Arlo Guthrie / Alice's Restaurant / 1967
The Motorcycle Song
goofy, loose, comic
A deliberately silly, nonsense talking-blues built almost entirely on rhyme-driven wordplay and a repeated chorus that insists on a preference for motorcycles over pickles, tickles, and death. It's less a song with meaning than a demonstration of playful, improvisational absurdity within the folk tradition.
absurdism nonsense wordplay freedom/mobility anti-seriousness folk performance tradition
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing an unspecified audience directly and casually, as if telling a rambling anecdote at a live show; the voice is unreliable in the sense that it isn't trying to convey factual truth, only comic rhythm.
What happens
The song barely progresses in plot terms - it's a loose frame of the narrator visiting friends (Ray, then Mike) who each report some minor mishap, interrupted each time by the same insistent chorus about wanting to ride a motorcycle rather than face other options. The 'story' exists mainly as a scaffold for rhyme and repetition rather than for any developing arc.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with a fixed, unchanging chorus and short, loosely connected narrative verses that follow an almost nursery-rhyme rhyme scheme (repeating a line's end word for comic effect). The structure mimics oral storytelling and talking blues, where verses could seemingly be extended or improvised indefinitely.
Section by section
Opening chorus
“I dont want a pickle”
The song opens with its refrain rather than a verse, establishing the comic logic immediately: absurd alternatives are rejected in favor of the motorcycle, setting a tone of nonsense before any narrative context exists.
First verse (Ray)
A minimal anecdote about visiting a friend named Ray functions mostly as rhyme scaffolding - the friend's name and the narrator's actions are chosen for their sound rather than meaning, and the promised revelation of what Ray said is deferred into the next chorus.
Second verse (Mike)
The pattern repeats with a new friend, Mike, whose loss of his bike lightly gestures toward the fragility or precariousness of the freedom the chorus celebrates, though the tone remains comic rather than mournful.
Final chorus
The repeated cutoff on the word for motorcycle becomes almost a running joke by the end, turning the song's structure itself into a performance bit - a joke about repetition that the audience is in on by the third round.
Craft
- repetition/refrain
- The chorus repeats near-verbatim each time, reinforcing the comic insistence on the motorcycle preference and giving the song its singsong, incantatory quality.
- internal rhyme and repetition-as-joke
- Lines often repeat the same word or phrase back to back for a deadpan comic rhythm, mimicking a stammering or teasing storyteller.
- anticlimax
- Each verse builds toward a small revelation (what Ray or Mike says) that turns out to be trivial or absurd, undercutting narrative expectation.
- vocal fragmentation
- The chorus's word 'motorcycle' is cut off mid-word at the end of each round, a vocal device that turns the song itself into a playful, breathless performance gag.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as pure comic filler within the Alice's Restaurant album's storytelling frame - a wordplay exercise whose pleasure lies in rhythm, rhyme, and the running gag of the truncated word, not in any thematic depth. A secondary, more generous reading might see a faint undercurrent about the appeal of freedom and risk (motorcycles) against domestic annoyance and mortality (pickles, tickles, death), but this seems more incidental to the joke structure than intentional thematic work.
Context
This song appears as one of several short comic pieces on the Alice's Restaurant album, an LP centered on Guthrie's talking-blues storytelling style inherited from his father Woody Guthrie's tradition of narrative folk song. It functions as a lighter, almost novelty piece amid the album's more socially pointed material.
Listen for
- The comic timing of the chorus's cutoff on the final word each time
- The rhyme-driven, almost tongue-twister quality of the verse lines
- The deadpan, conversational delivery typical of Guthrie's talking-blues style
- How each verse's anecdote deflates into something trivial rather than dramatic
About Arlo Guthrie
Arlo Davy Guthrie is an American folk singer-songwriter. He is known for singing songs of protest against social injustice, and storytelling while performing songs, following the tradition of his father, Woody Guthrie.
b. 1947 / United States
Full biography and catalogue