I met Arlo in '67 a little before the song became a big hit. Even at that point he was getting a little tired of singing and telling the story every night. I watched him a lot at the Gaslight and there were actually 3 different versions of Alice's Restaurant that I heard, all of them using the chorus, but each one different. The only one I remember was the Alice's Restaraunt Please Tip The Gaslight Waitress Blues, the premise of which was "If you don't tip the waitress, it would mean that you were destroying the capitalist system, and nobody wants to see that happen, do they?" I thought that at the time he was going to need an operation to remove his tongue from the inside of his cheek.

Mark Ross