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

NEW YORK — Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped inspire Arlo Guthrie’s The 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 about 40 years, and indicated that she was in failing health. Other details were not immediately available.

“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 around and had a few good laughs, even though we knew we would never get a chance to talk again.”

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

On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a simple task 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, helped the Brocks throw out trash, but ended up throwing it down a hill because they couldn’t find an open dumpster. The police charged them with illegal dumping, jailed them briefly and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with major consequences.

In 1966, Alice Brock ran 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 disqualified him from entering the draft . The chorus was a tribute to Alice—whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, wasn’t actually called Alice’s Restaurant—which 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 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 perennial and part of popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” was the title of his million-selling debut album and the basis for 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, “Moose Come Walking.” At the time of her death, they had discussed 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 different times, though she would later admit that she didn’t initially care much for cooking or business. She would also cite her professional life as the reason her marriage fell apart, while denying rumors that she had cheated on her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who late in “Alice’s Restaurant” advised, “You can have anything you want” at Alice’s Restaurant, “except Alice.”