Ain’t the afterlife grand?
I figure the best way to know if a songwriter is any good is by reading what others, particularly other songwriters, have to say about him.
If that’s true, then damn. John Prine must be one of the best there ever was.
Asked in 2009 to list his favorite songwriters, Bob Dylan put Prine front and center. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”
Kris Kristofferson, upon discovering Prine in a small club in Chicago in 1971: “No way somebody this young can be writing so heavy. John Prine is so good, we may have to break his thumbs.”
Close friend and frequent collaborator Bonnie Raitt: “He was a true folk singer in the best folk tradition, cutting right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain. For all of us whose hearts are breaking, we will keep singing his songs and holding him near.”
Jack Antonoff, songwriter/guitarist/singer in the indie rock ban “fun.”, said: “John Prine is as good as it gets. An honor to be alive in his time.”
Bruce Springsteen tweeted, “John was a true national treasure and a songwriter for the ages. He wrote music of towering compassion with an almost unheard-of precision and creativity when it came to observing the fine details of ordinary lives. He was a writer of great humor, funny, with wry sensitivity. It has marked him as a complete original.”
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Music critics can be a fickle bunch, but they have been nearly unanimous in their admiration for Prine over the years. A few quotes:
Alanna Nash of Entertainment Weekly: “John Prine’s best work has always been slightly cinematic and hallucinogenic, full of images that transport as well as provoke.”
Margaret Renkl, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, wrote in 2016: “The new John Prine — older now, scarred by cancer surgeries, his voice deeper and full of gravel — is most clearly still the old John Prine: mischievous, delighting in tomfoolery, but also worried about the world.”
Michael Branch of CNN: “John Prine was a gifted writer and vintage American troubadour who reminded us that life is as comical as it is heartbreaking, and that we should never fail to empathize with others.”
Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post: “Many journalists loved John Prine because he did what we try to do: document America.”
The late Roger Ebert, writing about a Prine concert in 1971: “He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.”
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By all accounts, Prine was a kind, sweet guy, but he was also one tough cookie. Despite a lack of much commercial success during his five decades in the music business, he nevertheless persevered, started his own record company (Oh Boy Records) and recorded 18 studio LPs and two live albums. He was on the road a lot in the early days, and he continued performing well into his ’60s and ’70s as health permitted. He also survived two major cancer-related surgeries in 1998 and 2013. But on April 7, he fell victim to the coronavirus. He was 73.
You’ll all pardon me if I’m kicking myself these days. I somehow failed to pick up on Prine and his work when he was first starting out in the early ’70s when he wrote and recorded many of his best songs. I’m pretty sure a couple of my friends in college tried to turn me on to some of his tunes, but I too quickly dismissed him because his gruff voice wasn’t much to my liking.
Ah, but here’s the thing: Prine’s voice was perfect for the kind of songs he wrote. Like his inspirations, Dylan and Johnny Cash, he sang in a sometimes-wry, sometimes-bitter conversational style that was perfectly suited to his simple melodies and common-man lyrics.
Prine’s 1973 LP
I’ve always put Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen at the forefront of my list of the greatest lyricists of my lifetime, but I have discovered (after the fact, I’m embarrassed to admit) that John Prine belongs in that exalted group. He offered such wonderfully keen observations on the human condition, often very concise:
“Just give me one extra season so I can figure out the other four.”
“I don’t care if the sun don’t shine, but it better, or people will wonder.”
“Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see.”
“We were trying to save our marriage and perhaps catch a few fish, whatever came first.”
“If it weren’t so expensive, I’d wish I were dead.”
In these and other examples, Prine often wrote in the first person, sharing his own experiences and fantasies, in turn poignant, angry and whimsical. But he just as often served as narrator for his fictional and true-to-life tales, putting potent words into the character’s mouths.
A mother speaking to her son about his absent father: “Your daddy never meant to hurt you ever, he just don’t live here, but you got his eyes.”
An elderly woman referring to her husband: “My old man is another child that’s grown old.”
An adolescent boy singing about his troubled father: “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes.”
Most provocatively, speaking for Jesus: “I’m a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood. They’re gonna kill me, Mama. They don’t like me, bud.”
His 1991 comeback
Prine echoed the belief many songwriters share when he said, “I felt sometimes I was a conduit, a channel through which songs arrive from an unknown source, maybe God.”
He had periods when songwriting came almost effortlessly. “Sometimes, a song takes about as long to write it as it does to sing it. They come along like a dream or something, and you just got to hurry up and respond to it, because if you mess around too long, the song is liable to pass you by.”
When major or minor life events occurred, both good and bad, they became fodder for new material. “ After my second divorce,” he said with a chuckle in 1990, “about a month later, the song truck pulled up and dumped a bunch of great songs on my lawn.”
Prine had a singular approach to songwriting. “I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better. Rather than tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. Like what color the ashtray is. How far away the doorway was. So when you’re talking about intangible things, like emotions, the listener can fill in the blanks. You just draw the foundation.”
In his 1973 song “Grandpa Was a Carpenter,” Prine painted a picture in such a way that listeners could easily insert memories of their own grandfathers: “”Well, he used to sing me ‘Blood on the Saddle’ and rock me on his knee, and let me listen to radio before we got TV, well, he’d drive to church on Sunday and take me with him too, stained glass in every window, hearing aids in every pew.”
Prine’s 1971 debut
Last year, Prine was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, where he summed up why he chose a life as a songwriter: “I gotta say, there’s no better feeling than having a killer song in your pocket, and you’re the only one in the world who’s heard it.”
There were two Prine tunes I discovered long ago as cover versions by other artists. One was “Angel From Montgomery,” recorded by Raitt on her 1974 LP “Streetlights.” She and Prine sang it together often, most recently at the 2020 Grammy Awards, where he won a long-overdue, well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award.
The other one was the heartbreaking “Hello In There,” which Bette Midler recorded for her first album. In it, Prine described the pain and loneliness that aging brings, and he urged us all to pay attention: “Old trees just grow stronger, and old rivers just grow wilder every day, old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say, ‘Hello in there, hello.'”
I’m sure as hell paying attention now, Mr. Prine.
He left behind an impressive legacy of nearly 200 songs, and you’d be hard pressed to find one you could label a clunker. His favored genres were country, folk, a little bluegrass and what is now popularly called Americana, and he did them all well. His songs are generally pretty basic, three- or four-chord construction, which makes them easy to learn on guitar, something I’ll be doing for the next few weeks. And they’re easy to sing too, so you can bet they’ll start showing up at occasional singalongs by the fire pit, especially the funny ones.
Take “In Spite of Ourselves,” the title track from his 1999 album which features duets with some of country music’s best female vocalists. The song’s blunt lyrics offer a fairly hilarious yet poignant dialog between Prine and Iris DeMent as husband and wife who adore each other but view their marriage quite differently. Husband: “She thinks all my jokes are corny/ convict movies make her horny/ she likes ketchup on her scrambled eggs and swears like a sailor when shavin’ her legs/ she takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,/ I’m never gonna let her go…” Wife: “He ain’t got laid in a month of Sundays/ I caught him once and he was sniffin’ my undies/ he ain’t too sharp but he gets things done/ drinks his beer like it’s oxygen/ he’s my baby and I’m his honey/ never gonna let him go…”
Or consider 1973’s “Please Don’t Bury Me,” a whimsical look at death that now takes on an entirely deeper meaning: “Please don’t bury me down in that cold cold ground, no, I’d druther have ’em cut me up and pass me all around, throw my brain in a hurricane, and the blind can have my eyes, and the deaf can have both of my ears if they don’t mind the size.”
I see that the new generation of country singers adores Prine with as much enthusiasm as their predecessors do. Check out this YouTube video of Prine sitting on stage with Kacey Musgraves as she plays a song she wrote called “Burn One With John Prine.” It’ll bring tears and chuckles in equal amounts.
Rest in Peace, John. Much obliged for your fine body of work.
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A Spotify playlist of some of Prine’s finest tunes. Dial ’em up!
As the sax player in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Clemons was pretty well known when he decided to do a solo project in 1985. Songwriter/producer Michael Walden wrote this joyous song and gave it to Clemons to record on his “Hero” album. Clemons invited Jackson Browne to sing it with him as a duet, and it reached #18 on the pop charts that year. The lyrics underscore the importance of unconditional reliability among close friends: “Oh, you can depend on me, over and over, over and over, know that I intend to be the one who always makes you laugh until you cry, and you can call on me until the day you die, years may come and go, here’s one thing I know, all my life, you’re a friend of mine…”
Probably the song about friends that tugs at most people’s emotional heartstrings is this heartwarming Carole King tune, which appears on her monumental 1971 album, “Tapestry.” James Taylor was recording his “Mud Slide Slim” LP next door in the same L.A. studio, and they both played on each other’s recording sessions. Once Taylor heard this song, he pleaded 
with King to allow him to record his own version, and she agreed. (Quite the friendly gesture, no?) It went on to become Taylor’s only #1 single and one of his signature tunes. The two friends reunited in 2010 to record and perform this song and many others from these fondly loved albums: “You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running to see you again, winter, spring, summer or fall, all you’ve got to do is call, and I’ll be there, hey ain’t it good to know that you’ve got a friend…”
Actor/musician Buzzy Linhart was part of the Greenwich Village scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s as an instrumentalist and producer, working with everyone from Richie Havens and Phil Ochs to John Sebastian and Jimi Hendrix. Bette Midler was also part of that scene, performing periodically in the Continental Baths. Linhart and Mark “Moogy” Klingman came up with the loose, fun tune “(You Got to Have) Friends,” which Midler heard and immediately recorded in a campy arrangement that ended up entitled just “Friends” on her debut LP “The Divine Miss M.” It was one of three singles released from the album, and became her unofficial theme song: “Standing at the edge of the world, boys, waiting for my new friends to come, I don’t care if I’m hungry or poor, I’m gonna get some of them, ’cause you got to have friends, ’cause you got to have friends…”
Ray Davies has said this song is about the death of his older sister, Renée, who lived for a time in Ontario. Upon her return to England, she gave Davies his first guitar for his 13th birthday. She then fell ill, owing to an undiagnosed hole in her heart, and died while dancing at a night club. The lyrics to “See My Friends” deal with mourning the loss of a loved one, and the need to have friends to lean on. Released in July 1965, this Kinks single reached #10 in Britain but not at all in the US, which severely disappointed Davies: “See my friends layin’ across the river, she is gone and now there’s no one else to take her place, she is gone and now there’s no one else to love, ‘cept my friends…”
Vocalist Paul Rodgers and bassist Andy Fraser co-wrote this somewhat serious track from Free’s third LP “Highway.” It was written with vocalist Paul Kossoff in mind, who struggled with emotional insecurity made worse by the fame the band got from their huge 1970 single “All Right Now.” Kossoff said he loved the song, but he nonetheless suffered a breakdown that led to the premature dissolution of the band. The lyrics speak of how crucial it is to have a friend to help us through our struggles: “All I need is a friend, someone to give a helping hand when I’m afraid in the night, someone to squeeze me and tell me it’s all right, you know I worry such a lot, and I would give all I’ve got just to have someone believe in me, just to do that and put me back on evenly, baby baby, be my friend…”
By the mid-’80s, Mitchell had developed a bitterness about the music business as well as conservative government policies, and it showed up in her work, especially on her 1985 LP “Dog Eat Dog.” But there were exceptions, especially the leadoff track “Good Friends,” a marvelous duet with singer Michael McDonald. The adjacent photo is from a compelling music video of the song that’s worth watching. The lyrics describes her complicated relationship with her then-husband Larry Klein, who she said was more a friend and fellow musician than a spouse: “I have to come and see you maybe once or twice a year, I think nothing would suit me better (right now) than some downtown atmosphere in the dance halls and the galleries, or betting in the OTB, synchronized, like magic, good friends, you and me…”
Early in their career, Elton John and lyricist Bernie Taupin were eager to get their songs exposed to audiences in as many ways as possible, so they accepted an invitation to write songs for the soundtrack of a quiet little French film called “Friends.” It was released in early 1971 to little or no fanfare, but the accompanying “Friends” LP got attention because John had already scored his big hit “Your Song” by then, as well as his acclaimed “Tumbleweed Connection” album. I have always had a soft spot for the John-Taupin songs on this neglected LP, particularly the title track, which I have adopted almost as a mantra for my life: “Making friends for the world to see, let the people know that you got what you need, with a friend at hand, you will, see the light, if your friends are there, then everything’s all right…”
While most of Queen’s voluminous song catalog was written by either vocalist Freddie Mercury or guitarist Brian May, a few were composed by bassist John Deacon. One of his best efforts was “You’re My Best Friend,” a love song to his wife that appeared on Queen’s breakthrough LP “A Night at the Opera” in 1975. As we all know by now, it was “Bohemian Rhapsody” that stole the show on that album, but “You’re My Best Friend” was no slouch, reaching #7 on the UK singles chart and #16 in the US: “Oh, you’re the best friend that I ever had, I’ve been with you such a long time, you’re my sunshine and I want you to know that my feelings are true, I really love you, oh, you’re my best friend…”
How extraordinary that Simon wrote such worldly-wise songs as this one when he was only 27. The first side of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” album was an impressive song cycle that looks at several stages of life, including teenage angst, young married travelers, midlife divorce, and the declining years. “Old Friends” and its followup track “Bookends” offer a sophisticated, poetic look at old age and the value of lifelong friendships and cherished memories: “Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly, how terribly strange to be 70, old friends, melody brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears…”
A friend doesn’t always have to be a person. It could be a pet, or even a favorite place that one continually returns to. For Taylor, that place is Martha’s Vineyard, where he had spent many summers as a boy, and it’s where he built a home for himself and then-wife Carly Simon to start a family. He wrote about it in “Hello Old Friend,” a track from his reflective 1974 LP “Walking Man.” His constant touring during this phase of his life took its toll, and he was always very happy to return to his island home in the woods: “Hello, old friend, welcome me home again, well, I’ve been away but that’s all over now, say I can stay for October now, stay a while and play, hello, old friend, isn’t it nice to be home again…”
Both as the leader of Utopia and as a solo artist, Rundgren has always been more about artistic statements than commercial concerns. Consequently, his albums and singles have performed respectably but have never been huge hits, except perhaps his 1972 single “Hello It’s Me.” In 1978, Rundgren enjoyed his third-biggest single “Can We Still Be Friends?” from his “Hermit at Mink Hollow” album. He has said the song is autobiographical, with lyrics that describe how, despite numerous attempts to fix his relationship with longtime companion Bebe Buell, it wasn’t going to work…but he wanted things to remain amicable: “Let’s admit we made a mistake, but can we still be friends? Heartbreak’s never easy to take, but can we still be friends? Can we still get together sometime?…”
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