MA -- Great Barrington -- Guthrie Center at the Old Trinity Church (Alice's Restaurant Church):
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- Description of Subject Matter: Stockbridge is located in the Berkshire Mountains on the western edge of Massachusetts. It's a little town of 2,400 souls which looks a lot like a village that the illustrator Norman Rockwell would paint. That's not entirely coincidental because he lived and died here.
I'd already seen his artwork when they came to the Corcoran Art Gallery here in Washington DC so I didn't try to see it again. (Personally, though, just thinking of Norman Rockwell makes me feel warm and fuzzy.) For me, though, Stockbridge meant something else that's not even listed in the AAA guide. This is thanks to the song "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie. (He's no relation but he has a great last name!)
If you remember the song... well, to call it a song is generous. It's one chorus inserted in a 20-minute discussion of Arlo's experiences trashing up the Berkshire Mountains and how that allowed him to avoid serving in Vietnam. The complete lyrics can be found on http://www.arlo.net/lyrics/alices.shtml but here are some relevant passages:
This song is called Alice's Restaurant, and it's about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's Restaurant.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
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. . . .
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.
When I saw Arlo Guthrie (and his son and daughter) in concert in the early 2000s, he started singing the song and then stopped. Apparently, he doesn't sing it anymore which is too bad because, other than "The City of New Orleans", it's definitely his best-known song. But he did mention afterward that he had bought Alice, Ray, and Fasha's church and turned it into a dinner theatre. Arlo doesn't live in Stockbridge. I'm told he lives in a more secluded area of the Berkshires.
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I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].