WOODSIDE PERCUSSION STUDIO IL TRIAL

Guthrie then states that the littering incident was 'not what I came to tell you about' and shifts to another story, this one based at the Army Building on Whitehall Street in New York City as Guthrie appeared for a physical exam related to the Vietnam War draft. The Army Building where Guthrie had his physical examination Guthrie and his friend paid a $50 fine to the court and were ordered to pick up the garbage. When Obie saw that the judge relied upon a seeing-eye dog, he realized that the officers' meticulous work had been foiled by a literal 'case of American blind justice'.

WOODSIDE PERCUSSION STUDIO IL TRIAL

Guthrie and his friend stood trial the next day. After a few hours, Alice bailed them out. There, Obie and a crew of police officers from the surrounding areas collected extensive forensic evidence of the litter, including 'twenty-seven 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us.' The young men were briefly jailed, with Obie taking drastic precautions to prevent Guthrie from escaping or committing suicide.

He and his friend drove to the police station, expecting a verbal reprimand and to be required to clean up the garbage, but they were instead arrested, handcuffed, and taken to the scene of the crime. Guthrie, stating ' I cannot tell a lie' and with tongue in cheek, confessed that he 'put that envelope underneath' the garbage. The next morning, the church received a phone call from the local policeman, Officer Obie, saying that an envelope in the garbage pile had been traced back to them. They eventually noticed a pile of other trash that had previously been dumped off a cliff near a side road, and added theirs to the accumulation. As a favor to them, Guthrie and the friend volunteered to take their large accumulation of garbage to the local dump in their VW Microbus, not realizing until they arrived there that the dump would be closed for the holiday. Guthrie recounts events that took place in 1965 (two years prior at the time of the original recording), when he and a friend spent Thanksgiving Day at a deconsecrated church on the outskirts of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which their friends Alice and Ray had been using as a home. He then sings the chorus, which is in the form of a jingle for the restaurant, beginning 'You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant', and continuing with directions to it. Guthrie explains that his friend Alice owns a restaurant, but adds that 'Alice's Restaurant' is the name of the song, not the business. It is a corruption of the word massacre, but carries a much lighter and more sarcastic connotation, rather than describing anything involving actual death. Guthrie refers to the incident as a ' massacree', a colloquialism originating in the Ozark Mountains that describes 'an event so wildly and improbably and baroquely messed up that the results are almost impossible to believe'.

Due to Guthrie's rambling and circuitous telling with unimportant details, it has been described as a shaggy dog story. (Guthrie has used the brief 'Alice's Restaurant' bookends and guitar backing for other monologues bearing the Alice's Restaurant name.) The track lasts 18 minutes and 34 seconds, occupying the entire A-side of the Alice's Restaurant album. The song consists of a protracted spoken monologue, with a constantly repeated fingerstyle ragtime guitar (Piedmont style) backing and light brush-on- snare drum percussion (the drummer on the record is uncredited), bookended by a short chorus about the titular diner. In 2017, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being 'culturally, historically, or artistically significant'. The work has become Guthrie's signature song and he has periodically rereleased it with updated lyrics. The song was an inspiration for the 1969 film also named Alice's Restaurant. The title refers to a restaurant owned by one of Guthrie's friends, which plays no role in the story aside from being the subject of the chorus. The song is a deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft, in the form of a comically exaggerated but largely true story from Guthrie's own life: he is arrested and convicted of dumping trash illegally, which later comes up to challenge his suitability for the military draft. ' Alice's Restaurant Massacree', commonly known as ' Alice's Restaurant', is a satirical talking blues song by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, released as the title track to his 1967 debut album Alice's Restaurant.

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