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

NEW YORK — 

Alice Brock, whose Massachusetts-based eatery helped animate Arlo Guthrie's deadpan Thanksgiving standard, Alice's Restaurant Massacree, has died astatine property 83.

Her death, conscionable a week earlier Thanksgiving, was announced Friday by Guthrie connected the Facebook leafage of his ain Rising Son Records. Guthrie wrote that she died successful Provincetown, Massachusetts, her residence for immoderate 40 years, and referred to her being successful failing health. Other details were not instantly available.

"This coming Thanksgiving volition beryllium the archetypal without her," Guthrie wrote. "Alice and I spoke by telephone a mates of weeks ago, and she sounded similar her aged self. We joked astir and had a mates of bully laughs adjacent though we knew we'd ne'er person different accidental to speech together."

Born Alice May Pelkey successful New York City, Brock was a lifelong rebel who was a subordinate of Students for a Democratic Society among different organizations. In the aboriginal 1960s, she dropped retired of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village and joined Ray Brock, a woodworker who encouraged her to permission New York and resettle successful Massachusetts.

Guthrie, lad of the celebrated people instrumentalist Woody Guthrie, archetypal met Brock astir 1962 erstwhile helium was attending the Stockbridge School successful Massachusetts and she was the librarian. They became friends and stayed successful interaction aft helium near school, erstwhile helium would enactment with her and her hubby astatine the converted Stockbridge religion that became the Brocks' main residence.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1965, a elemental chore led to Guthrie's arrest, his eventual avoidance of subject work during the Vietnam War and a opus that has endured arsenic a protestation classical and vacation favorite. Guthrie and his person Richard Robbins were helping the Brocks propulsion retired trash but ended up tossing it down a elevation due to the fact that they couldn't find an unfastened dumpster. Police charged them with amerciable dumping, concisely jailed them and fined them $50, a seemingly insignificant discourtesy with large repercussions.

By 1966, Alice Brock was moving The Back Room edifice successful Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising prima and his breakout opus was an 18-minute talking blues that recounted his apprehension and however it made him ineligible for the draft. The chorus was a tribute to Alice — whose restaurant, Guthrie pointed out, was not really called Alice's Restaurant — that countless fans person since memorized:

You tin get thing you privation astatine Alice's Restaurant / You tin get thing you privation astatine Alice's Restaurant / Walk close successful it's astir the backmost / Just a fractional a mile from the railroad way / You tin get thing you privation astatine Alice's Restaurant.

Guthrie assumed his opus was excessively agelong to drawback connected commercially, but it soon became a vigor perennial and portion of the fashionable culture. Alice's Restaurant was the rubric of his million-selling debut album, and the ground of a movie and cookbook of the aforesaid name. Alice Brock would constitute a memoir, My Life arsenic a Restaurant, and collaborate with Guthrie connected a children's book, Mooses Come Walking. At the clip of her death, they had been discussing an grounds dedicated to her astatine her erstwhile Stockton home, present the Guthrie Center, which serves escaped dinners each Thanksgiving.

Brock ran 3 antithetic restaurants astatine assorted times, though she would aboriginal admit she initially didn't attraction overmuch for cooking oregon for business. She would besides mention her nonrecreational beingness arsenic a origin of her matrimony breaking up, portion disputing rumors that she had been unfaithful to her husband. Her grant was immortalized by Guthrie, who precocious successful Alice's Restaurant advised: "You tin get thing you want" astatine Alice's Restaurant, "excepting Alice."