Alice Brock, the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Diner,” dies

Alice Brock dies at age 83.

Guthrie announced her death on his own Rising Son Records Facebook page on Friday (Nov. 22), just a week before Thanksgiving. Guthrie wrote that she died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she had lived for about 40 years, citing her declining health. Other details were not immediately released.

“This upcoming 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 and laughed, even though we knew we would never have the chance to talk together again.

Born Alice May Pelkey ​​in New York City, Bullock was a lifelong rebel and a member of organizations such as the Student Organization for Democracy. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village, and married carpenter Ray Brock, who encouraged her to leave New York and settle in Massachusetts.

Guthrie, the son of famed folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Bullock around 1962, when Bullock was a student at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts. And Bullock is a librarian. They became friends and stayed in touch after he left school, when he lived with her and her husband in a converted Stockbridge church, which became the Bullocks’ main residence.

A simple chore led to Guthrie’s arrest on Thanksgiving Day in 1965, he ultimately avoided military service during the Vietnam War, and the song became a protest classic and holiday favorite. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were helping the Bullock family throw away trash but ended up throwing it down the hill because they couldn’t find an open bin. Police charged them with illegal dumping, jailed them briefly and fined them $50, a seemingly minor crime that had serious consequences.

In 1966, while Alice Brock was running The Back Room restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star with his breakthrough song 18 minutes of bluesy music about his arrest and how it disqualified him from the draft. The chorus is a tribute to Alice—Guthrie points out that her restaurant is not actually called Alice’s—and has been remembered by countless fans ever since:

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s/You can get anything you want at Alice’s/It’s just a walk in the back/Only half a mile to the railroad tracks/You can get anything you want at Alice’s of anything.

Guthrie thought his song was too long to be commercially popular, but it quickly became a radio perennial and became part of pop culture. Alice’s Restaurant It was the title of his multi-million-selling debut album and the basis for a film and cookbook of the same name. Alice Bullock will write a memoir, my restaurant lifeand collaborated with Guthrie on a children’s book, moose walking. At the time of her death, they had been discussing creating an exhibit dedicated to her at her former Stockton home, now the Guthrie Center, which offers a free dinner every Thanksgiving.

Bullock ran three different restaurants at different times, although she later admitted that she initially cared little for cooking or the business. She also cited her career as the reason for the breakdown of her marriage, while dismissing rumors that she was unfaithful to her husband. Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie, who advised late in “Alice’s Diner” that “you can get anything you want at Alice’s Diner,” “except Alice.”