Alice’s Restaurant Massacree

The Zoo Crew is spinning a long one for the Zoo Freaks tonight, the kind of record you put on when the room is full and nobody is in a hurry to leave. Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” from the 1967 album Alice’s Restaurant, runs about eighteen and a half minutes, which is plenty of time for a story, a chorus, and a little sideways look at the way the world used to work. The Zoo Crew has been playing it for the Freaks because it still feels like a campfire tale told by somebody who was actually there, and because it still gets a laugh out of a pile of trash.

The song is mostly true, which is half the fun. On Thanksgiving 1965, Arlo was eighteen and home from a short, doomed stretch at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, where he had gone to study forestry. He drove up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to see his friends Ray and Alice Brock, who lived in a deconsecrated church. Alice had been a librarian at the boarding school Arlo attended, and she later ran a little restaurant just off the main drag. After a dinner that, as the song puts it, could not be beat, Arlo and his buddy Rick Robbins offered to haul out the junk the Brocks were clearing from the church. It was not household scraps so much as a divan, bottles, paper, boxes, and pieces of wood, enough to fill a Volkswagen bus. The town dump was closed for the holiday, so they added the load to a heap already sitting beside Prospect Street. Officer William J. Obanhein, the Officer Obie of the song, spent a disagreeable couple of hours sorting through the mess until he found a scrap with Ray Brock’s name on it. Arlo and Rick pled guilty to illegally disposing of rubbish, paid a twenty-five-dollar fine each, and were ordered to pick the whole pile back up after a rain.

The joke started that same night in the church kitchen. Arlo had a guitar out and they were making up foolish little lines about hiding from Obanhein at Alice’s restaurant. It was not a song yet. A year later, when Arlo went before the draft board in New York and the littering conviction was enough to get him waved off as not the kind they wanted, the story grew a second act. He has said he took the war seriously, and that what he ended up with was less an anti-war sermon than an anti-stupidity song. He told interviewers it took about a year to put together, and that a lot of people assumed it was fiction. The chorus is a circle you can join without knowing the plot. The long talking part is the plot. He has credited the length to storytellers he loved, including Lord Buckley and the long routines he heard Bill Cosby do at the Gaslight. A live tape got heavy play on New York’s WBAI in early 1967, a Newport Folk Festival set that summer went over big, and the studio-audience recording on the album became the one radio stations still haul out every Thanksgiving. Guthrie has said he never set out to write a holiday song. The album reached the Billboard chart and eventually went platinum. Arthur Penn turned the tale into a 1969 movie, with Arlo playing himself. Arlo, Alice, and Rick were never especially happy with how the film treated them.

Alice Brock died in November 2024 at eighty-three, and the following Thanksgiving was the first since the record came out without her. In 1991 Arlo bought the old Trinity Church, the same building where the Brocks lived and where the Thanksgiving guests slept on the floor, and turned it into the Guthrie Center, named for his parents. Officer Obie, for his part, mostly confirmed the bones of the story even when he quibbled with a detail or two. Arlo has also noted, with a straight face, that the original recording runs the same length as one of the famous gaps in Richard Nixon’s tapes, and that Nixon owned a copy of the record.

How Arlo got started is a family story as much as a coffeehouse story. He was born Arlo Davy Guthrie on July 10, 1947, in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son of Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, a dancer with the Martha Graham company who later founded what became the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. Huntington’s took Woody in 1967, the same year Alice’s Restaurant came out, and Arlo was able to play the album for his father before Woody died. The house in Howard Beach, Queens, was a stopping place for Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Cisco Houston, Lead Belly’s circle, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Arlo’s mother taught him his first guitar chords when he was about six. At thirteen he made his first public appearance, at a Cisco Houston concert. Summers took the family to the Berkshires, where Marjorie taught dance, and Arlo boarded at the Stockbridge School, graduating in 1965. He spent that summer in London, busking and meeting the folk scene, then lasted only a few weeks at the Montana college before the Thanksgiving trip that changed the plan. Harold Leventhal, who had managed Woody, helped the kid find rooms to play. The Alice’s Restaurant tape is what landed the Warner Bros. deal. From there came the 1969 Woodstock set, built around “Coming into Los Angeles,” the 1972 hit version of Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans,” and a long run of Thanksgiving concerts at Carnegie Hall that lasted into 2019. In 1983 he walked away from the major-label life and started Rising Son Records so he could put the records out himself. “Massachusetts,” from the 1976 album Amigo, later became the official folk song of the state where he has lived most of his adult life.

The Zoo Freaks can chase the rest of the trail from the man’s own porch. The official site is Arlo Guthrie, and the front page still points back to Alice’s Restaurant, including anniversary recordings and Thanksgiving countdowns. He keeps one Instagram, and he says so himself, at @folkslinger. On X he is the same handle, @folkslinger, and the profile points straight back to the official site. The Facebook page is Arlo Guthrie. The old church is still doing its quiet work as the Guthrie Center, the place the song made famous and the place he bought so the story would have a roof. When the Crew lets the needle run out, come back around to THE ZOO and sit with the rest of the Freaks. The chorus is easy. You can get anything you want.