TUNING IN TO ‘ALICE’S RESTAURANT’

Thanksgiving without Arlo Guthrie would just be a bunch of football and hand-traced turkeys and revisionist history, which is why everyone’s stoner uncle insists on turning up the radio every year during Turkey Day to celebrate and remember the “Alice’s Restaurant Masacree.” The classic song tells the somewhat possibly maybe autobiographical story of how Guthrie spent Thanksgiving ’65, which started with a goodwill effort to throw out the accumulated trash at his friend Alice’s church-turned-home in Great Barrington, MA, and ended with poor Guthrie sittin’ there on the Group W bench amongst the mean, ugly lookin’ people: the mother-rapers and father-stabbers and father-rapers. It’s become tradition for radio stations across the country to play the song multiple times during the day on Thanksgiving (probably because it’s the only song about Thanksgiving not sang by Adam Sandler in a stupid falsetto), and two local stations are keeping that tradition alive.

Tune into Cool 106.7FM or Solid Gold 104.5FM on Thursday, November 23, and you’ll be sure to hear it: they’ll each be playing the full, uncut song at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, and 6pm.