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As I noted above, last year, I can quote damn near the entire thing. In harmony.
A few years ago another Boomer and I got goin’, and what I didn’t remember he did. We got through the entire thing without missing a word.
I spend Thanksgiving with my parents, who are old-school Europeans. They don’t like very much music that’s been written since about 1940.
So the answer to the question is a definite no.
All they have to do to join is to sing it when it comes around on the guitar.
I tried to start it as tradition today (before seeing this thread).
Kids (9 & 7) liked it, and Mrs. Mixo was swayed. I blindly picked the 90s version that came up first on YT, not the 60s version I always heard on the radio. Next year…
I asked a friend today (the day after Thanksgiving) if she did “Alice’s Restaurant” with the family yesterday. She said, “No, I cooked at home.”
You seem to assume a familiarity with the subject matter than I just don’t have. I didn’t know what Group W meant. And I don’t find irony funny in and of itself, so it never dawned on me that that was the point.
If they clarified either of these points, I didn’t catch it–probably because I unknowingly tuned out for part of the song. Having made that bad a review of it, I’m not entirely inclined to listen to it again.
With your explanation, I at least get why some of you would like the song so much. But the draft is so removed from me and my generation that it just doesn’t have the significance or dark humor for me that it has for you.
Let’s hope that when the US feels the itch to enter another war (and history teaches us that it will), you will revisit Alice’s Restaurant. I’m sure you would feel differently if your life and those of your friends and children were on the line for no good reason except another generation’s asshole politics.
We can laugh about it now, but it was no laughing matter in the 1960’s.
Saw The Last Waltz Revisited at the Ogden in Denver. When it started with Alice, the jolly drunk crowd’s chatter got louder to compensate. So I kind of heard it.
I first heard Alice’s Restaurant as a 12 year old hanging out with an Army wife in Germany. She put it on the record player, probably in an attempt to keep me amused and occupied. I fell in love with the song immediately. When it got the the part, where Arlo says “and if two people do it…” she raced for the turntable and ripped up the tone arm.
It was years before I heard the rest of that song, but I have never lost my love for it.
Years and years later, I was working for an attorney as a legal secretary. He brought in several huge blowups of aerial photographs to use as an exhibit in a case. I nearly died of delight and amusement.
When I was working as a substitute teacher, a young man was telling me how he had forgotten he had a juvenile court appearance the next day, and had stayed up way too late the night before drinking and playing video games. To amuse myself, I asked him if he felt like “the All American boy from New York City”. He blinked twice and said “That’s from Alice’s Restaurant, right?” I felt a glimmer of hope in the next generation in that moment.
I didn’t this year, but I have many times in the past. The local iconic rock station, WBLM, the Rock and Roll Blimp, plays it every Thanksgiving, off the original vinyl they had when they played it for the first time in the trailer in Litchfield, Maine back in 1973.
Why in the world would that be a T-Day tradition???
Have you ever listened to the song? It begins, “Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant, but Alice doesn’t live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog.” Part of the song is set at Thanksgiving.
And if you’d rather read the lyrics instead of listening to the song, go here.
I hope I’m allowed to say “yes” even though it was yesterday. I didn’t set out to listen to it, but a radio station I had on happened to be playing it.
Actually, the fact of the matter is that I don’t think I’ve ever heard the song, on Thanksgiving or any other day.
Here:
http://grooveshark.com/#!/search?q=alice's+restaurant
(I don’t think I’m breaking the rules doing this–but if I am, maybe it’ll get me off the list when the draft comes back!)
Thanksgiving is this Thursday (here in the US) and it’s time for this thread again!
So we’ll just wait for it to come around again on the guitar…
Let’s hope we get 50 posts this year.
I daresay, the only reason I know this song is from the Dope. I consider myself fairly well-exposed to music, but this song has always been a big black hole for me.