"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant/Walk right in it's around at the back/just a half a mile from the railroad track/You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant" (Arlo Guthrie "Alice's Restaurant" 1965-66)

In honour of the 40th anniversary of the writing of "Alice's Restaurant" Blogcritics.org is featuring the song and its creator, Arlo Guthrie, as our Featured Artist (and song) for the month of May. As the month progresses various writers from the site will be contributing articles on what the song has meant to them, reflections on the movie that the song inspired or just talk about Arlo in general.

So come on in and pull up a chair or take a seat at the counter, while Blogcritics.org takes you on a tour of "Alice's Restaurant". Hope you enjoy the meal.

There's a certain kind of creative genius required to take the mundane and turn it into something interesting. To also make it endure across 40 years and two generations is testimony to either the uniqueness of the creation, or the individual behind it.

Perhaps it's all part and parcel of being a folk singer; you sing songs that resonate with people no matter when they were written. Either something in the content or the attitude of the material manages to continue to appeal to people long after the song may have been topical.

Whatever the reason, Arlo Guthrie's 18 minute song about a six month period of his life in the years 1965-66 has stood the test of time. What could be so interesting about someone getting arrested and going to trial for littering or even their initial inspection by the draft board? When it was turned into a long narrative, spoken over the same simple tune, he was forced to go on a special tour just to satisfy demands to hear it performed every ten years.

I was only four years old when Mr. Guthrie started writing that song, and was probably five by the time he had polished it off. I might have been seven or eight when the movie Alice's Restaurant was released, but by the time I was seventeen I had memorized the entire 181/2 minutes (save for the speech by the sergeant to the guys on the bench in group "W") and was performing it whenever anybody was stupid enough to ask me to.

The war in Vietnam had been over for two or three years by than. I lived in Canada, which hadn't even been involved in the conflict, and so it shouldn't have had any relevance to us at all. Okay it was funny, and there were some great lines in it which were just fun to say: "24 8X10 colour, glossy photos with circles and arrows on the front and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining how each one was to be used as evidence against us" said all in one breath sounds really silly.