Wow, too bad he didn’t play it. I saw [del]Alice Cooper[/del] Arlo Guthrie about 10 years ago and he did Alice with the Nixon tie-in and the whole bit. Also had his son and daughter on tour with him and the hilight of the night was him doing a really rocked up version of his dad’s Ruben James with his son’s band.
He gave it up decades ago apparently. My cite is an interview I saw of him on TV. He said pretty much as soon as he had kids he gave up the drugs. He went on about it for a minute or so and seemed quite sincere.
del, for, I assume, delete.
[ del ] like this, without the spaces [ /del]
So, not to be a jerk, but at his age, is it safe to assume that Arlo didn’t get the Huntington’s gene from his dad? I loved him as a kid, and when my mom told me he might lose his mind because of a genetic thing, like his dad had, I was just horrified.
It’s an odd but well-observed phenomenon that the more weed one smokes, the more likely one is to remember the lyrics to “Alice’s Restaurant”.
The same is true of tequila and “Margaritaville”.
I laughed.
I think he oughta do an Alice Light version but as I’m unlikely to ever buy a ticket to see him my opinion doesn’t really matter.
Maybe he just wanted to get out of there quickly so he could go ride his motorcycle.
It’s not Thanksgiving. Why would you want to hear that song in the spring? It’s like wanting to hear “Silver Bells” at a baseball game 
Agreed - Alice’s Restaurant is a Thanksgiving song, and why would you play it any other time of the year? If I see Hall & Oates in July, I don’t get upset when they don’t bust out a little Jingle Bell Rock.
I’ve seen Arlo a few times over the past couple of decades (first time in 1993) and I’ve never once seen him do Alice’s Restaurant. But every show was fantastic regardless.
I got the chance to meet him once after a show and he was a pretty nice guy too. Quite gracious w/ his fans.
I think all performers face this issue, don’t they?
But shouldn’t they have thought of that when they took up writing hit songs? Surely it’s not a unknown.
I once heard Joni Mitchell point out, to an audience, that no one ever asked a painter to, ‘do that again’, which is true, but she still played the song.
I also saw David Bowie during the tour where he announced this was the last time he would play these songs, Ziggy Stardust, etc, he was moving on. Understandable, of course, and very up front. But he was just racing through the material, not a very enjoyable concert, all round.
But then think about the Rolling Stones, I’ve seen them 3 times, and you know you’re not going to hear every song you want - they can’t do all their hits, after all.
I recently saw Neil Young, which was awesome. So awesome we didn’t even notice that he didn’t play several standards we’d assumed we’d hear. All the way home it was, "Hey, we never heard ‘Rocking in the Free World’, etc. Of course he did do lots of his standards, just mixed in with his latest stuff.
I think it’s a little disingenuous to leave out such a song, it’s not like Arlo has dozens of big hits exactly. But then think about a performer like Shania Twain, what’s she going to do next time she tours? Please her fans by singing all those touching love songs, “From this moment on”, etc. etc., when they were written about a lover who betrayed her in the end.
Ah, live as a performer is never easy, who knew success could be so conflicting?
Enh. I think one of the great things about Dylan is that you don’t know in advance what he’s going to play. It’s never a matter of hearing the same old stuff he always plays. The one time I got to see him live, he didn’t play “Like a Rolling Stone,” or “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” or “Lay Lady Lay,” or “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or “Mr. Tambourine Man,” or “All Along the Watchtower,” but it was still a great show. (He did play “Rainy Day Women” as his final encore.)
And the first time I saw Procol Harum live, they didn’t play “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
I agree in general. But the time I mentioned he didn’t do a single song his audience was there to hear. Not a single damn one.
The times I’ve seen Dylan, I rarely could tell what song he was doing. Not only the melody was changed but the lyrics were so mumbled that it compounded the identification into oblivion.
And to bring it full circle, Arlo sometimes tells a story about Dylan coming by his house to see Woody, and not being able to understand a damned thing that Dylan said when he knocked on the door.
Too bad about Alice’s - I admit I did get to hear it in 1989 in a club in Vienna, Austria. It was awesome, but so were a lot of his other songs that he did.
A slight exaggeration. According to Wikipedia, the recorded versions of the songs “Alice’s Restaurant” and “American Pie” are 18:20 and 8:27, respectively.
There was a time when Arlo would joke in concert that his song and the 18 1/2 minute gap in one of the key Nixon Watergate tapes were almost exactly the same length, and the real reason they had to erase the tape was to hide the fact that Nixon and Haldeman had been listening to “Alice’s Restaurant.”
He tells that story on this album, which is a 1995 remake of the entire Alice’s Restaurant LP, complete with an updated version of the cover photo.
Kinda like some people can’t differentiate an excellent vintage wine from Boones Farm?
Can you imagine Europe not playing Final Countdown or Big Country not playing Big Country?
I saw him in 1988, and he didn’t play Alice then, either. He did offer an explanation, though. He said that it was a long song, and while he remembered the story (having been there and all), he didn’t remember all the original words as well as some of the audience, so unlike a lot of the songs and stories he did that night, he couldn’t just make it up as he went along. He said his dad was the same way, and one of the hard things to figure out in grade school was that his dad hadn’t sung him the same versions of some of his songs that all the other kids knew. As an example, he sang “This Land is Your Land,” along with some of the verses that never would have made it into a grade school songbook.
Then he said that the next year was the 20th anniversary of the Massacree, so before the next tour, he planned to sit down with a record player (remember those?) and re-learn the song. Presumably he did, and we just have to wait for it to come around again.
The OP should have gathered up his fifty friends and walked out. 