Alice's Restaurant (Revisited)

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree", commonly known as "Alice's Restaurant", is a satirical talking blues song by singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, released as the title track to his 1967 debut album Alice's Restaurant. The song is a deadpan protest against the Vietnam War draft, in the form of a comically exaggerated but largely true story from Guthrie's own life: while visiting acquaintances in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, he is arrested and convicted of dumping trash illegally, which later endangers his suitability for the military draft. The title refers to a restaurant owned by one of Guthrie's friends, artist Alice Brock. Although Brock is a minor character in the story, the restaurant plays no role in it aside from being the subject of the chorus and the impetus for Guthrie's visit.

The song inspired the 1969 film Alice's Restaurant, which starred Guthrie and took numerous liberties with the story. The work has become Guthrie's signature song and he has periodically re-released it with updated lyrics. In 2017, it was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant".

Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited is a 1997 album by American folk singer Arlo Guthrie. The album is a new recording of all material from the entire original Alice's Restaurant album, as performed live 29 years later at The Church in Housatonic, Massachusetts. The cover of this release also pays homage to its predecessor as it pictures Guthrie in the same pose as the original album: sitting shirtless at a dinner table with a napkin spread over his chest, holding his fork and knife and waiting for Thanksgiving dinner to begin. This time, however, he is without his hat (displaying a full head of gray hair) and 29 years older.

Each song is essentially faithful to the original, with one notable exception. At the end of the re-recording of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", Guthrie launches into a postscript story about attending Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977. He meets Carter's son Chip, who tells him of the discovery of an opened copy of Alice's Restaurant left behind by the Nixon family when they left the White House, leading to speculation around the fact that the title song and the gap in the Watergate tapes are both 18½ minutes in length. The Massacree Revisited continued a tradition of Guthrie's to perform "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" only once every 10 years, with this version coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the song.

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