our sophomore English teacher.
I was thinking about her just today. Someone was talking about the antisemitic protests in Montreal. Which made me think of being in that city in the fall of '67, for Expo '67. And coming home on Sunday, my parents detoured to drop me Off-Broadway, where my class was attending a performance of "MacBird."
Back when Off-Broadway was a thing. Broadway was for musicals, big tent productions. Off-Broadway was where all the experimental, cutting edge productions were. Testing limits.
Yes, a field trip on a Sunday. We didn't need no stinking time off from school to attend a cultural event.
And we went to see Janis Ian at Philharmonic Hall on a Friday night, before it was Avery Fisher Hall, before it was David Geffen Hall. We had to hear "Society's Child."
And on the bulletin board in Mrs. Hurley's classroom was thumbtacked...
An article about Arlo Guthrie and "Alice's Restaurant" from "Time" magazine.
The straight news was becoming hip to the alternative, to the youthquake. And when you made it there your acolytes felt good for you, you'd triumphed, and as a result we had too.
So what was "Alice's Restaurant" all about?
The draft.
All those Trumpers... I'd like to hear your take on things if you were subjected to getting your ass shot off overseas.
I mean we grew up in the wake of World War II. We knew you had to fight for your right...to live under a democracy, if not to party.
But did we really want to be in the line of fire?
And then the first guy from my high school died.
It was a real thing. Regular people, they got drafted and...
Can I tell you the military was the enemy, as were the cops? Everything's flipped today. Back then we were suspicious of organizations, it was about the lone individual.
Like Arlo Guthrie.
Woody Guthrie's son.
Not that everybody knew who Woody Guthrie was. This land was your land, from the redwood forests... We'd been singing those words since first grade, we had no idea someone actually wrote them, we figured they'd been passed down through the ages.
And of course Bob Dylan was influenced by Woody Guthrie. But at this point, most people only listened to Top Forty, they didn't go any deeper. They hadn't heard "Purple Haze," which also came out in '67.
So this guy with the funny name had this long song...
Oh, we were into length. That was testing limits. There were long versions and short versions, like with "Light My Fire." Did you know the long version, were you even aware it existed?
So Arlo Guthrie takes a whole side of an album to tell this meandering story about being drafted but evading service because he was a litterbug. The Group W Bench....that was in regular conversation, just like W.C. Fields.
So it was Thanksgiving and the dump was closed and Arlo and his buddy put the trash in a ravine and...
Suddenly, Alice and her restaurant were famous.
But then there was the movie, and everybody truly knew who she was. And it was most people's first exposure to Joni Mitchell, who sang "Songs to Aging Children Come" on a hillside in the snow.
The "Alice's Restaurant" movie was dark. Anything but a superhero fantasy. Then again, life was alternately light and dark. We were testing limits while MLK and RFK were being assassinated, while there were riots in the street. You listened to a record to know which way the wind blew.
So Arlo became a cultural staple.
And he "came back" in the Woodstock movie when he flew in from London from over the Pole. And he made some great music thereafter, but then there was corporate rock and disco and MTV and he wasn't quite a footnote, but he was far from mainstream.
As for Alice Brock?
The restaurant closed not long after the song came out. She got a divorce. She had a cameo in the movie...
And then she disappeared.
But we never forgot her. You can't forget these iconic moments of the sixties.
And I went with my buddy Keith to see Arlo at Fordham University. He started picking the notes to "Alice's Restaurant" and a whoop of recognition came over the hall. But he said there were three versions of the song, and we didn't know which one he was going to play.
He played one about Johnson being paranoid. Yes, LBJ was anathema. Little did we know we'd get Nixon, little did we know we'd get Trump. We actually had it pretty good in retrospect, but we wanted more. Not for ourselves, but for society.
Now dumping your trash in an unauthorized place... All these years later that seems a taboo. I never understood a dump being closed, but when we rented a ski house in East Jamaica, Vermont in that same year of '67, that was the case... No dumping on Sunday. So my father would look for a dumpster.
Now you're even afraid of putting your trash in a dumpster, because who knows, there might be a camera.
That's what I don't understand about the poor and uneducated and their physical crimes. There are cameras everywhere, don't you watch streaming television?
But in the wake of the environmental movement, which really didn't gain traction until 1970, with the first Earth Day, on April 22nd, my birthday, the first day I got high, we went to see the Woodstock movie...
The rules changed.
Now if someone throws garbage out the window you get pissed.
Then again, that philosophy is waning. And they told us to recycle and almost all we put in the blue bucket goes into a landfill overseas.
But some people are saying to drill, baby, drill.
And it's confounding if you were around back then. It seemed like we were always going forward. But that hasn't been the case for years. And techies are our idols, not musicians. Hell, Steve Jobs revered musicians. But today's musicians are not the best and the brightest and they're looking to sell out to the techies, when in reality music is all about telling truth to power, that's what Arlo Guthrie did.
But at this late date, all you can say is...
"I don't want a pickle
Just want to ride on my motorcycle"
(That was on side two.)
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