I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I’d never actually listened to Alice’s Restaurant until today, prompted by a documentary on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition called You Can Get Anything You Want: Arlo Guthrie’s New Religion
.
The weird thing–and I use that word deliberately–is that my brother and I independently recognized it as the stylistic source for one of Weird Al Yankovic‘s early original songs, Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung. Al does a lot of these style parodies
, and I often like them better than his actual song parodies.
(I should point out that we’re hardly the first ones to notice the similarities.)
This post also gives me an excuse to quote Arlo’s father, Woody:
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Woody Guthrie, via Eric Costello
