Alice’s Restaurant

When I was growing up, every Thanksgiving there was a local TV channel that played the movie Alice’s Restaurant on a loop. That’s where it stayed until dinnertime and then resumed later that night. To this day, I can’t think of a more worthy Turkey Day tradition than commemorating the 1965 Thanksgiving that Arlo Guthrie and his friend dumped “a half a ton” of garbage in hokey Stockbridge, Massachusetts, thereby getting into some exaggerated small-town trouble that would later, in a crazy turn of events, help him get him out of going to war. The song came first, released in 1967, just over 18 minutes of jovial, folksy storytelling—“Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago…”—where Arlo recounts the whole yarn in song form. He tells the absurdly sordid tale, starting with the town dump being ...