Alice's Restaurant
To those of hippie age, it's a cliche. But for me, Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie is an integral part of every Thanksgiving. When I was younger commercial radio was not, well, it wasn't what you might call good for the most part but it wasn't quite as uniformly cookie-cutter across the country as it is today. Each Thanksgiving at noon when I was younger WNEW-FM in NY and then later WXRK when it became "Classic Rock" (whatever that is) would play the piece in its entirety and I would make a point of being near a radio to listen.
Of course, I owned my brother's old vinyl copy but back then (Old Fogie statement alert!) you got a sense of community by listening to the radio. Rock radio stations would do things like "concert echo" where they would have someone at whatever big stadium or arena concert in the area was going on and they would call in the setlist of the show and the station would play the songs off the records so you could listen in the car while you sat in the steaming New Jersey traffic for 63 hours trying to get out of the parking lot.
To my knowledge, this doesn't happen anymore.
Though commercial radio is a dead artistic medium, independent radio is alive and well. Glen Jones played the 30th anniversary version (Real Audio) of Alice's Restaurant last year on WFMU which was a nice change of pace. I also remember reading an interview with Guthrie where he said (and I'm paraphrasing here because I couldn't find the article online) that people want to interpret the song in various political ways but ultimately the song is a broadside against one thing:
Pure stupidity.
I like that a lot. Go back and have a listen and see if you don't agree.
Enjoy the holiday.
Of course, I owned my brother's old vinyl copy but back then (Old Fogie statement alert!) you got a sense of community by listening to the radio. Rock radio stations would do things like "concert echo" where they would have someone at whatever big stadium or arena concert in the area was going on and they would call in the setlist of the show and the station would play the songs off the records so you could listen in the car while you sat in the steaming New Jersey traffic for 63 hours trying to get out of the parking lot.
To my knowledge, this doesn't happen anymore.
Though commercial radio is a dead artistic medium, independent radio is alive and well. Glen Jones played the 30th anniversary version (Real Audio) of Alice's Restaurant last year on WFMU which was a nice change of pace. I also remember reading an interview with Guthrie where he said (and I'm paraphrasing here because I couldn't find the article online) that people want to interpret the song in various political ways but ultimately the song is a broadside against one thing:
Pure stupidity.
I like that a lot. Go back and have a listen and see if you don't agree.
Enjoy the holiday.
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