"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a musical monologue
by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie released on his 1967 album
Alice's Restaurant. The song is one of Guthrie's most prominent
works, based on a true incident in his life that began on
Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie of the same
name. Apart from the chorus which begins and ends it, the "song" is
in fact a spoken monologue, with a repetitive but catchy ragtime
guitar backing.
Some of you may be familiar with this very popular song and not
need any review of the story therein, but for those of you who
aren't familiar with it the story goes like this.
Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on
Thanksgiving, when my friend and I 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.
We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be
a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump. So
we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW
microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed
on toward the city dump.
Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the
dump saying, "Closed on Thanksgiving." And we had never heard of a dump
closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off
into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.
We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the
side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the
cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile
is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we
decided to throw our's down.
That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had a thanksgiving
dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the
next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie. He said, "Kid,
we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of
garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And
I said, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope
under that garbage."
To find out what happens next with Officer Obie, you will have
to go listen to the song. What we want to discuss here is the
envelope that got them in trouble. Well, I happened to have had a
chance to look inside that envelope and was quite surprised by what
I found. Can you guess what was inside that envelope? In the
envelope was an 8x10 color glossy picture with circles and arrows
and a paragraph on the back... No wait. That's wrong. What was in
the envelope was a small scrap of paper with the following.
This may be a clue as to where to find "a Thanksgiving dinner
that couldn't be beat", but it's more likely the way to where they
hid the rest of the garbage.