“
Arlo Guthrie providing a place to bring together
individuals for spiritual service, as well as cultural and educational exchange
founded the
Originally built as the St. James Chapel in
1829, the structure was enlarged in 1866 and renamed
Source: The Guthrie Center
YOUTHS ORDERED TO CLEAN UP
RUBBISH MESS
LEE -- Because they couldn't
find a dump open in Great Barrington, two youths threw a load of refuse down a
Stockbridge hillside on Thanksgiving Day.
Saturday, Richard J. Robbins,
19, of
Police Chief William J. Obanhein of Stockbridge said later the youths found
dragging the junk up the hillside much harder than throwing it down. He said he
hoped their case would be an example to others who are careless about disposal
of rubbish.
The junk included a divan,
plus nearly enough bottles, garbage, papers and boxes to fill their Volkswagen
bus.
"The stuff would take up
at least half of a goodsized pickup truck,"
Chief Obanhein said.
The rubbish was thrown into
the Nelson Foote Sr. property on
Chief Obanhein
told the court he spent "a very disagreeable two hours" looking
through the rubbish before finding a clue to who had thrown it there. He
finally found a scrap of paper bearing the name of a Great Barrington man.
Subsequent investigation indicated Robbins and Guthrie had been visiting the
Great Barrington man and had agreed to cart away the rubbish for him. They told
the court that, when they found the
Unidentified
newspaper clipping, reprinted in This is the Arlo
Guthrie Songbook,
What happened up in
A number of people, Arlo and Rick included, were members of the family, and so
they were not guests in the usual sense. So when Ray woke up the next morning,
he said to them, "Let's clean up the church and get all this crap out of
here, for God's sake. This place is a mess," and Rick said,
"Sure."
So Arlo
and Rick swept up and loaded all the crap... into a VW microbus.. and went out to the dump which
was closed. So they started driving around, until Arlo
remembered a side road in Stockbridge up on Prospect Hill by the Indian Hill
Music Camp -- which he went to one summer -- so they drove up there and dumped
the garbage.
A little later, the phone
rang, and it was Stockbridge police chief William J. Obanhein.... "I found an envelope with the name Brock
on it," Chief Obanhein said.... the truth came
out, and soon the boys found themselves in Obanhein's
police car....
So they
went up to Prospect Hill, and Obie took some
pictures, and on the back he marked them, "PROSPECT HILL RUBBISH DUMPING
FILE UNDER GUTHRIE AND ROBBINS
Never mind what it says in
the song; there was no police brutality, no mistreatment. "I didn't put
any handcuffs on them," says Chief Obanhein
emphatically, "and I didn't take the toilet seats off, 'cause we don't
have any seats.
I told the architect who
designed the cells you can't have things like that 'cause when people come in
here, they're like to rip them off."
Well, Arlo
and Rick sat down on this metal cot..., and pretty soon
Well, it was an open-and-shut
case, anyway. The kids went in, pleaded, "Guilty, Your Honor," were
fined $25 each and ordered to retrieve the rubbish....
Then they went all back to
the church... and they sort of started to write Alice's Restaurant
together.... "We were sitting around after dinner and wrote half the
song,"
Saul Braun,
Source: Alice’s
Restaurant (Arlo Guthrie) (1966)
This song is called
You can get anything you want at
You can get anything you want at
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at
Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two
years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the
restaurant, but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church
nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And livin' in the
bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to
be in. Havin'
all that room, seein' as how they took out all the
pews, they decided that they didn't have to take out their garbage for a long
time.
We got up there, we found all the garbage in there,
and we decided it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to
the city dump. So we took the half a ton
of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW Microbus, took shovels and rakes and
implements of destruction and headed on toward the city dump.
Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain
across across the dump saying, "Closed on
Thanksgiving." And we had never
heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we
drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.
We didn't find one. Until we came to a side road, and
off the side of the side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the
bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one
big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we
decided to throw our's down.
That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had
a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up
until the next morning, when we got a phone call from officer Obie. He said,
"Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of
garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And
I said, "Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a
lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."
After speaking to Obie for
about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we finally
arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and pick up
the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the police officer's
station. So we got in the red VW
microbus with the shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on
toward the police officer's station.
Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at the police
station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for being so brave
and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely, and we didn't expect it,
and the other thing was he could have bawled us out and told us never to be see
driving garbage around the vicinity again, which is what we expected, but when
we got to the police officer's station there was a third possibility that we
hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said "Obie,
I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on." He said, "Shut up, kid. Get in the back
of the patrol car."
And that's what we did, sat in the back of the patrol
car and drove to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote. I want tell you about
the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this happened here, they got
three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to
the Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars,
being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in
the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment
that they had hanging around the police officer's station. They was taking
plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty
seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with
circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against
us. Took pictures of the approach, the
getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention
the aerial photography.
After the ordeal, we went back to the jail. Obie said he was
going to put us in the cell. Said,
"Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your
belt." And I said, "Obie, I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don't
have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you want my belt
for?" And he said, "Kid, we
don't want any hangings.” I said, "Obie,
did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?" Obie said he was making sure, and friends Obie was, cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn't
hit myself over the head and drown, and he took out the toilet paper so I
couldn't bend the bars roll out the - roll the toilet paper out the window,
slide down the roll and have an escape. Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours
later that
We walked in, sat down, Obie
came in with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour
glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each
one, sat down. Man came in said,
"All rise." We all stood up,
and Obie stood up with the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down
with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, we sat down. Obie
looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a
paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing
eye dog. And then at twenty seven eight-by-ten colour
glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one
and began to cry, 'cause Obie came to the realization
that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn't nothing
he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty seven
eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was
to be used as evidence against us. And
we was fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but thats not what I came to tell you
about.
Came to talk about the draft.
They got a building down
And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to
kill. I mean, I wanna,
I wanna kill.
Kill. I wanna,
I wanna see, I wanna see
blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.
Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin
up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin
up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL,
KILL." And the sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down
the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Didn't feel too good about it.
Proceeded on down the hall gettin
more injections, inspections, detections, neglections
and all kinds of stuff that they was doin' to me at
the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was
there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things and I
was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they
was leaving no part untouched. Proceeded
through, and when I finally came to the see the last man, I walked in, walked
in sat down after a whole big thing there, and I walked up and said, "What
do you want?" He said, "Kid,
we only got one question. Have you ever been arrested?"
And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's
Restaurant Massacre, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff
like that and all the phenome... - and he stopped me
right there and said, "Kid, did you ever go to court?"
And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty
seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the
circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me
right there and said, "Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench
that says Group W .... NOW kid!!"
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and
there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join
the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean
nasty ugly looking people on the bench there.
Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers
sitting right there on the bench next to me!
And they was mean and nasty and ugly and
horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest,
ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest
father raper of them all,
was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all
kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I
said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the
garbage." He said, "What were
you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench
there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said,
"And creating a nuisance." And
they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all
kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking
cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant
came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said.
"Kids,
this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say",
and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said,
but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench
there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it
down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the
pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other
side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other
side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read
the following words:
("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")
I went over to the sargent,
said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to
ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin
here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the
army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein'
a litterbug." He looked at me and
said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna
send you fingerprints off to
And friends, somewhere in
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant
Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time
it come's around on the guitar.
With feeling.
So we'll wait for it to come around on the guitar, here and sing it when
it does. Here it comes.
You can get anything you want, at
You can get anything you want, at
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at
That was horrible.
If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud.
I've been singing this song now for twenty five
minutes. I could sing it
for another twenty five minutes. I'm not proud... or tired.
So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this
time with four part
harmony and feeling.
We're just waitin' for it to
come around is what we're doing.
All right now.
You can get anything you want, at
Excepting
You can get anything you want, at
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at
Da da da da da
da da dum
At
©1966, 1967 (Renewed) by Appleseed Music Inc. All Rights Reserved.