Still Life with Coffee

Woke up this morning,
Put on my slippers,
Walked in the kitchen and died.
And oh what a feeling
As my soul went through the ceiling,
And on up to heaven I did ride.

John Prine has the amazing gift of telling a story in a simple, straightforward song. Verse, verse, chorus. Nothing too intricate; some of the tunes sound a lot alike. They're put together like country songs, two guitars and bass, plenty of twang. They're from Nashville, and he looks comfortable in the black suit and black shirt. But in my book it's poetry.

I went to see Prine last night at the Palace Theater, kitty-corner from the stately Ohio Statehouse, and ended up having a sort of spiritual reunion with some old friends who used to appreciate the same stuff. It's not easy to distinguish the work of art itself from what I was going through at the time. How could anyone separate the song, the album, or the artist from their concurrent personal adventures in life as we know it? So my response to about three albums worth of John Prine songs is heavily tied to people I knew at the time who were sharing that appreciation on some level in their own idiosyncratic way.

I'm guessing Prine connects with a lot of people that way. The bass player asked me what songs they didn't play that I wished they would, but there was really nothing missing. What I most wanted to hear was "Hello in There," and I did. I hoped he would do "Sam Stone" because it is so devastating. I had no complaints. I was just there to enjoy the moment.

When my friend whisked us backstage to watch the encore from the wings and then through a labyrinth upstairs to the little room in the old movie house, we thought we might get to meet Prine himself. Turns out he left immediately to go back to the hotel and didn't go back to the dressing room to hang out, but I did get to express to the band, the promoter, my daughter, and my friend who got us tickets that Prine reaches some deep, soft, emotional place, and that was about as much earnestness as anyone could take.

We had an apartment in the city.
Me and Loretta liked living there.
It's been years since the kids have grown,
Lives of their own, left us alone

He didn't do a lot of talking between songs, but he did introduce that particular story with another story about when he was helping a friend with his newspaper route. They would deliver the Sun-Times to a nursing home, taking a paper to each subscriber in their rooms, and some of the old people would talk to him and pretend he was a grandson or a nephew. So he's always had a connection with old people, he said, "and now I am one."

Old soul maybe. He looked fit as a fiddle onstage, and he moves well with the guitar. His voice is as strong as ever, though he has never had operatic pipes. It's a little rough, like an uncut diamond, and his range covers just enough notes to tell the tale. He's a little thick around the middle, but he always was chunky. He never was a prettyboy, and the ordinary workingclass face has only gotten more beat-up looking with time.

But the songs are even more gut-wrenching now than they were in the early seventies when I first became an admirer. And I was ecstatic to witness Prine's two-hour set in yet another provincial capital on yet another stage in yet another old theater and see him holding his own in the battle against the brutal fact that sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Prine writes about death a lot, and about love, of course, loneliness, despair, betrayal, peaches - all the major themes. There's plenty of religious imagery - God, angels, Jesus, pearly gates - some of it tongue-in-cheek and some definitely not. I guess like many of us who were raised to be patriotic, god-fearing middle-Amerikans, he continues to cast a jaundiced eye on the damage done by his own cultural baggage. Yet wonder of wonders, he maintains a hard-working and indispensable sense of humor.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try and find Jesus on your own.

So in a way he wrote part of the soundtrack of a certain version of my life during a crucial formative stage before I was set in my ways, and it was fun to share a little of that magic with Zelda at a crucial formative stage before she gets too set in her ways. These opportunities don't come up every day, and rumor has it there's a time limit.