Submitted photoArlo Guthrie will perform Tuesday at the Tower Theatre in Bend.

Sarah Lee Guthrie can’t remember the first time she heard her father Arlo Guthrie’s most well-known song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.”

The 18-minute-plus talking blues song was already more than a decade old when she was born in 1979, and her father’s music has always been part of her consciousness. As she puts it, “It was my bedtime story.”

However, she does recall the first time she saw “Alice’s Restaurant,” the 1969 film based on the song and starring Arlo — though she might wish she didn’t.

“That was kind of traumatizing in its own right — like, oh man, my dad in his whitey tighties? What’s going on?” Sarah Lee said, laughing, from the home she shares with husband and musical partner Johnny Irion in Santa Barbara, California — also coincidentally a stop on the final leg of the Alice’s Restaurant 50th Anniversary tour, which lands at the Tower Theatre on Tuesday.

“And I was in high school, you know, and I was completely embarrassed. … Because when you’re a kid it has no significance to you. You’re in your world with your friends, until your friends start calling, ‘Hey, Alice, “Alice’s Restaurant”!’ I’m like, oh shoot, really? You know about that? It’s shocked me at different times in my life that it actually has reached so far and wide.”

Sarah Lee is of course part of the show now — she’ll open for her father and join his band onstage at the Tower. That means she’s also been reliving some of that embarrassment each night of the tour, when clips of the film play behind Arlo during his solo performance of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” She laughs when this is pointed out to her.

“You know what? I never stop really appreciating it; I think it’s so funny and great,” she said. “I’m 37 years old, so 37 years of listening to this song, more than most people. I still find it to be really entertaining and really fun. And I love watching people’s reactions, especially when we get — you know what’s interesting, we get a lot of multi-generations in our crowds, and I’m seeing a lot of kids out there now. And I think it’s awesome that people are bringing their kids and their grandkids to the show, because to look out and see their faces, reactions and everything, that’s what I feed off of.”

The son of famed troubadour Woody Guthrie, Arlo is known for his Guthrie Family tours, where at least three generations of Guthries take the stage to play songs from every era of the family’s impressive musical history (the last one was in 2012).

But in reality, every tour is a family affair for the Guthries, and this one is no exception. Son Abe Guthrie, who has played with his father for 30 years, will once again lead the band (he also put together the multimedia portions of the show).

Sarah Lee got her musical start late — she’s played guitar with her husband in their eponymous duo for the last 15 years. She first joined her father onstage in 1998, after spending years as his road manager.

This current tour has featured Sarah Lee’s first solo performances without Irion. She joined her father on the road in September.

“This is a really cool time for me; I’m really growing and learning and becoming,” she said. “It’s been a great learning experience, as well as just so cool and fun to be out on the road with Dad again.”

This tour is special — Arlo rarely plays “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” anymore, except for the anniversaries every 10 years. And though its been ongoing since the beginning of last year, it’s still appropriate to call it the anniversary tour, given the song’s long gestation.

Arlo began writing it in 1965, the year the events in it began to unfold. The story, relayed in Arlo’s amiable, meandering monologue over a Piedmont fingerstyle guitar lick, is by now legend: An 18-year-old Arlo spends Thanksgiving at a church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts — the home of his friends and owners of the titular restaurant, Alice and Ray Brock. The Brocks ask Arlo and his friend (not named in the song) to take the church’s garbage to the dump. Finding it closed for the holiday, they dump the trash over a cliff. The song then goes into great detail on Arlo’s subsequent arrest, trial and punishment.

The second half of the song details Arlo’s experience before a Vietnam-era draft board. After several failed attempts to dodge the draft (including showing up hung over and attempting to convince the psychiatrist he was psychotic), Arlo eventually learns his littering conviction disqualifies him from service. The song ends with a call for anyone facing the draft to sing the song’s refrain to the examining psychiatrist: “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.”

In past interviews, Arlo has revealed the song was written as the events happened, taking about a year to complete. It was released on his first studio album, “Alice’s Restaurant,” in 1967.

During the 40th anniversary tour for the song in 2005, the U.S. was in the midst of war in Iraq, a situation not too dissimilar to Vietnam in the ’60s, as Arlo himself pointed out in interviews at the time. But the song transcends war or the draft. For Sarah Lee, the story is a reminder that humor can be a powerful weapon against an unjust — or just plain ridiculous — system.

“It’s not just an anti-war, anti-draft, protest song. To me it’s really — it’s a great story of a guy who beat the system, which is ridiculous, and he pointed out how ridiculous it is by using humor in the face of tragedy, and I think that in itself is quite genius,” Sarah Lee said. “And it’s something that we forget to do as humans. We get wrapped up in the significance of a certain fight, and we forget that, you know — we forget to be in the moment and laugh about things that are gonna pass, and it’s not always easy because these issues are really hard.”

The generations of veterans who have come out to the shows on this tour would seem to agree.

“It’s not just a throwback; I mean, these people are still living,” Sarah Lee said. “There’s veterans every night that come up to me when I’m out at the merch table or out by the bus. And I hear people go, ‘Hey, I was a veteran and you have no idea what this song has done for me; it saved my life, it helped me through my hard times.’ It was code in the war. People actually used terms like ‘Group W Bench,’ and they used terms like ‘Trinity Racing Club’ and all these kinds of things that came from the story as code to find out who your allies were.”

Sarah Lee has a full plate when this tour wraps in May. She’s working on a solo album at the moment, and she and Irion are planning another album with their children, a follow-up to their 2009 kids’ release “Go Waggaloo.”

At the same time she’s guiding a new generation of Guthries into the music business, she still sometimes finds herself struggling with her family’s legacy. But most of the time, she’s at peace with her own work — and the legacies of her famous father and grandfather.

“I go up and down; I get full of confidence, you know — my God, this is great, what a gift, I’m grateful and all of these wonderful ideas,” she said. “And then in the next minute, I’m like, shoot, what was I thinking? I just want to go run and hide. But the bottom line is, I think, really, yeah. It’s absolutely scary, but it’s just who I am.”

And fortunately, her family has been by her side all along.

“I have really wonderful teachers.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com