Home Arts and Leisure Arlo Guthrie Gets Arrested for Littering

Arlo Guthrie Gets Arrested for Littering

And writes Alice's Restaurant

by
19 comments

A Thanksgiving dinner clean-up in 1965 launched Arlo Guthrie on a folksinging career, created an anti-war anthem and transformed an old church into a home for a local charity called the Guthrie Center.

Arlo Guthrie in 1979.

Guthrie’s story about his 1965 arrest for illegally dumping the remains of the Thanksgiving dinner became the cult classic song, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, or just Alice’s Restaurant.

The satirical monologue tells a story set in Great Barrington, Mass., where Alice Brock and her husband Ray lived in a deconsecrated church.

The church started out as St. James Chapel in 1829, and  parishioners renamed it Trinity Church after expanding it in 1866. Alice had bought the small Gothic Revival building with $2,000 from her mother.

Alice was an artist, Ray was a woodworker and architect.  The young couple was influenced by Jack Kerouac and the Beats.  They both worked at the Stockbridge School, a boarding school from which Arlo Guthrie had graduated in Stockbridge, Mass.

stockbridge-school

The Stockbridge School in 1954.

Arlo Guthrie, Beatnik

Arlo Guthrie, the son of folksinging legend Woody Guthrie, dropped out of college after his freshman year and came to stay with Ray and Alice for a few weeks. The Brocks acted as surrogate parents to young people like Guthrie who camped out in the church to escape “Establishment pressures” and the draft.

The neighbors hated the “Beatnik commune.” They wrote letters to the editor complaining about it, and honked their horns and yelled when driving by.

Alice opened a restaurant in the back of a row of businesses on Route 7 in Stockbridge, but it isn’t clear if she’d opened it by Thanksgiving in 1965.

alice's-restaurant

Original site of Alice’s restaurant.

Guthrie, 18, and his friend Richard Robbins, 19, joined Alice and Ray’s Thanksgiving dinner that year. Afterward, Alice asked the boys to take the trash to the town dump, but they found it closed. So they threw the trash down a nearby hillside.

Hours later, Stockbridge Police Officer William ‘Obie’ Obanhein called the Brocks. He told Alice  he had just spent two very unpleasant hours going through the trash until he found an envelope with the Brocks’ name and address on it.

Alice ratted out Arlo Guthrie and Richard Robbins. Officer Obie (William Obanheim), who had modeled for Stockbridge artist Norman Rockwell, didn’t like the long-haired hippies. He decided to make an example of them. So he arrested the teenagers and put them in a jail cell. Alice, furious with Obie, bailed them out.

You can get anything you want

You can get anything you want

Alice’s Restaurant

On the day of their trial, Officer Obie brought detailed photos of the crime to the courtroom. In the song, Guthrie describes his exhibits as

…27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

Guthrie also described in the song how Officer Obie watched the judge walk to the bench with a seeing-eye dog.

The judge fined Guthrie and Robbins $25 each and told them to pick up the garbage. Later, Guthrie was drafted. He was disqualified from military service because he was “morally unfit,” having been convicted of littering. He was sent to the Group W bench, where, he says in the song,

I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.

The chorus, ‘You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant’ begins and ends the song. Guthrie sang it live on WBAI radio in New York some time in 1967. It was so popular it became a staple of non-commercial radio pledge drives, and many classic rock stations play it every Thanksgiving. Pierre Robert on WMMR 93.3 in Philadelphia plays multiple versions multiple times over the holiday.

Alice’s Restaurant came out as an album in 1967, but the 18-minute, 34-second song was too long for a single. Later, Arlo Guthrie learned President Richard Nixon owned a copy. He joked that explained the 18-1/2 minute gap in the Watergate tapes.

Afterward

The Guthrie Center

The Guthrie Center

Alice sold the church, and it changed hands several times. Many Alice’s Restaurant fans had continued to make pilgrimages to the church, including Arlo Guthrie in 1990.

He felt the building nurtured lasting relationships, so he raised money and bought it. He named it the Guthrie Center, and it houses the Guthrie Foundation, an interdenominational interfaith meeting place.

Officer Obie died in 1994 at the age of 69. Years after the Alice’s Restaurant incident, he said, “You know, if it had only been a couple of bags of garbage, I would have picked it up myself.”

Alice Brock and Ray Brock subsequently divorced.  She lives in Provincetown, Mass. Ray Brock died in 1979 of a heart attack.

arlo-guthrie

Guthrie during his 2005 Alice’s Restaurant Massacree 40th Anniversary tour.

Watch Arlo

You can watch Arlo Guthrie sing Alice’s Restaurant Massacree at Farm Aid in 2005 here. He suffered a stroke on Thanksgiving in 2019, and gave up touring. “[I]t’s time to hang up the “Gone Fishing” sign,” he wrote on his website. “Going from town to town and doing stage shows, remaining on the road is no longer an option.’

*  *  *

 

 

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society. Available from Amazon (click here).

 

 

 

 

This story about Arlo Guthrie and Alice’s Restaurant was updated in 2023. The image of the Stockbridge Cafe By Dtobias – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3931984. Image of the Stockbridge School by By Wlmg – Canon 35mm Camera, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28430426. Image of Arlo Guthrie in 2005 By Adam Hammer from Saint Cloud, Minn., USA – Arlo Guthrie, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2595064. Arlo Guthrie in 1979 By Warner Bros. – Original publicity photo, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41907624.

19 comments

Marc Nedboy November 28, 2014 - 10:47 am

They used to play it every Thanksgiving.I play it off
You tube.Past a classic.

Brian Ketner November 28, 2014 - 10:56 am

Our only true Thanksgiving song!

Cecily Muller November 28, 2014 - 11:44 am

Listen to it every Thanksgiving and at other times in between 😉

Gail Fungaroli Glazier November 28, 2014 - 1:46 pm

I Remember it well!

Sue Nelson Coleman November 28, 2014 - 6:08 pm

Our Thanksgiving day tradition is to play Alice’s Restaurant just before we sit down to eat.

Kathleen Nelson Ferranti November 28, 2014 - 6:37 pm

Love to sing along every Thanksgiving!

Susan Lane Shaw November 28, 2014 - 9:41 pm

Our family watched the movie every Thanksgiving -one of our rituals.

Subhendu Prakash Upadhyay November 29, 2014 - 12:06 am

plz donate for cow operation on 0013001500007043 indian name subhendu only one rupees for cow u can donate in one doller too for save cow is a energy drink source and to much

Kathleen Taylor November 29, 2014 - 3:12 am

I’ve watched Alice’s Restaurant several times. Good stuff.

Keena Palmer November 29, 2014 - 6:56 pm

I have it on vinyl

Richard Verrochi November 30, 2014 - 9:17 am

As a Street Musician, “Alice’s Restaurant” is one of my favorites. People know the chorus well and sing along with my harmonica playing. Great fun!

Kevin Waters November 30, 2014 - 12:49 pm

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant!

Robert Wooten November 24, 2017 - 8:16 pm

Excepting Alice

Jim Tatro November 26, 2015 - 9:05 am

WMMR 93.3 in Philadelphia plays the entire Slices Restaurant Massacre three times during the Pierre Robert Show from 10:30 until 3:00. One of which will be at 12. Check the station out on line to listen.

Stockbridge Steps Into a Norman Rockwell Christmas Painting - New England Historical Society December 23, 2015 - 6:41 am

[…] was the year WBAI-FM first played Arlo Guthrie’s recording of Alice’s Restaurant – which mentions the real restaurant Alice Brock ran in Stockbridge. The police officer in the […]

Why the Ghost of Eugene O’Neill Haunts a BU Dorm - New England Historical Society December 29, 2015 - 7:36 am

[…] O’Neill lay dying in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel in Boston just before Thanksgiving in 1953. For years he had suffered from depression and what was diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease, […]

Jimmy Jones October 10, 2017 - 11:24 am

To think this whole generation of very talented people turned into Stockbridge Mass/Big Government shills. They all became the very thing they correctly protested against in their youth.

Peter March 10, 2018 - 3:22 pm

If you’ve ever listened to this song, you couldn’t possibly believe it’s about “illegally dumping the remains of the Thanksgiving dinner.” The garbage was there for “a long time,” not the garbage produced by the Thanksgiving dinner.

November 26 Peace Love Art Activism - The Woodstock Whisperer October 11, 2018 - 1:40 pm

[…] 26, 1965: Arlo Guthrie arrested in Great Barrington, MA for littering on Thanksgiving in the nearby town of Stockbridge. The resulting events and […]

Comments are closed.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Join our mailing list to receive the latest artciles from the New England Historical Society

Thanks for Signing Up!

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Join Now and Get The Latest Articles. 

It's Free!

You have Successfully Subscribed!