My monthly crush? Littering, blind justice, and the draft

This month’s crush focuses on the upcoming U.S. holiday, Thanksgiving. It’s a time of food, family, food, friends, food, shopping, food, watching movies, food, and more food.

Or littering.

Or dodging the draft.

(See, nice connection to “Selective Service,” eh?)

My crush is a song that fits the season to a T: Arlo Gurthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” a song that everybody has heard at least once - if not once a year.

As Wikipedia so stoically says about this epic song:

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (commonly referred to simply as “Alice’s Restaurant”) is singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s most famous work, a talking blues based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie. The song lasts 18 minutes and 20 seconds, occupying the entire A side of Guthrie’s 1967 debut record album, titled Alice’s Restaurant (Warner Reprise Records). It is notable as a satirical, first-person account of 1960s counterculture, in addition to being a hit song in its own right.

‘Tis the tradition in many families to listen to this song in its entirety on Thanksgiving Day, enjoying its rambling story and Guthrie’s happy, youthful twang as he happily relates the three stories in his song:

1. Bering arrested near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day, 1965.
2. The trial for said arrest, featuring a mountain of photographs and a visually-impaired judge, as well as the prejudice against the hippie culture.
3. A story of being called up for the Vietnam War draft, and getting out of it for having a criminal record based on his littering arrest.

It’s a fun yarn that Guthrie premiered at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, then committed to record while it was still fresh. Since then, he’s performed it off-and-on - he does tire of performing an 18-plus minute song year after year - to great acclaim by his fans. To keep things fresh, he’s altered the lyrics a bit, even introducing a new bit explaining the missing Watergate tapes (the missing bit is, after all, about 18 minutes long).

He even wrote a completely different version of the song in 1967 as the “The Alice’s Restaurant Multi-Colored Rainbow Roach Affair,” a paean to marijuana use and its role in the Cold War. You can get this version via the iTunes Store.

I’ve seen him perform it a few blocks from the Whitehall Street (NYC) Army Recruiting Center where the infamous draft interview took place may years earlier, and it was a treat.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this Thanksgiving-time classic.

Download: “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” - Arlo Guthrie (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)