Which one ?!
No one plays, or sings, that song because it’s so long. People who actually know all the words won’t do it. Please, tell me which station it is.
To the OP:
I haven’t seen the movie, but I can explain the song.
In addition to being a song of great social and political import, that makes fun of a time notorious for having no sense of humor while remaining true to the driving spirit of that time, and being kick-ass funny itself, Alice’s Restaurant is very, very good.
All the rambling tie back to each other and tie up in the end; the music support and emphasizes both the events and the humor. The humor is both restrained and intense. It’s more of a troubadour’s ballad than a song.
Let me put on my old-fart-trying-to-explain-stuff-to-youngsters hat for a minute.
First off, the movie is very much a product of its time. Yes, it’s slow and draggy and takes its own time getting to where it’s going. For comparison I suggest you watch a couple of other films that were big in the counter-culture, 2001 and Easy Rider.
The reason the film provides no context is because it didn’t need to. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who saw the film knew of the song, had heard the song at least 100 times, probably owned the album and quite possibly could sing along with the song for the entire 17 minutes. Much of the movie (particulatrly the trial and Arlo’s subsequent dealings with the draft board) was simply the cinematic retelling of the song.
As for the POINT (rather than the context) of the story, it’s quite clear. Young man gets caught in a small-town bureaucratic tar pit, is drafted, and is about to be sent to an immoral war where he’ll be ordered to do unspeakable things, and a huge bureaucracy grinds to a halt when it learns he’s been arrested for littering.
This is actually one of my favorite movies. Roger Ebert gave it a good review when it came out, as I recall.
The parts about the song are funny, and enjoyable to see after having heard the song for so long, as I did. But I think the end of the film has the most interesting statement.
Spoiler alert*
When Arlo is leaving the church at the end and Ray goes into his rant, he proposes that in the next iteration of the church commune, everyone will have their own houses. Then they can all see each other when they want to, and not see each other when they don’t feel like it. He’s basically proposing a society as it already exists now.
There’s another aspect. The movie is, in many ways, experimental. Arthur Penn was doing pretty much a stream-of-consciousness look at the life of young people at the time, and it deliberately meanders along from vignette to vignette until getting to the song (and though I knew the song, I don’t think it’s really all that necessary to enjoy the film). It’s much more European in style and is character and incident driven rather than plot driven. If it were made today, it would be called an indie film (compare it, say, to Little Miss Sunshine or Sideways
Pauline Kael has stated that it’s a shame that they don’t make movies like this that meander a bit before finding their voice. And since it was made, Hollywood product became almost completely plot-driven, so people aren’t used to a film working any other way.
…a man walked in, said “all rise”, we stood up, Obie stood up with the 27 8x 10 glossy pictures with circles and arrows. The Judge walked in, sat down with a seeing eye dog, he sat down…
And the meanest, badest father-raper of them all came over and asked me: “Kid, what’d ya’ get?”
An’ I said, “I didn’t get nothin’, I had to pay fifty dollars and pick up the half a ton of garbage.”
An’ he said: “No, what was you arrested for, kid?”
An’ I said: “Littering.”
And they all moved away from me on the bench there, with the hairy eyeball an’ all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things, until I said: “And creatin’ a nuisance.” And the all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time fillin’ out the forms and playin’ with then pencils on the bench, there…
The song is a musical recounting of how Guthrie parleyed a minor arrest record into a exemption from the draft. This was regarded as a major victory over the Establishment at the time. If you like you can consider it sort of like Grandpa Simpson telling long meaningless stories that never really go anywhere, but which gives you the flavor of the age.
With one particular friend, one of us can start an anecdote about some aggravating incident involving The Man, and say, “and then they made me sit on the Group W bench,” and that pretty much sums it up, nothing more needs to be said or explained.
Ask your parents to quit bogarting the pot and all get high. Then you will not care.
The song is interesting in the context of the Vietnam war era when guys who had no deferments for college etc, were getting drafted. Also, in a complete opposite of today’s military, if you got in trouble a common way to get OUT of trouble was to join up. Now they won’t touch you if you have a record.
The song is a war protest song!
Lost my train of thought there for a minute…be back after twinkies.
The thing is, I’m far too young to remember Vietnam or to have been “Counterculture” in any way. I was a kid of the 80s, raised on Miami Vice, big hair, leg warmers and movies with Ally Sheedy in them…
… and I think “Alice’s Restaurant” is hysterically funny. In fact, I can sing the entire song, word for word, and have performed it for an audience many times. I picked it up from a guy in high school, who obviously was no more a child of the Vietnam era than I was. It’s just inherently hilarious. It helps if you know something about the context and the time it was made in, but you don’t really need that to appreciate that it’s just funny as hell.
It also has memorable one-liners, which are always funny when shared. I remember once a business associate talking about having sat through a terribly boring presentation, and concluding his story with “…and then showed us 27 eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures.” I immediately jumped in with “With circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against you?” Everyone laughed like hell. I sometimes drop that line when doing quality audits if a customer uses digital photos to document nonconformances, and seven times in ten they bust a gut laughing.
Well, 18 minutes is more like it. But yeah. The beauty of a comic monologue is not how long the experience was but how well it can be described. And that often takes longer. Arlo was just a kid when he assembled his description of those two (dump and draft board) related incidents, but his description of it is near flawless. As if he were a Catskills comedian and not the son of a folksinger.
