Alice’s Restaurant

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant

There are Christmas songs, of course - we are about to be inundated with them ad nauseum in every store, restaurant, and colleague’s office. Hell, Christmas is sort of a black hole of holiday music, even pulling non-holiday, winter songs like Jingle Bells and Let It Snow into its irresistible gravitational pull.

There are Halloween songs as well, of a sort. Monster Mash comes to mind, and as a child of the ‘80’s, Thriller follows close behind. Jonathan Coulton’s Creepy Doll and Re: Your Brains definitely belong on that list. And if you are somewhat liberal with your definitions, this list offers a number of other options.

But what about Thanksgiving? It sits there, nuzzled in-between the two, a paragon of dietary excess masquerading as a harvest festival cum national heritage celebration. But it’s like a red-headed stepchild in the music department, lyrically and melodically unloved.

But not entirely. Enter: Alice’s Restaurant

This epic musical experience by Arlo Guthrie is the answer to anyone looking for a real, true Thanksgiving song. Well, sort of, anyway.

To be clear, it is absolutely a thanksgiving song. The pivotal events take place surrounding a visit to the titular Alice on the Pilgrim holiday, and the fact that it is a holiday is a causal component of everything that transpires. But the "sort of" comes in because it’s also a little like giving a pig a pancake - one does not fully appreciate what can happen when you give a folk singer a pile of garbage until one reaches the end of this 18-minute adventure.

I don’t remember who told me about Alice’s Restaurant. It may well have been a colleague from the brief period of time in college when I worked at the radio station, in answer to the question above: "why aren’t there any thanksgiving songs?"

I do remember when I first heard it, however. This was all back in the day well before streaming music services, before google or search engines or the World Wide Web. I’d mentioned my interest in finding and hearing the song to MLW and, on a visit with her over a college break, I found it waiting for me on CD in the bedroom in which I was staying. She had made a special trip to a private, non-chain record store (kids - go watch the movie High Fidelity for reference here) to ask about it and then order it for me. I was a very lucky young man.

What I discovered that day was an 18-minute long talking song that details Arlo Guthrie’s real-life experience of being arrested for littering, and culminating in his later encounter with the draft board.

Yes - those two things are directly related, and all told in a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek fashion that is just delightful. You just have to listen to see.

It’s a talking song, but with a sung chorus that occurs multiple times through the tale:

You can get anything you want At Alice’s Restaurant. Walk right in, it’s around the back, Just a half a mile from the railroad track. You can get anything you want At Alice’s Restaurant.

My little family will be listening to this at least once, if not twice, on the way to Thanksgiving dinner. And everyone will belt out the chorus each time it comes around.

It’s really the only thanksgiving song, or at least the only one we know. But it’s the only one we need.

Now I have to go and load up the family bus with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction...