Opinion: Sarasota's touching connection to the iconic song "Alice's Restaurant''
Alice Brock was the person who helped everyone else. If someone needed a job, money or a meal, she was always there.
About three years ago, however, it was Alice who needed help. Money and health problems left her struggling physically and financially. Approaching 80, she had COPD and heart disease and was tethered to an oxygen tube. An artist, she was unable to use her hands and sell her work, and she needed money to stay in her Provincetown, Mass. cottage too.
That's where Dini Lamot came in.
The area's biggest icons: OPINION: From Mick Jagger to Michael Jordan, Elvis to Edison, Sarasota-Manatee icon list tough to crack
The Edmund Fitzgerald: Opinion: The Manatee-Sarasota connections to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Bradenton and Lee Harvey Oswald: OPINION: Manatee, Kennedy and the Story of the Century
Lamot and his long-time life partner, Windle Davis, who split time between Sarasota and Maine, set up a GoFundMe page to help Alice out, and the person who spent decades doing for others reluctantly agreed to accept. A total of $179,720 was raised, enough to pay medical bills and keep her in her cottage.
Never heard of Alice Brock, you say?
Oh, but you have.
She was the friend of legendary folk singer Arlo Guthrie and the impetus for the American classic "Alice's Restaurant," a Thanksgiving staple. The 1967 song is such a treasure that it is preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically and artistically significant." It also inspired a movie.
What's really an anti-Vietnam War draft song runs over 18 minutes? Most of the lyrics are spoken by Guthrie, though everyone's heard the chorus at some point, maybe even sung it too:
"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
The song that made Brock reluctantly famous is largely based on a true account.
In 1965, Guthrie and a friend were celebrating Thanksgiving with Brock and her former husband at a church they were living at in Stockbridge, Mass. After the meal, Brock asked Guthrie and his friend to take some trash to a dump, but it was closed. They instead threw the trash at a different spot where some already existed and were arrested. The story goes on from there.
Brock, at the time, did own a restaurant that was called "the Back Room," which was underneath Norman Rockwell's studio.
As for Dini Lamot, he and Windle Davis were the founders of a 1970s new wave band in Boston called the Human Sexual Response.
Lamot did not meet Brock until 1991, when he was doing some landscaping at her cottage, according to a 2020 story in Sarasota Patch. The two became close friends over the years, and because Lamot was so impressed by Brock's generosity throughout her life he set up the GoFundMe page after she needed help.
Lamot called the page "You can give anything you want," a nod to the song's famous chorus.
The donated money has helped because Brock is still around. Last year, in fact, she and Arlo Guthrie celebrated Thanksgiving together for the first time since 1965, when the events took place that led to the legendary song.
Guthrie and Brock even went back to the same church where the Thanksgiving meal was held and they posed for a photo together.
Beneath the photo, Guthrie wrote these words on Facebook:
"Old friends are something to be celebrated and having them is something to be thankful for."
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: The story of Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant, Sarasota and friendship
