Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where “you can get anything you want” in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song “Alice’s Restaurant,” died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.
Viki Merrick, her caregiver, said she died in a hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Ever since Mr. Guthrie released the song, officially called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in 1967, it has been a staple of classic-rock stations every late November, not to mention car trip singalongs on the way to visit family for Thanksgiving dinner.
Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself. Over the course of a little more than 18 minutes, Mr. Guthrie — doing more talking than singing — recounts a visit that he and a friend, Rick Robbins, paid to Ms. Brock and her husband, Ray Brock, for Thanksgiving dinner.
A shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead. The next morning the police arrest them for littering, and Ms. Brock has to bail them out.
That night she cooks them all a big meal, and the following day they appear in court, where the judge fines them $50. Later, Mr. Guthrie is ordered to an Army induction center, where he is able to avoid the draft because of his criminal record.
Ms. Brock helped write the first part of the song, up until the trial.
“We were sitting around after dinner and wrote half the song,” she told the writer C.A. Sanders, “and the other half, the draft part, Arlo wrote.”
Mr. Guthrie first performed the song at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, and it was the title track of his first album, released that fall. With its sardonic line “You want to know if I’m moral enough join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug?,” it became an unofficial anthem of the antiwar movement.
The song made Ms. Brock famous, too, even though by the time it appeared, she had shut down her restaurant. But it was an unwanted fame, she said, at least at first.
“I was very uncomfortable because public figures are not really treated with much respect,” she told WAMC Northeast Public Radio in 2014. “They really aren’t. Once your name is in the paper, people feel that they can go, ‘Oh, are you Alice? Turn around,’ like they want to see my behind or something.”
Through the 1970s, Ms. Brock tried her hand at several other restaurants. After closing the last one, in 1979, she moved to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, where she took up odd jobs to support her new career as a painter.
And, over time, she came to accept the lot that fame had cast her.
“I resented it for a long time,” she told WAMC. “But I’ve come to realize now that people are just delighted when they hear my name, so how can I complain?”
Alice May Pelkey was born on Feb. 28, 1941, in Brooklyn, though she liked to tell people that she had been conceived in Provincetown. Her mother, Mary (Dubrovski) Pelkey, worked in real estate, and her father, Joe Pelkey, was a printmaker.
She attended Sarah Lawrence College but left during her sophomore year, later citing her support for “unpopular political causes.” She moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she met Ray Brock, an architect and sculptor.
They married in 1962, and the next year they moved to Stockbridge, Mass. They both worked at the Stockbridge School, a private institution — he as an art teacher, she as a librarian — where they befriended Mr. Guthrie, a student there, who was the son of the folk singer Woody Guthrie.
Ms. Brock opened the Back Room at the urging of her mother, who also helped the couple acquire a deconsecrated Episcopal church, which they turned into their home and which is also part of the story told in “Alice’s Restaurant.”
In 1968, the director Arthur Penn made a film based on the song, with Ms. Brock played by Pat Quinn. (Ms. Brock served as a consultant and had a cameo.) Coincidentally, a scene in which the screen versions of the Brocks get married was filmed on the same day their divorce became official.
Ms. Brock is survived by her stepchildren, Becca, Jono and Fletcher Brock; two grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; and two great-great-grandchildren.
Ms. Brock closed the Back Room in 1967. She sold the church in 1971; Mr. Guthrie bought it in 1991 to house his archives and a community action center. By then she had moved to Provincetown, where she tried to put her fame behind her in favor of the tight-knit community she found on the Cape, which she considered her “chosen family.”
She wrote several books, including “The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook” (1969); “My Life as a Restaurant” (1976), an autobiography; and “How to Massage Your Cat” (1985), a children’s book. She also illustrated “Mooses Come Walking” (1995), written by Mr. Guthrie.
Over the last decade, Ms. Brock struggled with financial and health issues, and a friend set up a GoFundMe site for her — a situation highlighted in a 2020 feature on the NPR program “Morning Edition.” Fans of the song quickly opened their wallets, and within a few days they had raised over $170,000.
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