“All songs are stories — some better told and worth listening to than others.”-Arlo Guthrie, quoted in the Times Union.
There is no radio station that plays “All story songs all the time.” It’s a unique form, generally the exception in a musician’s oeuvre rather than the rule. Occasionally, though, a hybrid song and story breaks into the culture in a big way. I have been thinking about two of these tales, each of which launched the careers of the young men who created them, about 50 years apart.
The first is Alice’s Restaurant, released in 1967 (based on events that took place two years before) and Hi Ren, released in 2022. If you haven’t heard them, you can go listen now. It will take you about a half hour to listen to them both. (If you listen to all of the recorded versions of Alice, it will take you a good hour and a half.) Take your time. I’ll be here when you come back.
It is difficult to quantify the success of Alice’s Restaurant. At 18 1/2 minutes, it was too long to get regular airplay or feature in the Billboard 100 charts. The album got to #29, and spawned a movie and two remakes over the years. Hi Ren, released in 2022, has had more than 28 million views on Youtube alone. It is one of the most commonly featured songs (along with Phil Collins in the Air Tonight and The Righteous Brothers Unchained Melody) in reaction videos.
It is clear that each of these story songs struck a chord, which means they should say something about the eras that embraced them. What hits me first about these two tales is that one is dark and one is light. Alice’s restaurant is a comic adventure against big, impersonal, external forces, whereas Ren is an internal battle against demons. Alice is social, recorded in front of an audience that laughs and reacts. Ren is literally speaking to himself. Perhaps the bigger cultural story of these two songs is one of moving from community to isolation.
Maybe this is inevitable in music that was created during the fade out of a global pandemic that kept us apart and demonstrated our fragility and powerlessness against great natural forces. The extent to which our life plans are up to the whims of fate is something we work hard most of the time to keep hidden and the pandemic peeled back the veil.
The Vietnam War had something in common with the pandemic. If your draft notice came up it did not matter what plans you had made for yourself. You didn’t start the war. You might not even approve of the war. But you might be the one asked to conduct the war, to sacrifice your body or your life to it. It makes a mockery of the idea that you are the master of your own destiny. But this was true for only a subset of the population– young men of daft age. Because only one generation was at risk of being drafted, it set up a generational divide. How do you deal with that? Arlo’s answer was to laugh at it. Alice’s Restaurant shines a light on the absurdity of the authority figures who hold his fate in their hands.
I am reminded of Stephen Fry’s observation on the difference between American and British humor. He says that “The American comic hero is a wise cracker who is above his material and who is above the idiots around him…” whereas the British comic wants to play the failure. Although Arlo’s soft spoken, folksy, quasi-southern drawl in Alice’s Restaurant makes him seem like the underdog, he is, in fact, the one who uses his wit to perforate the pretensions of the authority figures.
Ren, meanwhile, is illustrating his own personal struggles with mental and physical illness and artistic failure. I don’t think this is because Arlo is American and Ren is British (although he is). In some ways it is like comparing apples to… something less like an apple than an orange. Arlo’s monologue is comic. Ren’s is dramatic. But another big difference is time.
Both songs use the musical form to their advantage, pausing the instrumentation for dramatic effect, playing with tempo. Both lead up to a call to sing out. In Alice’s Restaurant the song is part of a social movement. “Can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out? Friends they may thinks it’s a movement. And that’s what it is, the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come’s around on the guitar.”
Ren is singing out himself, to a distant audience. “So cower at the man I’ve become, when I sing from the top of my lungs that I won’t retire, I’ll stand in your fire, inspire the weak to be strong.”
There is something about the former, the idea that we can hold hands and sing a song together and change the world, that seems quaint and a bit dated. It must have seemed that way to Arlo too because when he re-recorded the anthem in 1995, he updated the lyrics from “if you’re in that situation there is only one thing you can do” to “well, there may not be a hell of a lot you can do at all, but there’s something you can try…” and “they might think it’s a movement” had the additional quip that “most of them would be too young to know what a movement was.”
In spite of this, Arlo always maintained a certain sentimental idealism in his performances, a belief that what unites is is greater than what divides us, and that things like music can bring people together. This, for me at least, has always been his appeal. I want to believe it. And in spite of the differences in tone, the dark and the light, the community vs. isolation, both songs are uplifting in their own way.
Although Ren says he was “made to be tested and twisted” and “made to be broken and beat” the good news is, so are we all. We are, each in our own ways, bruised and battered, but the victory is that we are still standing. It is our very brokenness that binds us in a shared humanity. This is where Ren’s song shifts from I to we.
I must not forget, we must not forget
That we are human beings.
Story and Self 