Arlo Guthrie.

• Author: Dreifus, Claudia
• Position: Singer/activist - Interview

|Im not saying that we shouldn"t participate in he world and do everything we can to make it better, But we have to reserve a part of ourselves for ourselves,'

We are walking through the vestry of the most famous church of all the 1960s-the deconsecrated place of worship in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Arlo Guthrie, folk singer, son of Saint Woody Guthrie, took out the trash on a temperate Thanksgiving Day in 1965. As all who were conscious at that political moment recall, Guthrie deposited the remains of a dinner cooked by one Alice Brock outside a garbage dump on that historic day, found himself arrested by a phalanx of police, and thus, as a felony litterer, was excused from serving in the Vietnam war.

In a half-hour song about how illicit garbage-dumping saved him from official Asian peasant murder, Guthrie gave the world "Alice's Restaurant," the witty epic poem of the antiwar movement. For much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the lines You can get anything you want/at Alice's restaurant" were synonymous with resistance to the Vietnam war.

Subsequent to "Alice's Restaurant" Arlo Guthrie had several hits - including the folk ballad, "City of New Orleans," an old-fashioned railroad song very much in the tradition of his father. But in the 1970s, with the rise of discomania and the decline of folk rock, Arlo Guthrie disappeared from the radio - except annually on Thanksgiving Day, when "Alice's Restaurant" would be played as an antique piece of 1960s nostalgia.

Undaunted, the folk singer kept on keeping on, spending nine months on the road each year, touring with Pete Seeger, living in the Berkshires between shows, and marrying and having four children. Two years ago, by a fluke, he managed to buy the very church that started it all, the church that once belonged to his friends Alice and Ray Brock.

With the exception of his long, flowing white hair, Arlo Guthrie looks today very much as he did in 1968 - bejeaned, slender, and intense. He still manifests that sweet absurdist humor that all America found so beguiling "way back when." As we talk, I search for a place to dump the wrappers from my audiotape. "It's okay," Guthrie smiles. "You can litter here." Q: You now own the famous church of "Alice's Restaurant." Why? Arlo Guthrie: It wasn't anything I planned on having. But when it happened, it seemed an opportunity to tie together the last twenty-five years we've all lived through. I felt like there had to be heart somewhere in all of the upheavals we've lived through so far. Q: Well, how exactly did you get to buy it? Guthrie: Strange story. About two years ago I was doing one of these "Whatever happened to...." TV shows. One of our stops in our "nostalgic" journey was this church. And I was walking around here telling on camera what had happened here on Thanksgiving Day in 1965, which was when we took out the garbage. Some people came out from the church and said, "Hi, we own this church and we're selling it." I said, "Really? I'll tell somebody who can afford to buy it, because I can't." And then I went home and thought about how much I'd always loved being here.

I have this newsletter, the Rolling Blunder Review, that I send out to about 6,000 people who follow my music [address: P.O. Box 6573, Housatonic, MA 10236]. So I wrote an article and said, "Don't send me any money - just ideas on how I can buy a church, the church, the one we all know and love and made a movie in." A lot of people came up with some interesting ideas about nonprofit status, and I took them to the attorney and the accountant, who said, "You could try."

So we started a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization for the purchase of the building and we moved our record company, Rising Son Records, in here to help pay the mortgage, and housed some projects for helping AIDS victims and the homeless. So here we are: in Alice's church all those years after we took out the garbage! Q: Are you involved in community issues at all here in Great Barrington? Guthrie: At times, yeah. We had a landfill developer come up to this part of the county and he wanted to put in the largest landfill in the Northeast, essentially right next door to me. I got active on that. Q: Well, considering that you're the...