arlo (and alice)

will always have a special place in my heart

Arlo Guthrie's Storied Career

HAD ARLO Guthrie known his "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" would be so popular
and enduring, he surely would have made it shorter.
After all, it took 18
minutes and 20 seconds, and one full side, of his 1967 debut album for Guthrie
to gleefully recount the saga of how two years earlier he and his buddy Rick
Robbins tried to help his former teachers Alice and Ray Brock clean their
Stockbridge, Mass., home -- a deconsecrated 17th-century church -- for
Thanksgiving dinner by taking a half-ton of garbage to the local dump in their
Volkswagen bus. Except the dump was closed, leading Guthrie and Robbins to toss
everything down a residential hillside.........
.......That could have been
the end of the story, except that it was the middle of the war in Vietnam, and
when the draft board called, Guthrie's misdemeanor proved a far greater obstacle
to his being inducted into the Army than his hilarious efforts to paint himself
as a bloodthirsty psycho. In fact, Guthrie's
littering rendered him unfit for military service...........

it is just NOT thanksgiving for me without hearing the song.