John Prine

There are the songs you love, the bands, the singers. And then there is that special subset that you sing. You sing in your head, or you sing outloud. You sing in the kitchen, cooking. You sing on the bike, biking. You sing in the car, all alone, at 2 o’clock in the morning, heading home.

My mom sang in the kitchen. In my memory, most of her songs involved Jesus. My Dad, on the other hand, seemed singularly untouched by popular song culture. It was one of those things that made him an isolato in America. He was also singularly uninterested in sports – I sometimes wonder what kind of American male reared me. I believe the only lyrics he knew, or that he would come out with (save for mouthing the words of Christmas songs) were: “Red sails in the sunset/far over the sea”. Which he would sing mock crooner style, as though singing were an inherently bogus occupation.

All my family followed Mom, in liking to sing.

My life with song really begins when I reached the age of 12. That was when I was given my own room. Before that, my brothers and me all slept together. Since there was five kids, that made sense – but finally as a present my Dad knocked a room out of the part of the basement that was used for storage and as a play area. It was a huge gift to me. My Mom gave birth to me, and I am bound to her in my heart; my Dad, I’m not bound to so much. But I have to remember that, in a sense, giving me that room, he gave birth to the person I became. For good and ill, my adolescence was defined by that room. Virginia Woolf is your best guide to spiritual real estate – she’s damn right, everyone needs, at one point or another, a room of their own.

As we all know, adolescence -m in the U.S. at least – is when we find our own songs, our own soundtrack. Our own singers.
Or never.

Alone in my room (at last!), I furnished it with a clock radio, which I kept tuned, always, to WREK. WREK is the Georgia Tech station. WREK taught me the canon, from Bob Dylan to Frank Zappa, from Leadbelly to Herbie Hancock.
WREK gave me John Prine.

The songbook in my head consists of songs by great singer songwriters and lesser ones. It contains the entirety of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” a song which has been experimentally proven to last on a ten speed bicycle around the entirety of the Lake Austin bike and hike trail. It also contains numerous Donna Summer songs from the Bad Girls album (from post WREK days). It contains many songs I don’t sing and wish were not in there, but that the internal voice repeats when it hears them, from Lynnard Skinner and Elton John.

In this repertoire, John Prine stands in the upper ranks, next to, say, Neil Young.

At some point in my teenage years, by folks bought a bigass Sears stereo, which was a real piece of furniture, long, wooden (probably pine wood when I think of it, dyed mahogany) with a lid under which there was a record player. You could stand your albums up in a space that was closed by a sliding door. I don’t remember when I bought my first John Prine album or from where (probably from a long lost store called Treasure Island up on Memorial Drive), but I remember what it was: Common Sense. That album I can almost play in my head.

This isn’t to say that Common Sense is absolutely superior to, say, Diamond in the Rough, or other Prine albums. It doesn’t have, for instance, Paradise, a song that is all about the old sadness of American culture, right up there with Woody Guthrie’s Deportees. It doesn’t have the hymn, Diamonds in the Rough, which I like to sing outloud, my own “Red Sails in the Sunset”. It doesn’t have Christmas in Prison.

But its first three or four songs are almost perfect. For instance, the line from Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregaard, about the passing of the strange American counterculture, “and you talk about/ a paper route/ she’s a shutin without a home” I could put on my resume. Or the line from Common Sense: “it don’t make much sense that common sense/don’t make no sense no more” – which I think about frequently in the age of Trump. And then Middle Man, a song-patter with the usual excellent Prine similes (“Flo talks slow like she’s slow dryin’ paint”). And there is the great, chilling, He was in Heaven Before he Died, with the perfect line “a person can’t tell his best friend he loves him/till time has stopped breathing/ you’re alone on the hill”. Part of having a practical, singing relationship with songs is that these lines are quoted as I remember and heard them. There are two schools about this: one is literalist and insists that departure from the text is an error, and one school that holds that variants are the life of song – it is what inflated a little ditty about a scandal in Troy to the Iliad.

I’m in the latter camp. Elvis Costello in some interview commented about how much he liked Dylan and how much he felt certain of his words were too mumbled, and he quoted an example – which, the interviewer pointed out, was not correct. Costello had the song “wrong”. But he had the song.
All of which is to salute John Prine as he struggles with Corona Virus. Cause I don’t want to wake up some day and realize that part of me – of us – is gone and I said nothing.

Pick through the ashes/
Of the torch singer’s song…