Saturday, January 15, 2011

"I didn't get nothin'. I had to pay fifty dollars and they made us pick up the garbage."

Here's all 18+ minutes of Arlo Guthrie's 1967 tale of Thanksgiving dinner, solid waste disposal strategies, crime scene investigation, jurisprudence and the Seeelective Service Administration. I was reminded of this because the movie was on last night (uh, not very good), and even though I turned it off after about 45 minutes, I decided I wanted to hear the original again.  It's still pretty damned entertaining.

Being of a certain age, I'm pretty sure I heard this a few hundred-thousand times during the 70's.  I suspect, however, that a lot of...uh...younger folks are familiar with the "song" (it's really more of a monologue), but have never listened to it from beginning to end.

So here it is, in two parts, with illustrations by Andrew Colunga.

Enjoy.



2 comments:

Jenny said...

I hope I'm young enough to be classed as the younger folk (I'm 25) but I know this song well from beginning to end not just the 'Alice's Restaurant' bit. It was on a tape my parents would play on car journeys and now it's something my sister often listens to!

Nathan said...

Just to clarify any impression that I'm a doddering old fart, I was young enough when this first came out that it would be a number of years before I had any real idea why those guys were all on the "Group W" bench...aside from being "mean 'n ugly 'n nasty".

:D