Mine for John Prine
I saw John Prine at Berkley Performance Center in Boston quite a few years back. It was his first tour after having survived a run-in with cancer (his first of two).
He was just learning a new voice, the new delivery necessary. His band was just a stripped down affair: himself on guitar and (damaged) vocal, a stand up bass, and a young man playing electric guitar leads (twangy country licks and fills mostly). His first set was a lot of new material off a latest album. He had records to sell. The vibe was “brave-and-bawdy-humor-from-the bloodied-but-unbowed.”
There was an intermission with an actual curtain drawn across the stage to lend an old-timey vaudevillian air to things (even in the sleek modern performance space.)
My wife realized sometime during the first set that something in our dinner before the show had involved ingredients to which she was allergic. She didn’t want to miss the rest of the show so she gobbled down some benedryls and hunkered down for the second set in the seat next to me.
The lights went back down and the curtain opened slow and there was John Prine and his guitar alone on the stage. First he played the song ‘Far From Me’ — a song of his that I had always loved but that now had a new layer of poignant power with the scarred quality of his voice. Then the young man who had played electric guitar in the first set walked onto the stage with a tuba. Prine smiled. After the heartbreak of ‘Far From Me’ it seemed they were going to go for something lighter maybe — off beat. There was some nervous laughter in the audience.
The song they played was ’Sam Stone’ — one of the first songs Prine ever wrote, about a soldier come back from war and strung out on heroin, failing his children, slowly dying.
The tuba was there to play an eery melodic bass line to accompany Prine’s simple guitar picking and that voice singing. The stage was barely lit.
The refrain: “There’s a whole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose…”
Mahler never used horn with such gravity.
I can’t diagram any correlation between my own life experience and that dying soldier or his children or John Prine. I can only tell you that I’ve never been so moved by an artistic expression as at that moment.
It was just a year ago. With all the concerns and controversies astir in the Covid-19 outbreak to that point, I’d managed to keep it together, done my best to be rational and responsible. Deal with it all.
When I heard John Prine died I wept like a baby.