Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard‘Alice’s Restaurant Massacree’, has died at the age of 83.
Guthrie announced the death on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records label.
“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self. We joked and laughed a few times, even though we knew we would never get the chance to talk together again.”
Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived for some forty years, and referred to her poor health. He did not say what the cause of death was.
Born Alice May Pelkey in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who, among other things, was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village and married Ray Brock, a woodworker who encouraged her to leave New York and settle in Massachusetts.
Guthrie, son of celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and kept in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband in the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks’ main home.
On Thanksgiving Day 1965, a simple job led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual evasion of military service during the Vietnam War and a song that remains a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins helped the Brocks throw away trash, but ended up throwing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police accused them of illegal dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major consequences.
In 1966, Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakthrough song was an 18-minute talking blues in which he talked about his arrest and how it made him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice—whose restaurant, Guthrie noted, was not actually called Alice’s Restaurant—that countless fans have since memorized:
“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / Walk in the back / Just half a mile from the railroad tracks / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. “
Guthrie assumed his song was too long to catch on commercially, but it quickly became a radio staple and part of popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” was the title of his million-selling debut album and the basis of a film and cookbook of the same name.
Alice Brock would write a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant,” and collaborate with Guthrie on a children’s book, “Mooses Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they had been discussing an exhibit dedicated to her at her former home in Stockton, now the Guthrie Center, where free dinners are served every Thanksgiving.
Brock ran three different restaurants at different times, although she would later admit that she initially did not care much for cooking or business. She also cited her professional life as the cause of the breakdown of her marriage, while disputing rumors that she had been unfaithful to her husband.
Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who advised late in “Alice’s Restaurant”: “You can get anything you want” at Alice’s Restaurant, “except Alice.”
