NEW YORK Alice Brock, whose restaurant in Massachusetts served as the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie’s famous Thanksgiving classic, Alice’s Restaurant Massacree, passed away at the age of 83.
Guthrie revealed her passing on his own Rising Son Records’ Facebook page on Friday, only one week before Thanksgiving. She passed away in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived for about 40 years, according to Guthrie, who also mentioned that her health was deteriorating. Additional information was not immediately available.
Guthrie wrote, “This Thanksgiving will be the first without her.” Alice sounded like her normal self when we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago. Despite the fact that we knew we would never have another opportunity to speak, we joked around and shared a few good laughs.
A lifelong dissident, Brock was born Alice May Pelkey in New York City and belonged to several groups, including Students for a Democratic Society. She married Ray Brock, a carpenter who urged her to leave New York and relocate to Massachusetts, after leaving Sarah Lawrence College in the early 1960s and relocating to Greenwich Village.
Guthrie, the son of renowned folk performer Woody Guthrie, first encountered Brock in 1962 while he was a student at Massachusetts’s Stockbridge School, where she served as the school librarian. After he left school, he resided with her and her husband at the Stockbridge church that was transformed into the Brocks’ primary residence, and they remained friends.
A straightforward task on Thanksgiving Day, 1965, resulted in Guthrie’s detention, his eventual escape from Vietnam War service, and a song that has become a holiday favorite and protest classic. Unable to locate an open dumpster, Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins ended up throwing the rubbish down a hill while assisting the Brocks with their trash disposal. A seemingly little infraction with serious consequences, police accused them of illegal dumping, momentarily imprisoned them, and fined them $50.
By 1966, Guthrie was a growing artist and Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge. His breakthrough song, an 18-minute talking blues, described his imprisonment and how it disqualified him from the draft. Numerous admirers have since committed the chorus to memory as a tribute to Alice, whose establishment, as Guthrie noted, was not truly named Alice’s establishment:
Alice’s Restaurant offers a wide variety of items to choose from. It’s about a half mile from the railroad track, so you can walk right in. Alice’s Restaurant has everything you could ever want.
Guthrie thought his song was too long to be financially successful, but it quickly became a radio staple and a cultural icon. His first album, Alice’s Restaurant, sold millions of copies and served as the inspiration for the same film and cookbook. In addition to working with Guthrie on the children’s book Mooses Come Walking, Alice Brock would create a memoir titled My Life as a Restaurant. They had been talking about a tribute show at her old Stockton house, now the Guthrie Center, which hosts free Thanksgiving feasts, at the time of her passing.
Although she would later admit that at first she wasn’t very interested in cooking or business, Brock operated three distinct restaurants at different points in time. In addition, she would deny reports that she had cheated on her spouse and blame the dissolution of her marriage on her work life. When Guthrie said, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, except for Alice,” late in the evening, he immortalized her honor.
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