My uncles grumbled the minute Frank walked through the front door, staring at him from the kitchen as if he’d just stepped off a spaceship from Mars. My uncles – with their long history of military service – glaring at my friend’s long hair, bellbottom jeans and Nehru shirt as if ready to haul him to a barber.
Uncle Harry asked me how I could bring a character like this home, fumbling for words because he couldn’t say “long hair” or “hippie” without getting angry. On the road, I’d heard him mumble the usual stereotypical remarks about not being able to tell the boys from the girls.
But standing in my front hall, Frank defied even that, his crooked teeth and jack-o-lantern face making him look more the part of a scarecrow than a woman.
Frank did not look so odd when we had worked as ushers at the local theater a year earlier, but growing his hair and adopting his lifestyle had transformed him, and I had no way to defend Frank’s logic with uncles groomed on World War II and the Korean conflict.
We had come to my house to listen to records, the covers of which my uncles could not see; otherwise they would surely have banned him.
I didn’t own a record player, but the family did. It was kept it in a corner of the dinning room, separated from the living room, where my uncles sat to watch TV, by a set of thin pocket doors.
Even at the best of times, my uncles hated my music, shouting for me to “turn down that racket” whenever I played the Beatles and the Stones. I was uncertain how they would feel about the music Frank brought, since I knew nothing of Arlo Guthrie – although I had heard Arlo’s father, Woody, and thought the music resembled my uncles’ country & western, so we might escape our adventure unscathed.
I could not have been more wrong. The record Alice’s Restaurant was like no music I had heard before, and despite the volume set as low as possible, the grumbling started beyond the pocket doors as my uncles caught some of the lyrics.
“Turn it down!” one uncle shouted. “We’re trying to watch Bonanzain here.”
Maybe all of Arlo’s talk about Thanksgiving dinner made my uncles hungry, or maybe his talk about piles of trash made them mad. Even with the sound toBonanza turned real high, I could hear them saying things about “Beatnik crap.”
I could already hear their lecture in my head, about the bad effect such music would have on my behavior. They would never get the record’s message about the unfairness of life, and – despite their own efforts at simplicity – how society intruded on us, keeping up from living life as Thoreau had suggested, plainly. As soldiers, my uncles had learned to follow rules, not break them, and resisted anything that would suggest I could set myself free.
That record became my anthem of independence, far more meaningful to my personal life than the Star Spangled Banner, and from that moment on I knew I wanted to become a hippie just like Frank. Later, I followed him to Greenwich Village, and we sang that and other hippie songs in the streets.
But always, Frank returned to “Alice’s Restaurant,” singing it over and over again, each rendition becoming more defiant, firming up for me the vision of that place in New England where we could get almost anything we wanted (except for Alice). Frank sang that song the whole summer of 1968, and then through the fall and winter into 1969. He sang it on the streets of Paterson and on the streets of Manhattan – he even sang it on the bus we took between the two. Once he created a near riot of other passengers when we got stuck outside the York Motel in North Bergen when he sang the song a half dozen times, ceasing this only when driver and passengers threatened to cast us outside.
Long after we stopped making our weekend pilgrimages to Manhattan, after we had ceased being hippies, after the 1960s ended and the 1970s began, I still thought of that song with reverence, and sat myself in front of the radio every Thanksgiving when the local rock station played it.
Then one day in the early ’70s, a very nostalgic Frank got it into his head that he wanted to visit the place. Perhaps he was disappointed about how our lives had turned out, full of fuel shortages and greedy people, and he wanted to return to the one place he knew kept the old spirit.
We drove north to New England, following directions Frank had obtained from a friend, keeping a wary eye out for Officer Obie, and for the railroad tracks the song said we had to cross. Elation over took us when we saw the place. Once parked, we ran towards the entrance, only to find a very large man with very muscular arms barring our way. He wanted to know if we had reservations. – Al Sullivan