Alice's Restaurant (Original Soundtrack)

Album Review

As an album, the original soundtrack to Alice's Restaurant — like a lot of movie soundtracks — is something of a dud, bound for collecting dust after a few listenings; for most buyers, its greater value is its collectible potential as a piece of Arlo Guthrie memorabilia, and not as a listening experience. Fans of the movie will likely find the soundtrack more a letdown than it logically should be: it doesn't include some of the movie's most memorable musical moments, such as Arlo's kazoo-blowing coffeehouse rag, his duet with Pete Seeger on Woody Guthrie's "Car Song," or the emotional guitar arrangement of "Amazing Grace." The title story-song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," is reproduced here in a new, two-part version which pales in comparison with the original — indeed, its weakest points sound almost like a parody of the more famous performance. The record is filled out by a few short, folk-rock instrumentals composed by Guthrie or the album's producer, Garry Sherman; an a cappella, congregational "Amazing Grace"; the guitar solo "Crash Pad Improvs," which cropped up with lyrics a year later as "Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad # 16 Blues"; a throwaway honky tonk vocal (sung by Al Shackman) that is either a send-up of or tribute to classic country, or both; and Joni Mitchell's painfully dated "Songs to Aging Children," sung by Mitchell impersonator Tigger Outlaw. It can be said in favor of the album that it boldly went where few movie scores had gone before, abandoning typical Hollywood orchestrations for banjos, harmonicas, and electric guitars, and the resulting instrumentals are good if unexceptional. Still, the soundtrack fails to do justice to the score you actually remember from the movie, and the original LP is best left to the die-hard fans and collectors. Fortunately, when Rykodisc reissued the album on CD in 1998, it included the missing stuff, making for a much more satisfying listen.