I came to tell you about 'Alice's Restaurant.' Also, an excellent solo piano version of Guthrie doing Steve Goodman's 'City of New Orleans' with Seeger (or a lightly overdubbed second Arlo?) joining with not-quite-gusto on the choruses.īut I didn't come to tell you about snorting the musty insides of record jackets or great cover songs. Their double-live album Together in Concert likewise provides my personal platonic Proustian memory: the particular smell of LP cover cardboard trapping the thin plastic sleeves Warner Brothers used during the early '80s. I have vague sleepy recollections of seeing Guthrie with Seeger at Carnegie Hall at one (or several?) of their Thanksgiving concerts in the early '80s and Seeger hollering a solo a capella song while chopping through a small piece of wood with an axe, which was actually quietly terrifying at the time and, in retrospect, also kind of badass. I remember my father singing 'The Motorcycle Song,' maybe, as a lullaby. I can't really put a finger on my earliest memories of hearing Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant Thanksgiving Day Massacree' the same way I can sometimes conjure the primal textures of my first exposures to the Beatles or the Pete Seeger LPs my parents played (at my demand) repeatedly. 'Find Out What's Happening (Takes 8 & 7)' mp3 Happy Birthday Elvis, and long live the BWF.Īvailable on Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The Essential 70's Masters Tonight, I'll attempt to resuscitate and breathe some life back into this dying corpse by offering seven nuggets of pure gold recorded by the King at Stax Studios in his hometown of Memphis. It was not a miracle or a lack thereof - it just happened. Our annual Hanukkah extravaganza died when the lights unexpectedly went out after the second night. I am here tonight to help this long neglected enterprise limp into another year. Today is also the Boogie Woogie Flu's birthday and it's nearly dead. Today would have been Elvis's birthday, but he's dead.

Phast crackle