From "Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83/Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple 'Alice’s Restaurant' was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts" (NYT).
November 25, 2024
"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.... Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself....The song made Ms. Brock famous, too, even though by the time it appeared she had shut down her restaurant. 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.... I resented it for a long time... But I’ve come to realize now that people are just delighted when they hear my name, so how can I complain?'"
From "Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83/Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple 'Alice’s Restaurant' was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts" (NYT).
From "Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83/Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple 'Alice’s Restaurant' was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts" (NYT).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
32 comments:
Remember when the left was anti-war?
But that was yesterday
and yesterday's gone.
Shrink, I wanna kill Russians.
Guthrie is even more tedious on celluloid than on vinyl.
My birth home was in Great Barrington so I have memories of Stockbridge at that time. The church is actually closer to GB and we’d see Arlo et al through that narrow glass window in the kitchen from time to time. My high school friends and I would often quote the Massacree- ‘the eight by ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back uh each one…’ I can’t watch the movie- the acting is too cringe but I used to root for the chartreuse microbus…
I was more familiar with the Group "W" bench, than I was with the restaurant.
“(excepting Alice)”
As we too soon forget, peaceniks like Guthrie (père et fils) are conditional pacifists. As long as capitalists are doing the dying, they're cool with it.
Kid, what’d ya get?
Mass appears to be the only completely blue state.
Woody was pretty much a Communist, but Arlo endorsed ur-capitalist Ron Paul because of Paul's non-interventionism. He had to backtrack later and tell people that he hadn't become a Republican.
I'm sure I have seen the movie but I can't remember anything about it. The song is more memorable, but until just now I hadn't thought about it in years. It has a catchy refrain, like an advertising jingle. However, it celebrates a crime against the environment and should be cancelled......Apparently the song and the movie meant a lot to some people. According to the obit, when Alice fell upon hard times, she launched a Go Fund Me page and speedily raised $170,000. Her fame wasn't ephemeral or meaningless.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974).
This is the sort of pop phenomenon that kids today see and go, "Neat. Silly, but neat." Then they watch Logan's Run and other more dystopian movies of the era and start reading Vonnegut and Brautigan and get depressed.
the song was about a rich white boy, desecrating the environment; and trying (HARD!) to make a Black man take his place in the war.
The song celebrates both mother st*bbing and father r*ping.
The song ALSO celebrates perjury
Went to Youtube and the "original Song" is 18 minutes long! Tried it at 1.5 speed and still had to bail out after 5 minutes. I still like "I'm changing my name to Chrysler".
Alice Brock was one of those normal people who did not seek fame but had it dropped on her. Some time after she closed the diner, she opened a small, very nice restaurant by the river. (Another Alice - Waters - was big influence on restaurants and cooking at that time.) Later on, she bought a big commercial restaurant and hotel next to Tanglewood but that seemed to be a stretch and I think she sold that pretty soon thereafter.
She seemed to manage her fame, such as it was, fairly well. She didn't try to ubermonetize herself. In contrast to the Hawk Tuah gal who's trying to cash in and extend her 15 minutes. Not that she can be blamed because fame is fleeting, and her life will soon return to "normal".
"Group W is where they putcha if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committin' your special crime. There was all kinds of mean, nasty ugly-lookin' people on the bench there. There was mother rapers... father stabbers... father rapers... Father rapers! Sittin' right there on the bench next to me!"
Fond memories of waiting for whatever radio station (WAPL in the '70s and early '80s for me) to play it on T-Day. To this day I still can't say "VW Microbus" in anything but that fashion. Or "Kid....we don't like your kind". Or say something like "I'll go get the shovels -- and other implements of destruction". Or how "I look and feel my best this morning." Or "Motorcy............cle" (to pick from another one).
Is that where society went wrong? The 60s with JFK's Camelot, civil rights, women's rights, environmental concerns, etc. made a hard turn to identity politics (all military personnel rape and murder) and narcissism-this land is your land-dump your trash anywhere. And my mother and her Unitarian friends just loved that stupid song. And Classic Liberalism died.
I hated that song. Thanks for reminding me.
Not quite. My Republican (and Trump-supporting) brother gets elected regularly on Cape Cod by landslide numbers, to the all-powerful and heavily contested Register of Deeds office.
I think they keep re-electing him so that he won't get ideas of running for national office. ;^)
A very tiny red dot in a blue sea.
...it just feels like it.
Listening to the full version of the song was a Thanksgiving tradition of my late wife. I will remind her daughters on Thursday and I will listen to it every year until I die.
There are pockets of resistance. My sister-in-law had a seat on the city council of Northampton, and she is full hard right.
I've got an autographed copy of the Alice's Restaurant Cookbook, which I found at a used-bookstore in the 1970s. It's total Sixties, with screechy graphics and very loud colors. Lots of photos of Alice and her hippie fans. The men look pretty ridiculous, with silly hats and handlebar mustaches, but some of the girls are very pretty, among them Alice herself wearing a wreath of flowers. The book is clearly aimed at hippies who didn't know how to boil water: very basic (how to use spices, etc.), and the recipes are quite simple--but they look delicious. Tasty American cooking: roast chicken, shrimp salad, pot roast, Swedish meatballs. The kind of stuff the hippies probably loved at her restaurant. Since this was the 1960s, when sometimes all you could find were canned and frozen products, she told her readers how to doctor up canned soup with a little wine, lemon juice, or curry powder, and that drenching frozen vegetables with butter and/or sour cream could make them taste fantastic. She was right. Also wonderful were her entertaining tips: Don't worry if you don't have enough--or even any--fancy serving dishes or dinner plates; serve the stuff in hubcaps if you have to, and you'll be just fine. Again, she was completely right. I'm sad that she's gone.
I first heard "Alice's Restaurant" on an "independent" radio station (I have no recollection of the name or call letters) in New York when I was in law school. I wouldn't call it "anti-war" so much as "anti-draft". At that time I knew that Arlo's father, Woody, was (had been?) a communist, but that was in another country ("and besides the wench is dead"). Arlo is the first person I heard perform "The City of New Orleans", and for years I thought he'd written it. THAT was a great song!
Am I the only one that thinks Arlo looks like a forlorn Cocker Spaniel?
Didn't used to be - Berkshire County (where we live) used to intermittently elect Republicans before it was gerrymandered into a safe Blue district.
We moved to Stockbridge a few years ago and - as might be expected from a town that relies on tourism - the location of Alice's Restaurant is well marked - although it has not been used as restaurant for years.
Post a Comment