…but he had fun playing with the pencils.
No I have not, and therefore I think I deserve special treatment on this message board. All posts I make that seem lame or ignorant should be overlooked. What might appear as foolishness or inanity on my part is really just the lingering aftereffects of that movie.
You didn’t watch it…this is damned confusing. :dubious:
But you deserve Special Treatment for having a user name that sounds like shampoo. 
What I mean is “no I have not recovered.”
… and smoking cigarettes and all sorts of things.
On a more serious note, as if there could be much that is serious when we’re talking about Alice’s Restaurant, I’d suggest that we all think of the movie version as NOT canon.
Arlo wrote the story of the arrest and trial first. A lot of it with his friends who might have been at the Thanksgiving dinner, but certainly with friends who hung out at the church. So, as that story developed, there were probably several versions, some long and some short. The story about the physical was later.
Actually, when I saw him in concert, the story concerned some incredibly potent cannabis rolled into joints with rainbow coloured papers, Spiro Agnew accidentally getting a serious buzz off “finger-licking” some rainbow coloured roaches, and the strange events that occurred with a stoned VPOTUS at the helm.
…talkin’ about father rape and all kindsa groovy things…
Alice - she was a MacGuffin. I know they say Alice Brock, but trust me, she’s a MacGuffin.
I’ve seen him in concert use the line "I only ever made one movie…:
(pregnant pause)
…because I saw it".
Other fun trivia: Arlo’s song “Mooses Come Walking” has been made into a children’s book (my kid loves it) with illustrations by Alice herself (who also authored a hilarious book called “How to Massage Your Cat”). The followup “Whose Moose Am I?” has non-Alice art and is a generally inferior product.
So far no one has talked about the motivations of Officer Obie and the folks at 39 Whitehall Street in their treatment of Arlo. He was a hippie and the son of a prominent leftist. They despised him for this. Thus, the arrest instead of a citation, the jail cell with the missing toilet seat and toilet paper, the overkill of twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, the sending of Arlo to sit on the Group W bench with the mother stabbers and father rapers, and the officer telling Arlo, “We don’t like your kind.”
Another tidbit: I’ve long suspected that “anti-massacree” is a play on antimacassar.
I never got the impression from the song or from articles about it or about Officer Obanhein that he hated Arlo.
Motivation? Their motivation is that Arlo is a damn litterbug!
Sure, sure, it’s just some trash you say. What’s a little paper in the scheme of things?
But let me ask you, what if a guy came to the Grand Canyon and dumped his trash? you’d say, meh, it’s a big canyon.
What if two people came and dumped their trash? Still, little trash, big canyon.
But what if 50 people a day dumped their trash into the grand canyon? After not too long, it would be full. And then what would we have? The world’s largest trash dump!
That is what happens if you don’t nip these so-called “movements” in the bud! Nip it!
The significance of Alice and the Rest-au-rant is that Alice opened a restaurant, and Arlo wrote a jingle for the rest-au-rant. The part that Arlo sings is the jingle. The rest of the music is just the background music for the remainder of the stories.
I don’t think he hated Arlo personally, but just his type (police .vs. hippy). At any rate Officer Obie agreed to play himself in the movie. Something about if anybody was going to make a fool out of him, he would do it himself. Must of had some sense of humor about the whole thing.
Other bits of trivia (which may be old hat to this group)… the judge also plays himself in the movie. The real Alice has a cameo as a background person at the church. The real Ray appears via the home movie of the motocross racing. They had split up by the time the movie was made. The DVD version of the movie has a commentary track where the commentary is done by Arlo and he points out a lot of what was real and what was just good story for the movie.
I seen him in concert circa 1974 or 5. Despite chanting from the crowd, he wouldn’t do the song. He said something about not needing to because the war was done. Which to me means that at the time he looked on it primarily as a protest song using events that happened to him, along with friends Ray and Alice and the restaurant as background / comic relief to the story.