John Prine: C or D? (plus RFI: new album)

"But your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more.
We're already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into Heaven any more."

I may get the '90s album produced by the Heartbreaker next.

I have a weird affection for Common Sense, too. Esp. "Saddle in the Rain."
-- Huk-L (handsomishbo...), April 27th, 2005.

Lately is a word I seldom use (correctly).

"The waitress yelled at me. So did the food."

finally got The Missing Years. Not at the level of the s/t or Storm Windows, but the production glitz (John Mellencamp co-write) suits him.

He also co-wrote Mellencamp's "Jackie O" on the great great great Uh Huh.

So you went to a party with Jacqueline Onassis
If you're so smart, girl, why don't you wear glasses
So you can see what you're doin' to me

c

The one from a year or two back, Fair and Square? Outstanding. Has held up, gets deeper every time I've listened since the week it came out.

so are any of the eighties albums worth owning in their entirety? I heard "Maureen, Maureen," liked it a lot.

I think German Afternoons is worth owning. It's got one of his most fun songs - "Let's Talk Dirty in Hawaiian". I like Aimless Love too, it's got a great singalong about a family falling to the bottom of a bottomless lake. Oh and that's the album with "Maureen, Maureen" on it.

I've acquired more and more, Sweet Revenge the latest. "Blue Umbrella" and "A Good Time" are as funny and sharp as songwriting get.

he's also prime Sunday morning music.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5174X5AJ9PL.jpg

Perfect record.

...but really sad at times.

I find a certain comfort in that, but my wife simply has to reject Prine when she's not in the right mood.

Nobody's gonna say a bad word about the guy? Fine. Let me do it.

I can't do it.

He's too awesome. Nobody can do more with three chords and a two-note melody. The Missing Years and the Great Days comp plus the debut just about did it for me for a decade and a half, but lately I'm feeling the need to own 'em all in their entirety.

(Even "Let's Talk Dirty in Hawaiian" -- not my favorite of his songs, particularly as he misses an opportunity to use the best pun ever: "lack-o-nookie" as a Hawaiian word...)

love this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5axlwCBXC8

(did anyone ever see daddy and them? is it terrible?)

better than bob dylan

THERE I SAID IT

It may have been the Nanci Griffith duet version of "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" that finally made me notice him, but after seeing him with his great small band, and hearing various live albums and reissues from his independent label, I would pay whatever to see him play anywhere.

When I did see him, it was a high ticket price benefit for M.D. Anderson (where he underwent cancer treatment). I was in tears several times throughout the evening. "Sam Stone" in particular.

here's a version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tafy0RVXNOo&feature=related

^

love John Prine so much. ..

actually had to *leave* his concert -- after TWO hours -- this last march because, if I didn't, I would miss the last train (John played a concert at the high school suburb where he grew up. Maywood. awesome show. John talked and talked and talked. but what great stories!! the GREATEST stories. basically, a history of the evolution of suburban Chicago. and i am not even talking about the songs, I am talking about his introductions and his stories and perspective on the whole weird history, and his rise to fame, and his relationship with Roger McGruinn ... geez, but yeah, at a certain point, after 2+ hours, I had to check out .. I needed to catch the last train back from Maywood into Chicago, else I'dve been stranded ... John Prine, I love you man

this guy is really good at song titles
"the oldest baby in the world"
"he was in heaven before he died"
"aw heck"
etc.

also "hello in there" has got to be one of the most depressing songs

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-w4FoeF3yT/

Sturgill:

Im very sorry it took me so long..I had to go into the woods and let myself “just feel” this for a while.
You left on a gorgeous moon.

There are sometimes people in this life that you meet, seldom and few and far between it would seem, whose souls are so good and pure and beautiful that when they leave it seems if only for a brief while that everything else good and pure and beautiful in this world just left along with them. It blows you apart leaving everyone to see you broken. But then you come out of the woods and the funk to see the signs of Spring all around you and remember the joy and love they put into the world by always giving so much of themselves and you suddenly see them everywhere.

There is so much I never said only because I didn’t want to bother you with it. After all you never asked to be “John Prine”. There is so much I’ll never get to say now. You reminded me so much of my Grandfather it hurt sometimes. I never told you that.
I will miss the tours..I will miss our lunches..I will miss you listening to me bitch and complain about all the things you understood all too well and making me feel better sometimes by just sitting there saying nothing.
I will miss catching flies in mid-air with my hand just to make you laugh..I will miss showing up to the office and knowing Id just missed you there by finding my drums upside down..I will miss your corny ass jokes.
I will miss you. Every day.

So long old man.
You will always be loved.

(Sturgill Insta link is worth a click for the picture)

Then Isbell in the NYTimes:

A few years ago, my wife, Amanda Shires, was touring in Scandinavia with John Prine, and when they arrived in Sweden she saw him write “songwriter” on his customs form as his occupation. “When did you decide that it was OK to write ‘songwriter’ on these forms?” she asked him. “Today,” he told her. “I usually put dancer.”

John Prine was not a dancer. He was a songwriter and one of the best that ever lived, but he did love to dance. He danced around his house in Nashville with his wife, Fiona, danced in the driver’s seat of his beloved Cadillac and danced offstage every night, twirling an imaginary pocket watch. Once while performing onstage with John, I noticed him glance down past his Italian driving shoes to check the digital clock on the floor, and he saw me notice. He leaned in and whispered, “I wish we had more time.”

When John developed squamous cell cancer on his neck in 1998, his doctor told him he might never be able to sing again. John told him, “Doc, you’ve never heard me sing.” He didn’t consider himself to be much of a singer; his honest delivery had always been what mattered most. Cancer and the subsequent treatments left John with a low whisper of a singing voice, but one that, if anything, aligned even more perfectly with the hard-won wisdom of the characters he created.

John was in his early 20s when he wrote “Hello in There” from the perspective of an old man sharing an empty nest with his lonely wife. Hearing him sing the song after decades of hard living and surviving numerous illnesses brought new meaning to the lyrics, now delivered by a man who had caught up with the character he created. John always said when he grew up, he wanted to be an old person.

John was known for his ability to tell stories that related universal emotions through the lens of his gigantic imagination. He constructed what Bob Dylan called “Midwestern mind trips” from the tedium of the everyday, and he was a master at concealing the work involved. His songs sounded like they’d been easy to write, like they’d just fallen out of his mind like magic. He was praised for his dry humor and loved for his kindness and generosity. John had the courage to write plainly about the darkest aspects of the American experience in songs like “Sam Stone,” about a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran; “Paradise,” about the devastating effects of strip mining on a Kentucky town; and “The Great Compromise,” about his disillusionment with his country. Among his peers in the legendary Nashville songwriting community of the 1980s, his songs were the gold standard.

Of all the things I love about John’s songwriting, my favorite is the way he could step so completely into someone else’s life. John had the gift and the curse of great empathy. In songs like “Hello in There” and “Angel From Montgomery,” he wrote from a perspective clearly very different from his own — an old man and a middle-aged woman — but he kept the first-person point of view. He wrote those songs and the rest of his incredible debut album while a young man working as a letter carrier in Chicago. “Angel From Montgomery” opens with the line “I am an old woman/named after my mother.”

I remember hearing his 1971 recording of this song for the first time and thinking, “No, you’re not.” Then a light bulb went on, and I realized that songwriting allows you to be anybody you want to be, so long as you get the details right. John always got the details right. If the artist’s job is to hold a mirror up to society, John had the cleanest mirror of anyone I have ever known. Sometimes it seemed like he had a window, and he would climb right through.

After John faced a second bout with cancer in 2013, it seemed as though he was playing in extra innings — but he made the most of every bit of it. When Amanda — a fiddler and one of John’s favorite people — and I went into the studio to play and sing on his final album, 2018’s “The Tree of Forgiveness,” we were amazed by the beauty of the songs he’d written after more than 50 years of writing music. John was still razor sharp and he still had a story to tell. On the subsequent tour he played to the biggest audiences he’d ever drawn. He turned 72 that year.

But John’s work wasn’t just about his own music. In 1984, he and his longtime manager Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein started the independent record label Oh Boy Records. In the mid-’80s the major labels seemed like the only game in town, but Oh Boy succeeded against the odds. It released John’s albums along with records by Kris Kristofferson, Dan Reeder and Todd Snider, and it’s still finding new talent and operating with its artists’ best interests in mind.

He was a mentor to me and to my wife, who even helped him work on his songs sometimes, in between playing pranks on him while they were on tour. John saw her as a brilliant songwriter in her own right, and if John said you were a great songwriter, you knew it was true.

And there was more to John’s life than music. John and Fiona Prine had a beautiful relationship, loving and balanced and kind. Fiona understood John better than anyone else. After Amanda and I were married, Amanda started asking all the couples we knew, “What’s the secret to staying together?” John and Fiona gave the same answer, and it was the best one we’ve heard so far: Stay vulnerable. John remained vulnerable in love and in his work. He never played it safe.

When I was a baby, my 17-year-old mother would lay me on a quilt on the floor of our trailer in Alabama and play John Prine albums on the stereo. Forty years later, my daughter would call him Uncle John as he bounced her on his knee. My wife and I would sing his songs with him in old theaters or sometimes in his living room. In the summer, we’d all eat hot dogs with our feet dangling in his swimming pool. Now he’s gone and my heart is broken.

This week, John Prine danced off this stage and onto the next one, and I like to think he’s somewhere sharing a song and a cocktail with all the friends he outlived.

Iris DeMent wrote a lovely little piece about him for Rolling Stone.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/iris-dement-john-prine-in-spite-of-ourselves-981603/

They gave it a stupid title; it's not really about his songwriting at all.

Livestream tribute this afternoon

https://consequenceofsound.net/2020/04/john-prine-livestream-tribute-angel-from-maywood/

Just give me one extra season, so I can figure out the other four

Nice Rolling Stone article about his life and the last couple years of his career. It mentions in passing that he'd recorded six songs for a new album and was working on a memoir. Goddamn coronavirus.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-prine-last-days-beautiful-life-tribute-family-friends-bonnie-raitt-981646/

One horrifying thing the article mentions is that Prine actually developed symptoms before his wife did. Her test came back positive and his was inconclusive, so they were both quarantined at home but had to stay in separate parts of the house. She took him to the hospital (because he was exhausted and couldn't stay awake) on the first day she could leave quarantine. You have to wonder if things would have been different if he'd been admitted to the hospital early and monitored and treated before he got critical.

It's all so depressing and infuriating. If even a beloved, world-famous 73-year-old man with part of his lung missing is left to tough out COVID-19 at home alone until things get so bad he can't breathe, what hope does anyone else have of getting prompt treatment?

dang i would have loved a prine memoir

Extraordinary spoken word essay from Prine’s wife played on BBC Radio 4, ‘Today’ Programme just now.

John Prine tribute show streaming tomorrow on youtube at 7:30 eastern time.

His last song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L21Tc_DtL6M

ACL is rerunning his last proper appearance on the show from '18 this week, and it'll be up on their site for a few weeks presumably before hitting the vault.

Yeah, just now saw the end of that: he and band are very strong on "Lake Marie."

Sssizzlin’, even.

pic.twitter.com/hXsKwArDLF

— SNL Hosts Introducing the Musical Guest (@snlhostsintro) October 13, 2021

KAREN BLACK!

Also didn't know Prine did SNL.

I went out to eat with friends tonight. One friend just bought a lake house in Wisconsin. I asked him where it was, and he said, oh, Twin Lakes. John Prine once wrote a song about it, called "Lake Marie." That's cool, I said.

Later tonight I take him to go see a concert. We get there early enough to catch the end of the opening act, and what song should the opener close their set with but ... "Lake Marie"! I mean, what are the fucking odds? So many coincidences. My friend had to have bought that lake house, we had to have gone out to dinner, he had to have mentioned the Prine song, we had to have gone to that concert, we had to have gotten there early enough to see the opening act, and then the opening act had to have played the specific John Prine song we had been talking about earlier. Super weird.

It's a great song, easily the highlight of that Prine album, but I don't think it's well-known unless you're a real Prine fan - like I've NEVER heard it in any form unless I personally put it on - so yeah, crazy coincidence!

Wow, trippy! I just looked up the Twin Lakes and discovered that Lake Marie is actually Lake Mary.

Which just makes the song even more awesome imo. I love all the little things that don't hang together - the song starts with a story that's both aprocryphal and impossible, most of the song doesn't even take place at Lake Marie, and now it turns out Lake Marie doesn't even exist.

I tried to write an essay about Lake Marie once and failed, but here is a paragraph from somewhere toward the end:

This is not a linear narrative, or really a narrative at all. It’s more about the impossibility of making a single story out of the strange constellation of events and memories and song lyrics and half-forgotten stories that make up the defining moments of our lives. Things crash into each other that don’t really belong together; other people’s troubles intersect with our own, and once these things are in our lives, we can never disentangle them. Lake Marie and its apocryphal history, the shadowy, mutilated images on the TV screen, even the lyrics of “Louie Louie” are now inextricably linked, all part of that final irreversible moment when the narrator realizes his marriage can’t be saved. “All the love we shared, between her and me, was slammed, SLAMMED up against the banks of old Lake Marie. MARIE!” We have one last chorus, one last lament for those long-ago peaceful waters, and then – “Oh, baby. We gotta go now.”

It’s more about the impossibility of making a single story out of the strange constellation of events and memories and song lyrics and half-forgotten stories that make up the defining moments of our lives.

otm!

It's an amazing song. The Live On Tour version is far and away my favorite; sometimes I'll listen to it 3 or 4 times in a row. I heard it first and was blown away, never could appreciate the fussier album take.

wow this is an amazing song!

reminds me a bit of dylan's brownsville girl

You know what blood looks like in a black and white video?

Stadows

had never heard this song before (!). thank you. after it finished, spotify served up the neko case version of “buckets of rain”, unsettlingly.

Agree about Brownsville Girl; I've always sort of connected the two in my mind.

"Something about you, I can't quite, put my finger ON!" sung triumphantly, several years after being bummed out by fragmented remainz of "Visions of Johanna" (which sucked for him, was cool for us, but good to see him finally get it in that moment of Planet Waves.)

I mean, what are the fucking odds? So many coincidences.

Has anyone heard any of his son Tommy's debut album? Me neither, until last night.
He was playing at the venue attached to my workplace and I popped back there to check it out for a few minutes. As I walked in, he had just started a song and it was very clearly about his dad. He's touring with just one other guy, one electric and one acoustic guitar. I stayed and listened to the whole thing, cried silently throughout because tomorrow I go to my hometown for my own dad's funeral. It was like the song unlocked my feelings to the point where i could feel them. I identified with so many of the lyrics, but mostly the line "by the way people say I look just like you" because it's the thing I am most dreading hearing over and over and over again at the service.

As I left out the back, I saw him and told him about this unusual coincidence (I am leaving some stuff out about my own parentage but IYKYK) and thanked him for helping me find my feelings. He was super kind and I encourage anyone to listen to this song bc in addition to giving me an emotionally moving coincidence, it's a really great song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9E2HoploEk

Wow. Thanks so much for all of that, LL.

What Isbell wrote about xpost John and Amanda reminds me of that late duets album where most of the guests took off and left him, showboating like mad, though he sounded like dgaf/what he told the doctor who cautioned him that treatment might affect his singing ability, oh noes. Shires was the one who stuck around and drew him out, for witty musical conversation.

Also, I finally heard Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: The Songs of John Prine (Vol.2), from 2021, hope Vol. 1 is as satisfying. A reviewer said having Raitt do Angel From Montgomery here was way too obvious a choice, but, you know--

http://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_l0DuAqH3h6tbJjEscckSojWUe5aZ-vvYo

A friend sent this from Proviso East HS in Maywood, IL

https://i.imgur.com/L0BctvG.jpg

awwwww <3

<3

This week's Austin City Limits episode:

The ninth annual Austin City Limits Hall of Fame honors late singer/songwriter John Prine. Actor Ethan Hawke inducts the beloved icon joined by performers Tyler Childers, Allison Russell, Nathaniel Rateliff, Valerie June, Kurt Vile and Tommy Prine.