Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie

Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie's debut album, came out on Reprise in October 1967 with Fred Hellerman producing, and its centrepiece is "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", a satirical talking blues that rambles on for about 18 minutes and never once loses the room. Woody Guthrie's son had picked up his father's habits, protest and a good yarn between verses, and here the yarn is the whole show: deadpan, sly, a shaggy-dog story with a stinger in its tail.

"The Motorcycle Song" is the lighter side of the coin, a goofy little folk tune. The record just kept selling, going gold in 1969 and platinum in 1986, and the Massacree became a Thanksgiving ritual; fittingly, the cover finds a shirtless Arlo in a black bowler hat, knife and fork in hand, napkin across his chest, waiting for Thanksgiving dinner. He cut the same material again live in 1996 as Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited.

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