Memories of Arlo and Alice

When I pull out “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” to listen to it this Thanksgiving — a tradition I share with many other aging hippie/boomers — the moment will be tinged with sadness.

Alice Brock is gone.

She died at 83 last week, seven days before Thanksgiving, a day we have long associated with her.

Alice had no idea what she was starting back on Thanksgiving Day of 1965 when she served a holiday dinner to her friend, Arlo Guthrie. He was only 18, trying to make a living as a folk singer. He did have a solid role model — his dad, Woody.

We well know what happened on that fateful day when Arlo and his buddy, Rick Robbins enjoyed their special meal with Alice and her husband, Ray Brock — and their dog, Fasha.

As Arlo told us in his 18-minute epic, Alice and Ray were living in the bell tower of an old church near her restaurant in Great Barrington, Mass. And because the Brocks had taken out the pews downstairs and thus had all that empty space, “they decided that they didn’t need to take out the garbage for a long time.”

Well, as “a friendly gesture,” Arlo and Rick decided to load the “half a ton of garbage” into the back of a red VW microbus and take it to the town dump. Confronted by a “Closed for Thanksgiving” sign, they found another pile of garbage at the bottom of a cliff and threw the Brocks’ garbage on top of it.

They returned to the church and had “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.” But the next morning they received a call from “Officer Obie” of the Stockbridge P.D. He had found Arlo’s name on an envelope at the bottom of that half ton of garbage.

You know the rest of the story: their arrest for “litterin’’ followed by being fined $50 and made to pick up the garbage; and the second part of the song wherein Arlo is summoned to the headquarters for the draft in New York but avoids being sent off to Vietnam because he’s a litter bug with a criminal record.

It took Arlo, assisted by Alice, two years to complete this immortal tale. But upon its release it became a rallying cry of the antiwar movement.

Yes, friends, that song was in the air in New Haven, CT (my adopted hometown) in 1968 when Raffael DiLauro, a young hippie with a long-flowing beard, opened his little “head shop” there. And he named it The Group W Bench, in honor of the place where the sergeant ordered Arlo to sit because he wasn’t “moral enough to join the Army after committing your special crime.”

New Haven’s Group W Bench is still there! The spirit lives on. You should check it out.

When I interviewed DiLauro six years ago for the New Haven Register upon his store’s 50th anniversary, I asked him if the Group W was still relevant. His reply: “Absolutely! More so than ever. It all came around again. ‘Impeach Nixon’ is now ‘Impeach Trump.’” Comin’ back around indeed.

There’s somebody else I interviewed because I’ve been so inspired and amused by the story of Alice’s Restaurant — the great man himself. In 1992, long after the Brocks had sold that famous church and moved away, Arlo rallied the community to restore it as a home for the Guthrie Foundation, contributing to AIDS research and other worthy causes. Seeing a news hook, I snagged an assignment with Berkshire magazine to get Arlo talking about all this. He told me he envisioned Alice’s old church as a place “where people can come to be touched, to be held and to be hugged.”

I felt that church’s special spiritual aura when I attended its rededication on Jan. 30, 1992. Arlo, Alice and all their old friends were there.

By then Alice had moved to Provincetown and taken up painting. She especially loved to paint little stones, which she scattered on the beach. Through sheer serendipity, I have one — when my wife, Jennifer Kaylin, was the editor of the Hartford Advocate in 1987, she assigned Andrius Banevicius, a young reporter who loved the Alice story, to write about her legacy. And he came back from Massachusetts with a few of her stones. Knowing of my shared interest, he gave me one of them. It still sits atop the bureau in my bedroom.

Can you get “anything you want” from Alice? One of her whimsical stones is enough for me. Thanks, Alice!