DAGMAR: BLOG

The Guthrie Center, Great Barrington, MA -- Last night, in our Dagmar travels from "here to where", it was 2 1/2 hours out and 2 1/2 hours back to get to this fabled hootenany in the Berkshires at the site of Arlo Guthrie's "Thanksgiving Day Massacree" and his timeless Viet Nam protest song "Alice's Restaurant". Each hour we had there there was worth many more than the hours spent getting there and back on the "Stockbridge to Boston" road made famous in James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James".  It felt, as one might predict, like a trip down memory lane and into the annals of truly great modern American "folk" music history. There was no red VW microbus, half ton of garbage, shovels, rakes or other implements of destruction, but there was a roomful of gentle and earnest people in a gorgeous building trading songs in a circle with friendly ghosts all around for an audience. Our host George Laye, who runs the center, was weary and drained after a trying day, but welcoming, kind and gracious. It's one of those things that make you grateful to be doing what you're doing, to have the the world at arms length and glad to be alive.

60's culture died an ugly death and was buried in a landslide of cynical hippies-turned-investment bankers climbing over one another in a rush to "get theirs" and get out.   The world of flower children turned into an avaricious and hedonistic "me" generation that with materialism and capitalism run amuck, has now left wounds that will take generations to heal.  But in these places one finds the best of what that culture was, populated by people who have a broad understanding of what it was really about, what they were doing at the time, and who remain dedicated to the best of the principles it stood for.

The "restaurant" in the song title that was never THE restaurant (that was a few miles away, in Stockbridge) -- which in any case, as the song points out, was never called "Alice's Restaurant" -- was a deconsecrated church, built in 1829, that Alice Brock and her husband Ray bought for $2,000 in 1964 and turned into their home.  Arlo Guthrie bought the church in 1991, and it is now a non-denominational, interfaith meeting place with peace symbols lighting the bell tower.  A plaque inside reads:  "One God -- Many Forms / One River -- Many Streams /  One People -- Many Faces / One Mother -- Many Children".  The "chapel" is now an airy, gorgeous music room where the "Troubadour" series of concerts takes place from Memorial Day to Labor Day every year.  Alice Brock moved to Provincetown, MA and owns an art studio and gallery there at 69 Commercial Street.  Thank you, Wikipedia, for this information.

-- Jim Bauer, March 12, 2010