First, take a look at the cover of the album. Seated at a dining table, set with candles, three glasses, cigarettes and three plates for an elegant dinner is Arlo Guthrie. Arlo, incredibly dopey-looking, wearing a black formal derby hat on top of his sloppy long curly hair, is holding a fork and a knife in each hand like a hillbilly, and has no shirt on but for a napkin pasted to his chest.
If you don't dig the cover, which is incredibly funny looking, then don't listen to the title song of the record, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" which is 18 minutes long and takes up all of one side.
The composition, done in a very happy talking-blues style, is the true story of how 20-year
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old Arlo was arrested for littering, went through a draft physical and was rejected because of his police record for littering. Naturally it is a little more complex than that, and it is vastly funny on a dozen rehearings. Arlo sings and talks against a pretty guitar chord melody he wrote and ultimately brings the whole audience (recorded live), into singing the chorus "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant."
What makes the artist so thoroughly charming on the cover photo is the same unconscious insouciance that makes "Alice's Restaurant Massacree,"—a type of piece that, at this point in musical history, would seem to be totally out of date, trite and boring — an unqualified and complete success.
It is another one of those coincidences — inexplicably except by belief in them—that Woodie Guthrie's son, whom Arlo is, should be born into his musical career via this, his first album, on the eve of his father's death. There is something happening here and it is obvious.
There is a flip side to the album. The appearance of the cover and the title song leaves you completely unprepared for the other songs Arlo has written.
Arlo Guthrie is electric; he has gathered ideas and snatches of styles from many places — Bob Dylan, Donovan, Tim Hardin, Paul McCartney. The influences include his father and the entire folk milieu of Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Sonny Terry et al, in which he was raised. In fact, the album was produced by Fred Hellerman who sang with the Weavers.
Arlo has not done anything imitative; his eclecticism is of the sort where what you hear and what is happening enters as perfectly natural. For example, the style of melody in "Highway in the Wind." is reminiscent of Donovan and the accompanying quiet electric guitar and soft percussion calls to mind Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home days. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the organist on the session was Al Kooper. (Some hip radio Program Director is going to make a name for himself when he discovers the obvious Top-40 potential of some of these tracks, like "Now and Then.")
The lyrics are excellent. Take the lines from "Chilling of the Evening," itself a perfect title:
Though you know, my love
That I must go a
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