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!
Since we’re all cooped up at home (or should be) and in need of a little entertainment, I thought I’d try a bigger version of the puzzler game by introducing the first installment of Hack’s Back Pages Monthly Lyrics Quiz to test your memory banks!
Early in his career, Randy Newman wrote this song about a teen attending his first drinking party and deciding he didn’t like it much. His version of the song appears on his “12 Songs” LP, and it’s quite different from the rendition that most people know. Three Dog Night were known for discovering cool songs by other songwriters and releasing their own arrangement that they turned into big hits.
The duo combined to write this catchy danceable song that most people assume is about a woman. “It was originally written about New York City in the ’80s and its greed, avarice and spoiled riches, and then we changed it a bit to make it sound more like a woman because it would be more relatable,” said John Oates. It went on to become Hall & Oates’ biggest hit, staying at the top spot for four weeks in late ’82/early ’83.
After a very long day of recording that stretched well past midnight, Ringo Starr blurted out how tired he was: “Whew, it’s been a hard day…’s night!” Filmmaker Richard Lester decided it was a perfect title for his film about a day in the life of The Beatles in the midst of Beatlemania. John Lennon wrote it and Paul McCartney put on some finishing touches to the bridge. George Harrison added the jarringly wonderful opening chord.
The first major act to offer a racially diverse lineup was the perfect group to record Sly Stone’s cheerful song that urges equality and racial harmony. The lyrics mock the futility of people hating each other, urging instead “I am no better, and neither are you, we are the same whatever we do.” The song also includes the original line “different strokes for different folks,” which became a popular catchphrase that’s still in use 50 years later.
Glenn Frey, who started writing the music to this track while listening to Spinners and Al Green albums, was looking for a groove that merged rock and disco, with some biting guitar work. Meanwhile, Don Henley put the lyrics together while he was procrastinating about accomplishing a couple of personal goals. “It’s really about putting things off,” said Henley. Frey called it his favorite of the entire Eagles catalog.
Hornsby’s first LP was one of the more successful debut albums of the ’80s, spawning three Top 20 singles, including “Every Little Kiss,” “Mandolin Rain” and the #1 hit “The Way It Is.” The title track makes several references to the civil rights movement and the segregation and inhumanity that reigned in the U.S. before and during that period. It was a stark reminder in the mid-’80s that we still hadn’t solved these issues.
Michael McDonald joined the Doobies in 1976 and helped the band evolve from straight rock to a more soulful, R&B groove. This tune, co-written by McDonald and Kenny Loggins, was recorded by both artists at the same time, and both performed it in concerts, sometimes together, but it was The Doobies’ version from their “Minute By Minute” LP that went to the top of the charts and won a Record of the Year Grammy.
Critic Denise Sullivan succinctly summed up this irresistible song as “a most sublime slice of pop music heaven.” She noted its rock ‘n roll martial beat but said it “veered dangerously close to bubblegum.” The Turtles two primary vocalists, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, later joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and then morphed into their own ’70s group, Flo and Eddie.
It wouldn’t be until the mid-’70s and Bob Marley’s arrival that reggae found a real following among American music fans. But in 1972, Houston-born Johnny Nash became the first non-Jamaican to record in Kingston, Jamaica and the first to have a reggae song reach the top of the US charts. The song, like most reggae tunes, have lyrics which speak proudly of happiness, peace and brotherhood.
Country star Clint Ballard Jr. wrote this tune back in 1963, and several artists charted with their versions in other countries but stalled on the charts here. Ronstadt, who had struggled along through her first four albums, signed with Peter Asher in 1974, and the resulting LP, “Heart Like a Wheel,” turned out to be her breakthrough. Both the album and this song, perhaps one of the best break-up songs ever, both reached #1.
Film director Mike Nichols asked Paul Simon to write songs for his upcoming film “The Graduate,” but Nichols didn’t like what Simon submitted, except for “Mrs. Robinson,” which Simon hadn’t finished by the time of the movie’s release, so you hear only the chorus (twice) in the film. Four months later, Simon and Garfunkel released the completed song on their #1 LP “Bookends,” and the duo became household names.
Here’s another song that seems to be about a woman, and some fans thought it was about a bottle of wine, but in fact, it’s about a Rosewood guitar Diamond bought from the proceeds of his early hits. It wasn’t the first song someone wrote about a favorite musical instrument, and it certainly hasn’t been the last either. The song appeared on Diamond’s first album of substance, titled “Tap Root Manuscript.”
Ringo got significant help from George Harrison on writing and arranging this tune. They recorded it during sessions for Harrison’s “Living in the Material World” LP in late 1972. The track features Harrison on guitar, the great Nicky Hopkins on piano and Beatle pal Klaus Voorman on bass. The poignant lyrics refer to a photograph that remind us that either someone has died, or a relationship has come to an end.
The young, still-struggling Neil Diamond wrote (and recorded) this tune in early 1966. The Monkees’ musical director Don Kirshner heard it and decided his new made-for-TV faux rock group should record it for their second album, “More of the Monkees.” It ended up being the biggest selling single of 1967, and 34 years later, the ’90s band Smash Mouth had a minor hit with their own version of “I’m a Believer” from the “Shrek” film.
David Ruffin had left the famous Motown group in 1968, and now singer Eddie Kendrick was about to do the same, but not before the group scored one last blockbuster hit. The track is a seven-minute slice of what they called “cinematic soul,” about a deadbeat dad who left his wife and children, told from the viewpoint of one of the kids years later. The album version, with multiple instrumental solos, went on for nearly 12 minutes.
One of the best of the ’70s British progressive rock bands, Yes had run out of gas around 1980, but bassist Chris Squire and Alan White ended up teaming up with talented South African musician Trevor Rabin, using his songs and demos as the basis for a new group called Cinema. But once they convinced singer Jon Anderson to return, they decided to call it another Yes album despite its more commercial sound. The lead song reached #1.
The late great Queen of Soul had been recording for Columbia for five years, wasting her volcanic talents on boring middle-of-the-road material. Once she jumped to R&B-leaning Atlantic in 1967, they immediately put her to work on energetic soul songs. Her first single on Atlantic, arguably her peak career moment, was a fierce call for basic human respect and became the unofficial anthem of the women’s movement.
Pete Ham of Badfinger wrote this power ballad, which Badfinger also recorded, but when Harry Nilsson recorded his heartfelt version, it rocketed to #1 in early 1972 as the first single from the popular “Nilsson Schmilsson” album. It was very unusual for the great songwriter to cover another writer’s material, but in this instance, it proved to be a great choice for him.
The distinctive music video of this song certainly helped push it to the top of the pop charts in 1986. It features Palmer at the microphone with four heavily stylized female models, appearing almost like mannequins but lined up as background singers with guitars. Palmer had planned on recording this track with Chaka Khan in a duet, but her label wouldn’t release her to do it, although she still got credit for the vocal arrangement.
Instead of bitterness, King’s song (with lyrics by collaborator Toni Stern) assumes a more practical, less emotional attitude of blamelessness about the end of a romantic relationship. It’s interesting to note that Stern wrote the lyrics just after her affair with James Taylor came to an end, for he plays guitar and sings on King’s “Tapestry” album. The song held the #1 spot for four weeks and won a Record of the Year Grammy.
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