Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving standard, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, has died at age 83.
Her death, just a week before Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie on the Facebook page of his own Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing health. Other details were not immediately available.
“This coming Thanksgiving will be the first without her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke by phone a couple of weeks ago, and she sounded like her old self. We joked around and had a couple of good laughs even though we knew we’d never have another chance to talk together.”
Born Alice May Pelkey in New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who was a member of Students for a Democratic Society among other organizations. 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 resettle in Massachusetts.
Guthrie, son of the celebrated folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock around 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he would stay with her and her husband at the converted Stockbridge church that became the Brocks’ main residence.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a simple chore led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of military service during the Vietnam War and a song that has endured as a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were helping the Brocks throw out trash but ended up tossing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. Police charged them with illegal dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major repercussions.
By 1966, Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakout song was an 18-minute talking blues that recounted his arrest and how it made him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, 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 right in it’s around the back / Just a half a mile from the railroad track / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
Guthrie assumed his song was too long to catch on commercially, but it soon became a radio perennial and part of the popular culture. Alice’s Restaurant was the title of his million-selling debut album, and the basis of a movie 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 Stockton home, now the Guthrie Center, which serves free dinners every Thanksgiving.
Brock ran three different restaurants at various times, although she would later acknowledge she initially didn’t care much for cooking or for business. She would also cite her professional life as a cause of her marriage breaking up, while disputing rumors that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who late in Alice’s Restaurant advised: “You can get anything you want” at Alice’s Restaurant, “excepting Alice.”
