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His fans have known it for years: At an Arlo Guthrie concert, you can get anything you want -- except Alice.
The son of legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie officially retired Alice's Restaurant Massacree -- the satirical singalong that launched his career, fueled America's 1960s anti-war movement and spawned a feature film -- decades ago, citing issues regarding its length (on a good night Alice could push 30 minutes) and the desire to avoid succumbing to 'Ricky Nelson syndrome.'
"I remember the days when I first did it," Guthrie says of the song inspired by the songwriter's 1965 encounters with police and the draft board. "There'd be a couple of thousand people in an audience and none of them had heard it before.
"And the laughter and spontaneous combustion going on in the audience was a one-time thing; that could never happen again with any of those people that had ever been there.
SOUNDTRACK OF LIFE
"So I got used to the idea a long time ago that if it was going to continue it was going to be nostalgic. There's nothing wrong with that, but by the time you add the other songs into a set, what do you get, another 10 or 15 minutes to do something new?
"We've always tried to acknowledge that some of these songs, including Alice, have become part of the soundtrack of the lives of people of a certain age. I understand the desire to hear songs that are part of that soundtrack when you go to hear a performance.
"There are a lot of bands my age that are still working, still singing and still getting caught up in the demands of fans who want to hear particular pieces of music. I opted out of that a long time ago, and probably disappointed a lot of people by not doing a greatest hits night every night. Of course, it was easy for me -- I didn't have any greatest hits.
"But some songs were more well-known than others, and I can do City of New Orleans for the rest of my life and not get tired of it because I think it's a great song. It was only Alice that was the problem, because of its length. Who wants to do an 18-minute nostalgic piece?"
Ah, but just how 'nostalgic' is a song that questions the authority of an American administration to "burn women, kids, houses and villages" overseas, despite the objections of an ever-growing number of citizens back home?
A year ago, Guthrie decided the times had become "eerily familiar" enough for Alice to live once more. Tomorrow, the 40th Anniversary Massacree Tour reaches Ottawa at a time when for the first time in more than 50 years Canadians are experiencing the grim realities of war. And we'll be expecting Alice.
"It's just unheard of for anyone in my genre to be committed to do specific material," Guthrie says of the evening's promised highlight. "But on the other hand, it's been so many years that we've been promising or threatening to do it on the occasional anniversary. And here we are: It's the anniversary and it's time to learn it again."
WITTY MONOLOGUE
Or at least to sing it again. Most of those who learned Alice once, have never forgotten Guthrie's witty monologue. And in these eerily familiar times, Alice's friends are anxious to hear the story once more. After all, America's latest war just doesn't seem to have generated the calibre of pacifist anthems inspired by the last Vietnam.
"I don't think it's the lack of songs," Guthrie counters. "They certainly don't have the commercial appeal they had 40 years ago, so you might not be hearing them on the radio or seeing them on MTV, but there are a lot of young songwriters who have been tackling this thing head-on. You can go to any folk festival and they're everywhere.
"You know, I worked with Pete Seeger for about 30 years, and I never saw him send a record to a radio station. I never saw him go to a meeting with a record company. It was never in his mind to pay attention to that. And yet, his songs are known all over the world.
"Now, I don't know how that happens, but I suspect he knows something that most people are still learning, and that is that good songs find their way through humanity just through people."
Including, once again, Alice.