Alice Brock, who helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s classic Alice’s Restaurant, dies at 83

NEW YORK – Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts restaurant helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at the age of 83.

Her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie on the Facebook page of his own label, Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she had lived for about 40 years, and mentioned her poor health. Other details were not immediately available.

“This upcoming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke on the phone a few weeks ago and she was talking like old times. We joked and had a good laugh, even though we knew we would never have the chance to talk together again.”

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 carpenter, who encouraged her to leave New York and move to Massachusetts.

Guthrie, the son of famous folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962, when he was attending Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was a librarian. They became friends and kept in touch after he left school, when he stayed with her and her husband at the converted church in Stockbridge, which became the Brocks’ main residence.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1965, a simple act led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War, and the creation of a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins helped the Brocks take out the trash, but they ended up throwing it down the hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police charged them with illegal dumping, briefly jailed them, and fined them $50 for what seemed like a minor crime with serious consequences.

In 1966, Alice Brock ran The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star, and his breakthrough song was an 18-minute talking blues that told the story of his arrest and how he was excluded from the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice – whose restaurant, Guthrie noted, was not actually called Alice’s Restaurant – and one that has since been remembered by countless fans:

You can buy anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can buy anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / Walk right behind it / Just half a mile from the train tracks / You can buy anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.

Guthrie assumed his song was too long to be commercially accepted, but it soon became a radio fixture and part of popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” is the title of his million-selling debut album and the basis of a film and cookbook of the same name. Alice Brock wrote the memoir “My Life as a Restaurant” and collaborated with Guthrie on the children’s book “Mooses Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they were talking about an exhibition dedicated to her at her former home in Stockton, now the Guthrie Center, which serves free dinners every Thanksgiving.

Brock ran three different restaurants at different times, although she later admitted that she was not initially fond of cooking or business. She also mentioned professional life as the reason for the breakdown of her marriage, while denying the rumors about her husband’s infidelity. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who advised at the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, ‘except Alice.’