Alice's Champagne Palace is actually a bar and music venue in Homer, Alaska. It's a small town (about 5,000 people, with another 5,000 in the vicinity), but the people there are definite music lovers; one night when I was in town visiting family, Homer people managed to sell out both an appearance of the Kenai Peninsula orchestra (in the high school/community theater, about 500 seats) and an appearance of the jam band Moonalice at (of course) Alice's Champagne Palace (another few hundred in the next-door hall, IIRC). That's what this song is about, really -- Alice's Champagne Palace is both a campy-ass bar with frequent musical acts showing up (they had Bela Fleck and the Flecktones!) and a stand-in for Homer itself, which is a crazy little hippie town literally at the end of the highway.
Alice's Champagne Palace is actually a bar and music venue in Homer, Alaska. It's a small town (about 5,000 people, with another 5,000 in the vicinity), but the people there are definite music lovers; one night when I was in town visiting family, Homer people managed to sell out both an appearance of the Kenai Peninsula orchestra (in the high school/community theater, about 500 seats) and an appearance of the jam band Moonalice at (of course) Alice's Champagne Palace (another few hundred in the next-door hall, IIRC). That's what this song is about, really -- Alice's Champagne Palace is both a campy-ass bar with frequent musical acts showing up (they had Bela Fleck and the Flecktones!) and a stand-in for Homer itself, which is a crazy little hippie town literally at the end of the highway.