Thursday, April 09, 2020

Three albums by... John Prine

“Gary Shandling always said to me, ‘Don’t get mad, get funny.’ It changed my life.” — actor Rip Torn.
Somewhere in his life — quite early, I’d say — John Prine internalized the same strategy, and used it to profound effect.

Prine wrote and sang about gut-wrenching stuff — the sort of events that throw most people into a towering rage, for very good reasons. “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore”; “Paradise”; “That’s The Way The World Goes ‘Round” — knee-jerk “Ready, aye-ready” military adventurism; conscience-less capitalist evisceration of small communities; addiction and domestic violence, respectively. Lou Reed would sing about this and leave a listener horrified, if morbidly captivated. John Prine sang about it, and threw in the sort of screwball observation only he could pen, nudging the listener into chuckles — and the tacit understanding that these horrors were more intimately familiar to us all than anyone was keen to acknowledge.

Wait, why am I smiling? Why am I laughing?

In concert Prine’s delivery was deceptively casual, often punctuated with a one-shoulder shrug, as if to say, Ah, it’s for other people to get mad about. I’m just a song-writer.

Not that Prine’s catalog is concerned solely with eat-your-spinach matters. A lot of what he wrote is just plain goofy. Some of it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Some of it is incredibly sad. And there are quite a number of songs that are all of the above.

I have a bunch of his studio albums, most of them released on his own label. But his live albums have received more hours of my attention than all of the studio albums combined. That’d be John Prine: Live, Live On Tour, In Person & On Stage. 
The stories and anecdotes that accompany these songs are all a hoot, and several are epic — and certainly epic in length. Audacity is a helpful tool here, for those playlists that oughtn’t to get bogged down by verbosity, no matter how entertaining it might be.

To be honest, I don’t listen to the third all that often. The croak that intruded on Prine’s vocal delivery after his second fight with cancer was just too damn depressing.

But now that voice is silent, which is so much worse.

He seemed to be a man for whom self-care was a distant concern — until it became a central concern. That he should die of this stupid virus after clawing back from two harrowing rounds of cancer seems somehow appropo to these crazy times we are all struggling to endure. I expect he’d have something to say about that — and it’d probably make me laugh. Then cry.

Rest in peace, John.

8 comments:

pdb said...

I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t have guessed who John Prine might be if you’d mentioned the name to me prior to a month or so ago, when a recent-ish NPR Tiny Desk session with him started popping up for my consideration on YouTube. (I think I listened to a minute or two of it, and it didn’t hold me. Getting prompted with a lot of older tape of him, since, and the few I’ve managed to play so far are a good deal more appealing.) Now I’ve been asking myself for a couple of weeks, ‘Had I really never heard of this guy?’ But to the best of my recollection, that’s the case.

Solidarity Hall colleague Pete Davis has eulogized Prine for Current Affairs (where Pete is usual host of the magazine podcast) — seemed worth passing along to you here.

pdb said...

Now listening to that Tiny Desk session. Did I listen to it before? If I did, I gave it much shorter shrift than deserved. Sheesh, Bowman.

Whisky Prajer said...

Thanks for the Davis link. He eloquently unpacks Prine's "mail" and lards it all with a number of great performances.

As for the Tiny Desk concerts -- I am SUCH a Philistine! Simply could not be bothered to click and give consideration, unless someone (usually Darko) has led me there by the hand and asked me to pay attention.

DarkoV said...

Hey Darrell! Who else but you could put Reed and Prine together! One whose prickles are launched quills and the other, whose salve burns into you like acid leaving permanent marks. Quite an elegant eulogy that you've left. Compact and to the bone. I was introduced to Mr. Prine through his buddy Steve Goodman, a fellow Chicago-based s-s-er back in the last century. Both, IMHO, were 2 of the best songwriters of the last 40 years or so. One aimed and most always hit the heart while the other got to the heart through the head, the blood flowing back for oxygenation. Goodman's death, for me, was a huge tragedy having come at such an early age. Prine's death? I'm sure he's laughing at it as he and Goodman converse now. Having gone through all of the health issues (and ,as you pointed out so well, self care seemed an afterthought for him) that he had and pulled through them all, scathed and damaged but still there, to be felled by something so invisible. The miniature prickly bowling bowls that finally felled him...yes, I'm sure he's displaying an illegal smile.

Whisky Prajer said...

Steve Goodman -- oh, man. By the time I finally heard him, he'd been gone for some years already. Really tragic. The two of 'em had a lot more music between them, I suspect.

pdb said...

A live Prine segment YT has been pushing at me and that I finally got to tonight, and was grateful for — genuine balm after a lot of tension with ‘conservative’ family and friends over making sense of the current U.S. situation: https://youtu.be/iYSY4L2e44E?t=153

Listening to his exchange with Costello recorded on stage there, I put together what I guess you’ll know well, that Prine shared with Roger Ebert, the guy he apparently owed his ‘discovery’ to as a young singer, the experience of somehow managing to smile publicly through facially disfiguring later-in-life bouts with cancer. Don’t know that there’s too much to be made of that, but Lord knows not everybody who lives so much in the limelight is attended by grace like this (as far as the onlooking world can tell) right through to end of natural life.

Whisky Prajer said...

The Roger Ebert connection is something I only discovered on John's passing. Ebert frequently repeated Orwell's quip about "the face he deserves" -- an acerbic observation in keeping with all three men, really.

pdb said...

Here I am about to hit 50 — should’ve been dwelling on that Orwell line already. Whether to hurry up and correct some crucial thing while I still have a few months, though, or to put everything on pause until face and I are safely over the line …?

But yeah, that way of connecting these guys strikes me as good for some thought.