Alice Brock, Who Impressed Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’ Dies

Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped encourage Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving normal, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” has died at age 83.

Her dying, only a week earlier than Thanksgiving, was introduced Friday (Nov. 22) by Guthrie on the Fb web page of his personal Rising Son Information. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for some 40 years, and referred to her being in failing well being. Different particulars weren’t instantly out there.

“This coming Thanksgiving would be the first with out her,” Guthrie wrote. “Alice and I spoke by cellphone a few weeks in the past, and she or he seemed like her outdated self. We joked round and had a few good laughs despite the fact that we knew we’d by no means have one other probability to speak collectively.”

Born Alice Could Pelkey in New York Metropolis, Brock was a lifelong insurgent who was a member of College students for a Democratic Society amongst different organizations. Within the early Sixties, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence School, moved to Greenwich Village and married Ray Brock, a woodworker who inspired her to go away New York and resettle in Massachusetts.

Guthrie, son of the celebrated people musician Woody Guthrie, first met Brock round 1962 when he was attending the Stockbridge Faculty in Massachusetts and she or he was the librarian. They turned pals and stayed in contact after he left college, when he would keep together with her and her husband on the transformed Stockbridge church that turned the Brocks’ predominant residence.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a easy chore led to Guthrie’s arrest, his eventual avoidance of army service in the course of the Vietnam Battle and a music that has endured as a protest traditional and vacation favourite. Guthrie and his pal, Richard Robbins, had been serving to the Brocks throw out trash, however ended up tossing it down a hill as a result of they couldn’t discover an open dumpster. Police charged them with unlawful dumping, briefly jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly minor offense with main repercussions.

By 1966, Alice Brock was operating The Again Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star and his breakout music was an 18-minute speaking blues that recounted his arrest and the way it made him ineligible for the draft. The refrain was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie identified, was not really referred to as Alice’s Restaurant — that numerous followers have since memorized:

“You may get something you need at Alice’s Restaurant/ You may get something you need at Alice’s Restaurant/ Stroll proper in it’s across the again/ Only a half a mile from the railroad observe/ You may get something you need at Alice’s Restaurant.”

Guthrie assumed his music was too lengthy to catch on commercially, however it quickly turned a radio perennial and a part of the favored tradition. Alice’s Restaurant was the title of his million-selling debut album, and the premise of a film and cookbook of the identical title. Alice Brock would write a memoir, My Life as a Restaurant, and collaborate with Guthrie on a youngsters’s e book, Mooses Come Strolling. On the time of her dying, they’d been discussing an exhibit devoted to her at her former Stockton dwelling, now the Guthrie Middle, which serves free dinners each Thanksgiving.

Brock ran three totally different eating places at varied occasions, though she would later acknowledge she initially didn’t care a lot for cooking or for enterprise. She would additionally cite her skilled life as a explanation for her marriage breaking apart, whereas disputing rumors that she had been untrue to her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who late in “Alice’s Restaurant” suggested: “You may get something you need” at Alice’s Restaurant, “excepting Alice.”