Arlo Guthrie is a singer, composer, musician and actor whose enduring musical association with America’s least commercial major holiday abides in the way Bing Crosby still pops up at Christmas, even if that model crooner goes unheard the rest of the year.
Guthrie was born in Brooklyn — at that quintessentially American early amusement mecca Coney Island — in 1947 to a legendary and troubled troubadour named Woody, who inspired Bob Dylan, and Woody’s wife Marjorie, who for a time danced with Martha Graham.
Despite this weighty heritage, Arlo established his own identity as a performer early on, his credibility as an artist and a free spirit fit for his era earning him a large measure of respect from fans and critics alike.
Here is Hollywood film director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) — who got his precocious start as a teenage rock music writer — reviewing the self-titled Arlo Guthrie record in 1974 for the LA Times:
“Arlo Guthrie’s well-conceived and tasteful versatility, from the gospel of ‘Go Down Moses,’ to the folk of his father Woody’s ‘Deportees,’ is very impressive. A fine album.”
But even in that praise-laden review, Crowe must acknowledge the outsize prominence of Guthrie’s Thanksgiving classic, “Alice’s Restaurant” — besides which, for better or worse, everything else Guthrie does is perceived as secondary as a matter of cultural impact.
As yet unaware that DJs and streaming services would still be featuring Guthrie’s story song on Thanksgving 50 years later, Crowe begins that ’74 review noting already that “to most members of the record-buying audience, Arlo Guthrie is still the whimsically antiestablishment composer of the novelty tune ‘Alice’s Restaurant’.”
Guthrie’s enduring 18 minutes of musical mischief — officially entitled “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (sic) — has found the sort of eternal life as a Thanksgiving song that Crosby’s “White Christmas” has about a month later.
The funny, earnest, joyfully told tale — spoken-sung — takes off from a real incident that happened to Guthrie one Thanksgiving Day. He may not have realized it at the time of composition, but he’d also written a script — “Alice’s Restaurant,” the movie, came out in 1969 (when, let’s face it, what didn’t come out?).
For millions of radio listeners, the song has become the keynote of the Thanksgiving holiday. Hundreds of FM stations — and satellite radio, streaming, anywhere with a DJ or playlist — play the whole dang massacree every turkey day.
In 2024, the song took on a sorrowful note, as the inspiration for its title character — the real Alice Brock, an American artist, author and restauranteur — passed away in November at the age of 83. Brock’s Wikipedia entry includes plenty about her restaurants and radicalism, and also notes something about a “littering incident” for all those who don’t have a radio and have never heard the song.