I always thought, 'Hey if they’re gonna play one song of yours on the radio one day a year, it might as well be the longest one you wrote!'”Īnd play it they do. "If I go back and look at the hits to the website for example, they will spike one day a year. "I think it’s just one of those funny, crazy coincidences that you have an event that takes place on Thanksgiving, therefore it becomes associated with the holiday," he said. In 2014, Guthrie told Rolling Stone magazine he never intended to write a Thanksgiving song. 17 on the Billboard charts and has since gone platinum, selling more than 1 million copies.
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In 1967, Guthrie, the son of folk icon Woody Guthrie, recorded it as the entire first side of his first album, titled "Alice's Restaurant," although the song's full title is "Alice's Restaurant Massacree."
Then he sang it live on Bob Fass’ late-night show on New York radio station WBAI's "Radio Unnameable," and soon "Alice's Restaurant" became a tradition at the station. Robbins and Guthrie were arrested and fined $50 and ordered (by a blind judge, really) to pick up all the trash: the stuff they had dumped and the stuff that was there when they dumped the stuff they dumped.įor a couple of years after that Thanksgiving, Guthrie talked about the episode on stage, gently strumming his guitar as the story got longer and longer. Not knowing any better, they dumped the garbage in a makeshift dumping site that Guthrie knew about, near a music summer camp he had attended. "Not to make any excuses, but we just didn't know any better." "The bottom line is we were a couple of dumb kids from the city and didn't know anything about dumps because in the city, a garbage truck comes and takes your trash away," Robbins said. When Ray needed help cleaning up the large church hall, Guthrie and Robbins loaded up Ray's red VW Microbus with trash - which Robbins contends was not household garbage, but was furniture, scraps of wood and cardboard - and drove in the direction of the town dump, only to find the dump closed for Thanksgiving. That "Alice" Thanksgiving in 1965, Guthrie, 18, and Robbins, 19, had dinner at Alice and Ray's house, in the kitchen, which was in the bottom floor of their deconsecrated church's bell tower. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of a World War II foot soldier, but attended the Stockbridge School for one year, where he met fellow student Guthrie and Alice and Ray Brock, who were on the staff at the private school. Now 75, Robbins still can't believe that every November people want to talk about a stupid thing he did when he was a 19-year-old only interested in guitars and girls. (And co-defendant.) He still is that friend. They tune in to hear all about how Arlo and his friend were arrested for littering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving weekend 1965. "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant." They tune in to classic rock stations over the airwaves, via internet or on satellite radio to laugh at the ridiculousness of his shaggy-dog story, to marvel at how Guthrie weaves it over a gentle guitar. To them, Thanksgiving’s not Thanksgiving until they’ve heard Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” Thanksgiving arrives with must-haves: For some, that means family, football, a parade and turkey with all the trimmings.īut for others, the fourth Thursday of November is not complete until they’ve heard an 18-minute, 20-second, spoken-word song about littering, overzealous policing, the draft and a long-ago “Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.”
An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the station's status. Watch Video: Going back to 'Alice's Restaurant' siteĬorrection: WBAI, the radio station that first broadcast Arlo Guthrie's song, "Alice's Restaurant," is still broadcasting in New York City at 99.5 FM and online at.
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