INTERVIEW
Arlo on Alice and Life at 50
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 12, 1997) -- It was the unlikeliest of hit records. Rambling, surreal, almost Kafkaesque -- about the only thing the 18-minute narrative had in its favor, conventionally-speaking, was a catchy albeit nonsensical chorus. After all, who was Alice, and what did her restaurant have to do with the events recounted in the song?
Nevertheless, Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" became one of those rare, era-defining artifacts of popular culture.
A series of four concerts by Guthrie marking the 30th anniversary of the release of "Alice's Restaurant" concludes tonight at the Guthrie Center in Housatonic. The concerts, which are being recorded for natiowide radio broadcast on Thanksgiving Day, are reuniting Guthrie with members of his Berkshire-bred backup band, Shenandoah, which toured the world with Guthrie in the '70s and '80s.
For ticket information for tonight's show, call 528-1955..
Guthrie recently took some time to reflect on the unlikely results of getting arrested by Stockbridge Police Chief William Obanhein, from the writing of the song to his place on the world stage to his return to the original "scene of the crime" and his plans for the future. "I didn't expect anything to happen," said Guthrie about the release of his debut album, "Alice's Restaurant," in October 1967.
"I expected some sales of records in the stores," said Guthrie, in a phone interview from the home in the town of Washington that he bought with the proceeds from "Alice's" sales. "But no one in his right mind ever thought it would've gotten played on the radio. It was almost written in stone that you couldn't play anything over two, two-and-a- half minutes.
"But it did get played. It broke all the boundaries. I think it's still the longest song that got any measurable airplay."
More than getting airplay, the title track, which is actually called "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," said Guthrie, "took on a life of its own that went way beyond me."
Indeed, like Joseph Heller's novel "Catch-22," which gave our language the term to describe an unsolvable bureaucratic dilemma, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" became a cultural signpost whose resonance went far beyond the mere details of Guthrie's particular story.
Guthrie offers as evidence the fact that a re-recorded version of the album, released last year, shipped primarily to military bases around the world.
"It's the most terrific, funniest, wonderful reminder of what the song is all about," said Guthrie, "which is that in the face of great turmoil, you have to maintain a sense of humor.
"I think that's why in Vietnam there were `Alice's Restaurants' everywhere. I've got pictures of some of these places -- a tent or a tin can out in the middle of nowhere with a sign that says, `Alice's Restaurant.' I think those guys really needed to laugh every once in a while."
The song itself -- and the movie made from it a few years later, starring Guthrie and written and directed by Arthur Penn, of Stockbridge -- was rooted in the bare facts of Guthrie's life, a life that for all its twists and turns, finds Guthrie still sitting at the same table in the same church where he sat 32 years ago when Officer Obanhein called looking for him.
"We were sitting around the table -- me, Alice, Ray and a few others -- drinking coffee," said Guthrie. "The phone rang, Alice picked it up, and said `it's for you.'"
Anyone who has ever heard the song or seen the movie knows what happened next. A chain of events was set in motion that ultimately found Guthrie hauled off to jail, sent before a blind judge, ordered to report to a draft board in New York City, and ultimately turned down for the U.S. military because he got caught littering in Stockbridge.
"At first, it was devastating -- we'd been busted," said Guthrie. "Then I thought, this is really funny. It struck a nerve, and I started putting together a little tune."
It took Guthrie a little over a year to finish that little tune. Then, in the spring of 1967, he and fellow musicians Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin' Jack Elliott took their guitars to the studios of New York City's listener-supported radio station WBAI, which was having a fund drive.
"Jerry Jeff played a new song of his called `Mr. Bojangles.' And Ramblin' Jack played a new song, a talking song, which was long, too, about eight minutes. Then I said, well, I've got one too, and I went on for the next eighteen minutes.
"It was one of those magic nights. And they recorded the whole thing. And they started getting calls asking if they would play my song again.
"So they'd say, `We need a thousand dollars to play `Alice's Restaurant.' And they'd get a thousand dollars. Pretty soon, they were playing `Alice's Restaurant' all day long. And then they'd say, `We need a thousand dollars to STOP playing `Alice's Restaurant.' They made money both ways on the song."
Live radio recordings like this one began circulating throughout the spring and summer of '67. Then Guthrie made an unscheduled appearance at the end of the Newport Folk Festival that summer, playing the song for a crowd of approximately 20,000 people. Within days he was signed to Reprise Records, owned by Frank Sinatra at the time.
The release of "Alice's Restaurant" in October '67 was bittersweet. That same month Guthrie's father, the legendary folk-protest singer Woody Guthrie, finally succumbed to Huntington's chorea, the degenerative nerve disease that had kept him hospitalized for the last decade of his life.
The two anniversaries, thus, were forever linked. But in typical Arlovian fashion, they have become humourously intertwined. As only Arlo Guthrie can get away with, he said, "Woody actually heard a test pressing. That's the family joke. We played him `Alice's Restaurant,' and then, uh, he died."
While to some Arlo may have been the rightful heir to his father's mantle, for Guthrie himself, it's a role he never wanted.
"I had absolutely no aspirations to be a singer by profession," said Guthrie. "I wanted to be a forest ranger. I went to Rocky Mountain College and studied forestry. I always loved playing music, and I knew I'd always play music with my friends, but I never thought I'd end up being a performer. And I think I felt that way long after I'd started making records and was performing.
"I knew I couldn't sing very well. I never thought of myself as a great writer or anything. I was still amazed by all of this for at least a decade or two after `Alice's Restaurant' came out. But somewhere along in there I realized, hey, my life is going by, and when it's all said and done, this is what I am, and I might as well start getting good at this. So I actually started paying attention."
Now, at 50, with his health still good and with our culture's perennial obsession with Woodstock insuring him a well-established place in the pop-culture pantheon, Guthrie is finally ready to move beyond music into the save-the-world territory that for some was the living spirit of the '60s.
Five years ago, he bought Alice and Ray Brocks' old church and founded the Guthrie Center there. Closing the circle begun on that fateful Thanksgiving Day, the old Trinity Church would house Woody's and Arlo's archives and provide office space for Guthrie's record company -- the aptly-named Rising Son.
The center would also house an interfaith foundation dedicated to the memory of Woody Guthrie, the goal of which, according to a press release, is "to provide a place where organizations as well as individuals can come and learn from each other about our different cultures, religions, medicine and...share our different traditions of music and art."
Said Guthrie, "I have decided that as part of my life's work I would provide a place for people to be able to bring into themselves other ways of doing things in a non-threatening situation, because I know that these are the tools that will be required in the next millennium. These are not unique to me but they have never been more pronounced than in my own generation.
"In that sense this church is the perfect place to do that work. It's not just some hippie commune church. It's fun to think of it that way - - and I know there's a lot of local people who think of it like that -- and that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But the church has a global agenda."
One senses in Guthrie's words that perhaps there may be another agenda, a more personal one, perhaps even an unconscious one. When Guthrie talks in terms of bringing people together from different faiths and cultures via the common ground of music and the arts, he could very well be talking about himself, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish dancer/artist and a leftist/Christian folksinger from Oklahoma.
"Everyone has a different place where they stand to look at the world," said Guthrie in response to the suggestion that the foundation and its mission, in a sense, reflect his own identity. "Everyone has a different perspective.
Warming to the idea, he continues, "Why is it in some people's minds that there could be peace between people of different backgrounds and religious ideas and traditions? What gives them a reason to believe that it's worth fighting for? When I ask myself that question I know that there are some people who have already internalized these differences. It's a part of them, inside themselves.
"There's no battle going on inside me between the Jewish part of my life, the Christian part, or for that matter the Buddhist and the Hindu. They all live very happily within me. That's how I know they can live happily outside me."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Oct. 12, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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