Professor Elam

Friday March 4, 2011

It was all about Alice and the Restaurant and Officer Obie and the VW Microbus. 

I just realized that while I know most of you do not know this song, you probably don't know the original mini van the official counter culture live in it if you have to vehicle, the VW Bus as it was called.

Anyway, Arlo burst on the scene in 1967 with 

Alice's Restaurant. This 'story' rambled for about twenty minutes in song form, too long for radio play. But it caught on  as did his career. Arlo is the son of Woody Guthrie, a folk singer of some note during the 1930s. It is a socionomic moment of note that Arlo had success just as the bear market of 1966-1982 began. His counter culture story about the absurdity of being arrested and ending up on the Group W bench hit a responsive chord as a rebellion against government intrusion in general We are seeing revolt in Wisconsin as I write, and by golly Arlo is back on tour, right at Gruene Hall. Another bear market, another guthrie Song. Click on the hyperlink to read the lyrics and yes those are the actual lyrics to the song. 

Our point here is that a socionomist would expect counter culture singers like the Guthries to emerge during times of social protest. And so the bear markets of 1930, late 1960s and now in 2011 are seeing a re emergence of his popularity. 

Interestingly the revolt in Wisconsin is being staged by people supported by the government. The Tea Party takes the opposite stance in wanting less support for that group, and so the battle rages. 

Groups like this played at funky spots like Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters in the late 1960s and 1970s. San Antonio has some interesting jazz spots but nothing like AWH. 

By the way, before there was a 1960s counter culture there was the Beat Generation which gave rise to the Beatnik.

Beatniks tended to hang out in coffee shops way before there was ever a Starbucks but we don't mean the Denny's kind of coffee shop, we mean the laid back with guitar playing beat generation James Dean fans of what passed for counter culture even then. 

Bob Denver poked fun at this group with his character Ernest Krebbs on the Dobie Gillis Show. Denver later played essentially the same character in Gilligan's Island, where he starred as Gilligan. Denver was never able to shake the long cultivated image of the light weight guy that didn't care in his  real life.