Some songs shouldn't be sung in uniform

In the 'nothing's sacred anymore' category, the first strains of the song "Alice's Restaurant Masacreee" that I heard this Thanksgiving were sung by a group of soldiers.

The group is called Six-String Soldiers and they have the greatest job in the military. They play concerts and make music videos while playing guitars, banjo and mandolin. They're pretty good, I "liked" them on Facebook a long time ago, which is why I heard the song.

But this column isn't really about singing and strumming soldiers anymore than "Alice's Restaurant" is about Alice or the restaurant. Somehow, a group of soldiers adopting a former war-protest song just isn't right.

But then the songwriter Arlo Guthrie claimed in a Rolling Stone interview that the song wasn't as much an anti-war anthem as it was an anti-stupidity song. Despite what Arlo said, years later the song did have a pretty strong message against the draft during the Vietnam war era.

I first remember hearing the song probably in junior high, about five or six years after the release of the 18-minute, 34-second song. The record was in the collection of a friend's brother, who was old enough to protest and serve in the Vietnam War.

At the very end of the song Arlo offers advice on how to avoid getting drafted and at the point in my life when I discovered the song getting drafted was still on my list of worries, even though the war was over.

The song was written about a true life experience that Guthrie had one Thanksgiving in the 1960s when he went to visit a friend named Alice and her husband Ray in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Alice wasn't actually operating a restaurant at the time but she lived in an old church and they had a fine Thanksgiving feast in the church. After the feast Arlo and company did Alice a favor by taking out a large accumulation of garbage. Unfortunately the dump was closed on Thanksgiving and the garbage ended up at the bottom of a cliff with some other garbage.

The song goes on to explain who Arlo was arrested for littering and then years later rejected at draft induction because he'd been arrested for littering.

The song is a classic and during the 1970s it began to get regular play once a year - on Thanksgiving Day. Arlo quit playing it in concert after the war but then finally relented to fans and added it to his playlist every 10 years with the last time being the 50th anniversary of the song.

I only listen to it once a year on Thanksgiving and I prefer Arlo's original version please. The Six-String Soldiers version only co-opted the refrain and didn't tell the whole story. I do, however, love their version of the Woody Guthrie song ,"This Land is Your Land," and I whole-heartedly urge you to look that one up online and give it a play. You might also think about pulling Alice's Restaurant on YouTube next November. (You really can get anything you want on YouTube.)

In the meantime, I respectfully request SSS steer away from anti-war tunes while in uniform.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]