Alice Block, Massachusetts-based eatery inspired Arlo Guthrie’s deadpan Thanksgiving classic” “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” has passed away at the age of 83.
Guthrie announced his death on the Facebook page of his label Rising Sun Records.
“This Thanksgiving will be the first Thanksgiving without her,” Guthrie wrote. “A few weeks ago, Alice and I talked on the phone and she was like her old self. Even though we knew we would never talk together again, we joked and had a few good laughs.” I did.”
Guthrie wrote that he died in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he had lived for about 40 years, noting that his health had been declining. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Born Alice Mae Pelkey in New York City, Bullock was a lifelong rebel and member of groups such as Students for a Democratic Society. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College, moved to Greenwich Village, and married Ray Bullock, a woodworker who encouraged her to leave New York and resettle in Massachusetts.
Guthrie, the son of famed folk musician Woody Guthrie, first met Bullock around 1962, when Bullock was attending Stockbridge School in Massachusetts, where she was the librarian. They became friends and kept in touch after he left school, staying with her and her husband in the renovated Stockbridge Church, which became the Bullock family’s main residence.
On Thanksgiving Day 1965, a simple chore led to Guthrie’s arrest and ultimately allowed him to avoid military service during the Vietnam War, and the song remains a protest staple and holiday favorite. It is. Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were helping the Bullock family dump their trash, but they couldn’t find an open trash can, so they ended up throwing the trash down a hill. Police charged them with illegal dumping, jailed them briefly, and fined them $50, a seemingly minor crime with major consequences.
By 1966, Alice Bullock was running The Back Room Restaurant in Stockbridge, Guthrie was a rising star, and his breakout song was about an arrest and subsequent non-drafting.18 It was a minute of talking blues. This chorus was a tribute to Alice (as Guthrie pointed out, Alice’s Restaurant wasn’t actually called Alice’s Restaurant), and has been remembered by countless fans ever since.
“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant / It’s just a short walk out the back / Only half a mile from the railroad tracks / You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant” .”
Although Guthrie considered his song too long to be commercially acceptable, it soon became a perennial play on the radio and part of popular culture. “Alice’s Restaurant” is the title of his million-selling debut album, which was the basis for the film and cookbook of the same name.
Alice Block wrote a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant,” and would collaborate with Guthrie on a children’s book, “A Moose Walks Down.” At the time of her death, they were discussing an exhibit dedicated to her at her home in Stockton, the Guthrie Center, which now hosts a free dinner every Thanksgiving.
Block ran three different restaurants at various times, but later admitted that he initially had little interest in either cooking or business. She also cited her professional life as the reason for the breakdown of their marriage, while disputing rumors that she was unfaithful to her husband.
Her honor was immortalized by Guthrie’s advice late in “Alice’s Restaurant” that in Alice’s Restaurant, “you can get anything you want” “except for Alice.”
