Green Screen: Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 Song, ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ is the Hysterical Shaggy Dog Story of Guthrie’s Spell as a Litterbug
Leo Guth | November 24, 2021
Album Art from “Alice's Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie.
Taylor Swift isn’t the only one with a long song this Thanksgiving Season. The “City of New Orleans” singer Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” has become a Thanksgiving tradition in my family. Each year, if it’s not too cold out at our favorite nearby park in New Orleans, my family and I will go for a pre-dinner walk. Afterwards, we sit in the car and warm up, and listen to the nearly 20 minute song and absolutely crack up. But aside from being irresistibly catchy and infinitely quotable, “Alice’s Restaurant” isn’t just a song. It’s a clever anti-war, anti-bureaucratic satire of our justice system and command-and-control solutions to pollution. The song starts:
“This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's Restaurant.”
Of course the song actually has very little to do with Alice or the restaurant. Without giving too much away, the song — underscored by his own fingerpicking — is actually about the time Arlo Guthrie and a friend go to the city dump to drop off a heap of garbage only to find that it’s closed on Thanksgiving. Instead, they ditch the garbage on the side of the road. But the morning after Thanksgiving, Arlo receives a call from a local cop accusing them of being the ones behind the illegal dumping. What follows is a description of the court case convicting Guthrie of the crime before he changes the subject entirely, saying “but that's not what I came to talk about. Came to talk about the draft.” He then describes the process of tests he undergoes to be selected to fight in the Vietnam War. Due to his criminal record and repeated backtalk, the army lets Guthrie go and, in the end, he offers his own solution for how everyone can avoid the draft all at once with one simple trick.
Despite the irrelevant details, unnecessary repetition and roundabout way of telling his tale, it’s hard not to sympathize with our protagonist. Yes, littering is a crime for a reason, but with the way Guthrie is treated throughout the song by the justice system and military as a result of his victimless felony seems cruel and especially unusual. For example, after Guthrie and his friend are arrested, the officer asks them for their belts so that they won’t hang themselves in jail. To which Guthrie responds,
“Did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?"
The officer replies that he was just making sure, but then takes out the toilet seat and toilet paper so that Guthrie wouldn’t try to use it to take his life either. Cruel and unusual indeed. In the end, Guthrie is simply sentenced to pick up the garbage and pay $50, which is over $400 in today's money. Although, had our protagonist been Black, he might have received a harsher sentence. Thankfully, in this case, justice is blind. Literally. The judge has a seeing-eye dog.
Later on in the song, when Guthrie changes the subject to the draft, he describes his experience with the tests he has to endure before they can enlist him in the army. He says,
“You get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.”
At the bottom of the last form, he’s asked if he’s been rehabilitated. He goes to the sergeant who’s responsible for the enlistees with criminal records and asks if he had him sitting with murderers and rapists ...
“'Cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug.''
At which point, they let him go, only after sending his prints to Washington, however.
Environmental studies majors at Warren Wilson College (WWC) might remember “Command and Control (CAC)” legislation from Professor Amy Knisley’s topics in environmental governance class. For everyone else, it’s more or less when the government sets standards for who, what, where and how much a person or business can pollute. One of the main critiques of CAC is that it isn’t that easy to enforce. Guthrie explains that after looking everywhere for somewhere else to safely put the garbage in good faith, his reason for dumping was that there was already another pile of garbage on the side of the road. Guthrie says, “And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our's down.”
Somebody already got away with dumping one pile, so of course Guthrie believes that he wouldn't get caught either. But why was there a pile there anyways? And who’s job is it to clean it up when there’s no evident culprit?
To learn more about who’s legally accountable for our trash, I emailed local environmental policy authority professor Knisley for answers.
She wrote back, “If there's trash lying about it's the responsibility of whoever was supposed to be getting it from point A to B, but dropped or lost it on the way. “
According to Prof. Knisley, that could include the city waste management workers, the landfill managers and yes, even you. If you “smelt” it, you’re legally responsible to deal with it. Knisley also pointed out some statistics from a recent Buncombe County landfill waste audit, noting that much of the waste could have been diverted.
“Over half (the waste) was compostable and over a third edible. Who's putting compostables, let alone edibles, in the can?” said Knisley.
Lastly, she made reference to the Asheville homeowner's conflicts with local black bears getting into our trash.
“When bears yank open a shed and haul out the garbage bags with edibles inside, leaving a mess ... who should clean it up? The resident? The shed-maker? The bears?? Volunteers from Warren Wilson? It's a puzzle without end. The upside though is that wherever there's enough blame to go around, there's usually ways to make a difference to go around as well.”
I couldn’t agree more, Amy. So this Thanksgiving, make sure to be conscious of your waste and compost or dispose of trash in bear-safe receptacles. Or, at the very least, learn from Mr. Guthrie’s mistake and look up your local dump’s holiday hours.
