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.