[guitar intro] 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 It all started a little over three months ago, actually a hundred days ago, when I got a message from my employer. I was informed that I wouldn't have to go into work again for a long time, and I was also informed that I shouldn't go anywhere, see anyone, or touch anything. So me and my family of four were crammed into our tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and we stayed there for what seemed like forever. I started singing some songs, and everything was fine for a few weeks, but then that tiny one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment started to feel smaller and smaller and my two children started to sound louder and louder and soon everybody was grumpier and grumpier. So we packed up the family into our black Dodge Caravan with a roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse and went off looking for another place to ride out armageddon. Now when we set off in the van, we all noticed a horrible odor. It turns out if you park a car on a Brooklyn street for weeks and weeks, sometimes you end up with furry inhabitants. These particular inhabitants seemed to have a particular love for chicken bones, and it turned out that a whole family of rats had built a nest in the ventilation system, and for some time it had been their black minivan instead of ours. We had to take apart the ventilation system and clean it out and spray a bunch of different chemicals in there, but that's not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about tennis. Now during a global pandemic, if you manage to stay far far away from everybody else for at least fourteen days, and you know somebody else who's also been able to stay far away from everybody else for fourteen days, and as long as neither of you gets sick, you can decide to get together and stay away from everybody else, together. And that's what we did. And my family and my wife's sister's family joined up with my wife's parents, and our little universe of four people was now at least eight and a half people. And there were some activities that hadn't been possible before, and my brother and I started playing tennis. And with nowhere to go and nobody to see, we ended up playing quite a lot of tennis. And on the very first day we went to the tennis court, we saw a little metal box on the end of the court. And it said, in Sharpie, one dollar for sixty minutes, quarters only. And we looked up, saw some floodlights up above, and we realised that we just might be able to play tennis in the middle of the night, which seemed exceptionally socially distant and like a very good idea. So one night we decided to give it a try, and we started looking around for quarters. Neither of us had been to the store for at least two months, much less received any kind of actual change, so we looked in every pocket we had, we scoured every last crevice of the black Dodge Grand Caravan with the roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse, and after much effort we managed to find six quarters. We headed up to the tennis court, parked the Caravan in the grass, grabbed our tennis rackets, and headed for the court. When we got to the court, there was a problem that we hadn't counted upon. We walked up to the box, took out our six quarters, and read what it said on the box: two dollars for sixty minutes, quarters only. I went over to my brother-in-law, and I said brother-in-law, I swear it was only one dollar. I'm not sure he believed me, and we weren't feeling too good until we looked over and noticed there was another box at the end of the next court over. We walked over to that one and it said, in Sharpie, one dollar for sixty minutes, quarters only. And everything was fine until we tried to put a quarter in it, and the quarter came right back out. So we put another one in, and it came right back out. So at this point we knew that we needed two more quarters, so we called up Alice -- remember Alice? this is a song about Alice -- we called up Alice and asked her if she had any more quarters. She said she did, and when we got back to the house, she had exactly two more quarters there waiting for us. We drove back to the tennis court in the black Dodge Grand Caravan with the roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse, and parked back on the grass, grabbed our tennis rackets, walked back onto the court, went back up to the metal box that said it cost two dollars, we put the quarter in the box, and it plunked back out the bottom. We put another one in there, and it did the same thing. Now at this point, we came to the realisation that it was a typical case of American infrastructure deterioration, and we weren't going to be playing tennis in the middle of the night, and we were just about to head back home with our tails between our legs when my brother-in-law turned to me and said, do you have a screwdriver? And I ran back up to the black Dodge Grand Caravan with the roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse, retrieved some tools, and we opened up the electrical box. We looked at the specification of the switches inside the box, and on the internet determined the function of each wire, and we found a jumper wire that just happened to be hanging from the fence there, right there on the fence, and everything was fine. We were all ready to hot-wire the lights when a dark SUV slowly approached the Caravan. Now let me tell you about the town of Clayton, New York, where this is happening. They have three full-time police officers, two part-time police officers, and one police car. But rumor has it they're all getting laid off, so you can imagine how much they want to make it look like they're doing their jobs. Anyway, the SUV slowed up on the road, and stopped right behind the black Dodge Grand Caravan with the roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse, and turned on the searchlight, and carefully inspected the Dodge Grand Caravan, its roofbox, and no doubt found some of the many things we had in there for surviving the apocalypse. We were standing there in the dark, naturally. My friend was holding a piece of wire and a screwdriver. I was holding a tennis racket, since we were there to play tennis. And there we were standing, just frozen there, and the searchlight started to move away from the van, and it tipped up higher and higher. And the spotlight was racing towards us... until it shone directly on us... And I ... I thought at that moment our effort at playing night-time tennis was coming to a dramatic and unfortunate conclusion, and I was beginning to wish that we had never even attempted to hot-wire the Clayton Recreation Center's tennis court lights. And I was trying to think of what I might say if that officer came over to us, and decided my best course of action was to hold up my tennis racket high and say ... You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant Now of course, it didn't come to that. He lowered his spotlight and drove away, and we went back to hot-wiring the floodlights only to find that the power was out anyway. We got back in the black Dodge Grand Caravan with the roofbox loaded up with everything we might need to survive the apocalypse, and drove back to the house without playing a single point of tennis. But it left me wondering exactly what it was Officer Obie was looking for, if not, apparently, two grown men standing in the dark with a screwdriver and a tennis racket. And I ask you to ask yourselves, would the situation have ended any differently if the two of us hadn't looked quite as much like Officer Obie himself. And all we were trying to do was play a simple game of tennis. If this pandemic has taught us something about anything, it's how it feels to try to do something exceptionally ordinary and face all kinds of obstacles and real peril along the way. And the only way that we're going to come out of a mess like this is by starting to work together. And we need to learn to empathise with each other and realise that someone else experiencing hardship over and over again probably represents a real problem and not some politically-motivated stunt to make you feel bad. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is you may find yourself in a similar situation, or you may be trying to empathise with someone in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that, trying to do something exceptionally ordinary but facing great peril, there's only one thing you can do. Lift up your voice and sing a bar of Alice's Restaurant. Now if just one person does it, they may think he's mentally ill. And hopefully they'll show him some compassion. And if two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both hippies and will probably just steal the rest of your beer. And if three people do it, can you imagine, three people looking straight into the face of an oppressor and singing Alice's Restaurant? They'll think it's a Tik-Tok and know that they're on camera. And can you imagine fifty people a day, I said, fifty people a day standing in solidarity and singing Alice's Restaurant? Well, friends, they may think it's a movement. And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement. And all that you've got to do to join is to sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar. 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 That was horrible. I've been singing this song for fifteen minutes. I could sing it for another fifteen minutes. Hell, I've been singing a song a day for a hundred days. I could do it for another hundred days. I'm not proud... or tired. Maybe a little tired. If you want to end this pandemic... If you want to end racism... we got to learn to work together. So we'll wait until it comes around on the guitar and sing it when it does, this time with harmony and feeling. Here it comes... 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
recording: Ben Gould [Facebook]