Music: Arlo Guthrie

Growing up, our family had a tradition on Thanksgiving. Every year, we would watch the movie, “Alice’s Restaurant”. Part of this tradition was because of our first stepfather being a military veteran¹, and the movie was his favorite way to think back to his experience.

Kinda weird, because the movie is about hippies.

Whatever, the net result is that for a decade or so, it was what we tuned in to on Turkey Day.

The story is about a hippie who gets arrested for dumping the trash in a ravine to clean up for a thanksgiving meal. The police get called, they find an address, and they arrest the hippies.

But the story is really the song, Alice’s Restaurant, eighteen and a quarter minutes of a rolling folk song, narrated by Arlo Guthrie, son of the master, Woody Guthrie, you know the writer of “This Land is Your Land” a song that if you were Gen X, you sang in grade school. He also wrote “The House of the Rising Sun²”.

Anyhow, since I picked up my new Martin, I have been digging into traditional folk songs that I heard my dad play when I was growing up (not the abusive stepfather), so when this popped up in my YT feed, I knew I needed to listen to it.

I know this might not be your jam, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

1. Much later in life, I read his discharge papers, and he got a dishonorable discharge because he purposefully got drunk and disruptive before he was cycled through to ‘Nam. I am torn, was this self-preservation, cowardly, or was he just an asshole. Since he beat the shit out of us with his belt, I take the latter.

2. Yeah, you probably thought that that was an original by The Animals. I did.

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