And I always will remember these words my daddy said
He said, ‘Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead pecker-head’.I hope to prove him wrong.
John Prine When I get to Heaven
There was something nastily appropriate about it.
The day after my worried observation that in the age of coronavirus, Bob Dylan and his cohorts were statistically likely to be one substandard hand washing from very serious trouble, it was revealed that John Prine — one of the best of that cohort, and certainly the most blackly funny — almost certainly had it, and was in critical condition. A sick cosmic punchline.
So hemmed and hawed about whether to do this now, or wait, and decided with things being as they are, someone still being alive is the worst possible reason to delay saying something nice about them.
***
His self titled debut hit smack bang in that 1968 – 72ish period, where nothing was just country, or just soul, just folk, or just rock & roll, but some lovely combination of it all, of something more.
Typical of the era, Prine’s music — country instruments, earthy loose-limbed rhythms, a dust of blues accents over everything — is driving and expansive, tinged with possibility even at its saddest.
Take the lazy stomp of Angel of Montogomery (“If dreams were lightning, thunder was desire/ This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”) or the suddenly chilly sunset of Far From Me (“Well, ya know, she still laughs with me, but she waits just a second too long”).
The quality of the music was that of a road stretching off to who knows where, and was melancholy and hopeful in the same way. The effect is doubled now that the world is shrinking into our living rooms, the bars are all closed and police are monitoring any travel beyond the local shops.
His voice arrived set in amber, neither young nor particularly old. It was broad and charismatic, and never much more than adequately melodic. As Robert Christgau put it, Prine’s voice never went, “because it was already gone when it got here”.
Thus his range didn’t narrow so much as shift, and his wry phrasing remained as graceful as ever.
Sometimes his jokes are bawdy (In Spite of Ourselves, with his great collaborator Iris Dement), sometimes caustic (That’s the way that the world goes ’round) sometimes surreal (Living in the future). But they’re almost always funny because they are warm, and humane, and about something true to life.
Take his late career cover — again with Dement — of Let’s invite them over again. The story of a couple with in love with their best friends — not one another — is a tiresome melodrama in its original form. Because Prine and Dement have a lot less pity and a lot more affection for their characters, in their hands it’s a sweet, sad little comedy of manners.
And then there’s his “return from Vietnam” ballad Sam Stone — an aural imprint of 1971 America, so completely of its time that it’s timeless.
It’s been broken up into its base elements by cover after cover, across soul and country and rock. It accrues, with Didionesque cool distance, a litany of detail, of Stone’s return ” after serving in the conflict overseas”:
And the time that he served,
Had shattered all his nerves,
And left a little shrapnel in his knees.
All leading to the shattering refrain:
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm, where all the money goes. Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose”.
No one can break your heart like a great comic.
At the top of the piece, I quoted When I get to Heaven from 2018’s The Forgiveness Tree. I suspect that album’s cover image — that beautiful old face staring in repose at the camera — will be one you see quite a lot of in coming days.
He’s almost unrecognisable — though he’s one of those people who seems to look different in every photo — already weathered by lung cancer, and throat cancer and god knows what else in his 71 years.
He’s not smiling, exactly, but by now that curl of amusement at the corner of his mouth is a permanent feature.
Dancing to Architecture 
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