Alice's Restaurant

A playing of Alice's Restaurant has been a Thanksgiving tradition at my house for years.

The song is definitely a product of its time and loses something in translation to a generation that has never had to worry about being drafted to fight a bloody and unpopular war in an alien environment.

Trust me, it meant a lot to my generation.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ZwJiK0fJ0

 

Just so.

When the army didn't have "volunteer" in front of it, the idea that this was a way to beat the draft was a shared, black comic WTF.

 

What you're not getting is the song is about hippies. Lots of the folks who reacted to the song weren't.

 

Heard this song several Thanksgivings in a row when I was a kid and we were driving cross state to my grandmother's.

 

It's not really a song, anyway. It's a protest story with a chorus.

 

Personally, I love the song.
But we have no tradition of listening to it.


Maybe if we have kids, I'll make them listen to it every year.

 

I enjoyed the song too, for years.

Then I saw the video, and didn't like it that much.

It's funny how seeing a music video can ruin a song. Or make it better. In this case, I preferred my own mental images of the song's story.

 

The most boring teacher in my boring middle school made us listen to this boring song as a way to teach us about boring folk music. She was so boring she considered Bob Dylan too rock and roll and refused to teach us rock and roll, lest we not be bored.

 

Yeah. I think a lot of 60s folkies became music teachers. If you went to school in the late 70s/80s, there were a lot of music teachers who wanted to burn the intricacies of Peter, Paul & Mary into your brain cells and give (an extremely) grudging nod to The Beatles, et al.

 

What a dried-up old hippie hag! And at 35, right?

 

She was probably one of the folkies who booed Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.

My older sister's boy friend at the time was the 60's version of the dreaded hipster of today--too cool for school--- and went on a long rant how Dylan "turned traitor" .

Say what you want about PP&M, but Mary Travers was smokin' hot.

And I love "Alice's Restaurant"