Arlo Guthrie :: Alice’s Restaurant (The Massacree Revisted)
Winter of my sophomore year, my high school held auditions for Our Town. I knew I wanted the part of the Stage Manager, the wise, detached narrator of the play. We had a guy at Lakewood High who always got these dad type, old man parts—one of those unfortunate teens who already kind of looked 40 years old. He was a senior that year, and a shoe-in for the role.
In order to set my audition apart, I worked on a New England accent. Being from Cleveland, I had no real idea what that sounded like, apart from a sketch on SNL of a game show where people from New Hampshire give inscrutable driving directions. That was my shred of a start, but I really got there listening to Alice’s Restaurant over and over again for like two weeks straight. I’m not sure if the clipped singsong cadence I picked up from Arlo Guthrie is anywhere near what folks from the northeast actually sound like, but it got me the part.
Arlo Guthrie re-recorded the Alice’s Restaurant album in 1996, almost thirty years after the original. I know all the pauses and lilts of the 18 minute yarn he spun back in 1967, and this version, and who knows, maybe this happened every time he sang it in the intervening 30 years, is a close to perfect copy of that other version. And that makes me think, is that what performance is? Is that what a professional musician with a 30 year career has to endure? Does anyone who plays music that long expect to develop in their craft when the audience just wants the same thing out of you that they’ve heard before?
BUT BUT BUT. Arlo saves it, at least for me, at the end of this song. If you’ve heard Alice’s Restaurant before, skip straight to 17:14, where he starts on one of the thoughtful and playful storytelling tangents that have made me a real fan of his early live recordings. Yes, he’s getting old now, and punny, and cheesy in his delivery. But he KNOWS all that, he’s over it, and comes out updating the story and providing a punchline for a song that always felt like the longest joke in the world that accidentally became serious.
Alice’s Restaurant (The Massacree Revisted) (9MB MP3)
Arlo Guthrie (wikipedia)
vj said on thursday, september 25th, 2008
johnny said on wednesday, october 01st, 2008
i love this song. the other day, i listened to this on here, but it was playing at twice the speed. i don’t know what the problem was, but it was hilarious. like the chipmunks.
also, i found out my brother in law is related to all the guthries, including obviously arlo and woody, and the person that wrote The Big Sky about Montana.
Nice one! I recently went to the last record store in Arlington, VA - Orpheus (it’s incredible and unfortunately closing down)…anyway, I went in specifically to buy Alice’s Restaurant for my soon-to-be new baby, Alice. I got an original pressing for half-off!!!I wonder what kind of accent she’ll have?