Woody's Boy

This song is called Alice's Restaurant, it's, er, 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.

With this foot-shuffling introduction, Arlo Guthrie launches into 18 minutes and 20 seconds of wildly seriocomic semitrue narrative-plus-song about how he helped a friend named Alice clean out her place in Stockbridge, Mass., dumped the refuse over a cliff, was arrested for litterbugging and fined $50, and how this police record later got him into hot water at the draft board.

The aim of the song is more than personal reminiscence; the richly ornamented irony of Guthrie's prose and his superb sense of timing turn Alice into a winsome memorable addition to the antiwar repertory that young singers across the land are compiling. "You want to know," he asks a sergeant at the induction center, "if I'm moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after being a litterbug?"

Like Bob Dylan, Arlo owes some of his direct, throbbing guitar and vocal style to the late Woody Guthrie, which is not surprising in this case, since Arlo, 20, is the older of Woody's two sons. And as Oklahoma-born Woody's great songs voiced the common man's despair in the dusty '30s, New York-born Arlo throbs with his own generation's hang-ups. Its length has kept Alice from wide disk-jockey exposure, but Arlo's first Reprise LP is moving steadily up on the charts.

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