As Thanksgiving Fades From View-With The Fiftieth Anniversary Of Arlo Guthrie’s Great Alice’s Restaurant Massacre In Mind  

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Even if you didn’t, as Sam Eaton did not, place great store by holidays, especially family-etched holidays, Sam always believed that the occasion could be salvaged by listening to a rendition of Arlo Guthrie’s classic hippie-dippie Alice’s Restaurant. More so since this year, 2015, represented the fiftieth anniversary of the events depicted in the song out in Stockbridge at the far end of Massachusetts and of the initial writing of the piece although the record would not be produced and distributed until 1967. Moreover Sam did not need to go up into his attic in Carver to bring the now tattered album which contained the amply scratched vinyl record to be played on the ancient record player that he had kept through thick and thin since the time his parents purchased it for him when he rebelled against listening to their Great Depression and World War II etched music on the family record player in the living room.

See Sam could along with his wife, his third wife, Frida, as it turned out, who shared his enthusiasm for the song although she was too young to have been washed by the hippie wave that occasioned the song, listen to the whole original eighteen plus minutes of the classic on the U/Mass radio station WUBM which aired the classic three times a day on Thanksgiving Day, 9 AM, noon, and 3 PM. Thanksgiving the day on which the fateful Alice events took place. The station had been doing so for the past thirty years that they have been on the air after replacing WCAS in Cambridge as the folk music station of record in the Boston area. This year Sam and Frida could listen while they were driving out on the Massachusetts Turnpike on their way to celebrate the day with Sam’s old anti-war activist friend, Ralph Morris, out in Troy, New York (and have the additional nostalgic benefit of passing Stockbridge, the scene of the crime, at the end of the turnpike).

Sam and Ralph had met many years ago, back in the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, a time when both had had their own personal struggles with their draft boards, a subject which is parodied in the second half of the song and since both had retired recently they had taken to alternating Thanksgiving Day visits and dinners. So, yes, even if the day was not Sam worthy of serious celebration except as prelude to Black Friday sales madness which he personally avoided like, well like the Black Plague, they could listen as if back in a time machine. Check it out here.