A John Prine Winter

 

Man, I still miss John Prine. The guy was an amazing artist, and from all accounts, an amazing human being as well. I still haven't gotten over his death from COVID last April. Standing outside today in a snowstorm with a bunch of fifth graders brought memories of his music to mind. Few performers can evoke a time or a place for me the way John Prine could, and with a cold winter wind blowing through me and snow pellets lashing my face, I thought of Prine's songs "Storm Windows" and "Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)". "Storm Windows" came out in 1980 and has been a part of my life for a long time. Here are the lyrics:

 

Storm Windows

By John Prine

 

I can hear the wheels of the automobiles so far away

Just moving along through the drifting snow

It's times like these when the temperatures freeze

I sit alone just looking at the world through a storm window

And down on the beach, the sandman sleeps

Time don't fly, it bounds and leaps

And a country band that plays for keeps

They play it so slow

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Well, the spirits were high till the well went dry

For so long, the raven at my window was only a crow

I bought the rights to the inside fights

And watched a man just beating his hand against a storm window

While miles away o'er hills and streams

A candle burns a witch's dreams

Silence is golden till it screams

Right through your bones

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Storm windows gee but I'm getting old

Storm window keep away the cold

 

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down, oh no

 

Here’s what John Prine said about “Storm Windows”:

“I grew up on a four-lane highway. Lots of trucks. Lots of traffic. I used to have these spells every so often as a child where like the ceiling of the room was in normal perspective, but the doorway would appear much farther away than it was. Coupled with this, all noises seemed muffled and distant, particularly the traffic moving on the wet or snow-covered pavement. I was really in another world. I finally worked up the courage to tell my mother and father about it, and Mom made Dad take me to the eye doctor. I love them both.”

        

Another reason I have John Prine on my mind today is I went to Randy’s Records after work, waited outside for fifteen minutes until it was my turn to go in, and bought a boxed set of John Prine’s albums he recorded for Asylum Records. Not only did I get Storm Windows with the set, it also contained Bruised Orange, which was released in 1978. Here’s John Prine's intro to "Bruised Orange (Chain Of Sorrow)", and his lyrics to the song:

 

“I used to work at this Episcopal Church when I was like thirteen years old. I was saving money for a guitar and I'd go in on weekends and dust the pews up because round about then, a lot of people started going to church, so the pews would get real dusty. And I'd wax the cross up, vacuum the carpet and clean up the cup they put the wine in. Religion kind of lost its magic for me. I was a roadie for god."

        

"In the wintertime they used to call me up early on Sunday morning to come get the snow out, off the walk in front of the church, because if one of the congregation fell and busted their ass they'd sue the church for all the money they'd given it all those years. And I used to have to go in pretty early, about five thirty, six o'clock on Sunday morning to take care of the snow. I always thought it was a real strange time of the day, particularly on a Sunday morning. You normally see people are out late from Saturday night, or else people really had a job on Sunday morning, like a newsboy or altar boy or a bunch of people like that."

“I seen, I was going over one Sunday morning and this kid who was going over to a Catholic church, this altar boy, he got hit by a train. He was just kind of screwing around, walking down the track, looking at his shoes and he got hit. He was a pretty bad mess. And there was about six or seven mothers around the scene of the accident. They didn't know where their sons were at the time. They didn't know who had gotten hit, and it took about fifteen, twenty minutes to identify him. I always remember, like, the look on one mother's, on the other mother's faces. Not the ones that, the others had a big sigh of relief. And they tried to comfort the other one but they were too relieved to be very comforting.”

 

And that’s the story behind this song …

 

Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)

By John Prine

 

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley

Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley

On a cold winter's morning to a church house

Just to shovel some snow

 

I heard sirens on the train tracks, howl naked, gettin' nuder

"An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter"

Just from walking with his back turned

To the train that was coming so slow

 

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

 

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there

I sat on a park bench, I kissed the girl with the black hair

And my head shouted down to my heart

"You better look out below!"

 

Hey, it ain't such a long drop, don't stammer, don't stutter

From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter

And you'll carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go

 

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

 

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley

Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley

On a cold winter's morning to a church house

Just to shovel some snow

 

I heard sirens on the train tracks, howl naked, gettin' nuder

"An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter"

Just from walking with his back turned

To the train that was coming so slow

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

Man, I still miss John Prine.

70s Favorites: Underrated artists

Music from the early 1970s is my happy place. I made an iTunes playlist that consists entirely of music from that era that I listen to whenever I’m down or discouraged (which has been a lot, lately.) It’s funny, because I’m old enough to remember some of the music from the early 70s that I currently listen to when it first came out, but not all of it. My older brothers and sister didn’t listen to anything wilder than Simon & Garfunkel or The Carpenters – four artists I do like – so it was up to me to discover Who’s Next and Exile on Main Street on my own, which I did toward the end of the 1970s, when most of the contemporary music on the radio sucked.

 What I like most about music from the early 1970s is the quality and the diversity. Some of my favorite bands were at their creative peak, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, The Stones, and The Grateful Dead. Classic country by people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Buck Owens are a big part of my love for music from that era, as well as some superlative soul music by Marvin Gaye, Al Green, The Chi-Lites, and Stevie Wonder, among many others. But they weren’t the only game in town. Lesser known performers (for their era), such as Gram Parsons, Little Feat (a great, influential band that deserved to be bigger), Ry Cooder, and John Prine also put out some wonderful music. In the fall of 1973, Bruce Springsteen released one of his earliest and best albums, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, to fairly dismal sales. And there is a 1973 jazz/blues album by veteran performers Big Joe Turner and Count Basie entitled The Bosses that I absolutely love.

 Anyway, I was listening to my early 1970s playlist in my car yesterday, and Ry Cooder’s version of the Civil War anthem, “Rally ‘round The Flag” caught my ear. Cooder is an amazing guitarist, and he turned that old song into a slow blues, and it’s pretty great. I actually discovered the album that it’s from, Boomer’s Story, in 2007, thirty-five years after it was originally released. Ry Cooder has done some incredible music over his long career, but it doesn’t seem like many people have heard of him. Cooder digs up old songs and reimagines them in different musical genres. On Boomer’s Story, Ry Cooder performs an excellent instrumental version of James Carr’s late 60’s soul classic, “Dark End of The Street,” as well as the WWII chestnut, “Comin’ In On A Wing and a Prayer,” in a way that makes you think the guys in the plane probably didn’t make it. Like I said, good stuff. I was even lucky enough to find an original 1972 vinyl pressing of Boomer’s Story at Randy’s Records a few years ago.
 

So today I am paying tribute to the early 1970s by posting some albums that most people probably have never heard, but if you care about good music at all, you should. If you were fortunate enough to hear Ry Cooder’s Boomer’s Story, Big Joe Turner and Count Basie’s album The Bosses, Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken, Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel, and John Prine’s Sweet Revenge when they were first released, I congratulate you on your superb musical taste, and I’m kind of jealous.

John Prine and Me

 

My acquaintance with John Prine’s music started fairly inauspiciously with the album Prime Prine: The Best of John Prine, an okay introduction to Prine’s music, but not the best. I inherited that used LP indirectly from one of my sister's college roommates in 1979, when I was fifteen. I liked it well enough, but I listened to it only infrequently because I hadn’t yet developed the empathy and patience that Prine’s music required. However, because of Prime Prine, I did become acquainted with Sam Stone and a plethora of other great Prine musical characters.

 

Sometime between 1979 and 1988 I became a genuine fan of John Prine’s music. I bought the album John Prine Live in the summer of ‘88, when I was working for the US Forest Service. It’s a great album - John Prine duets with Bonnie Raitt on the definitive version of “Angel From Montgomery,” and it also contains my favorite version of his classic, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I love John Prine Live. That summer my dad became gravely ill and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Fortunately he was with us another twenty-one years. Prine’s music was a part of that awful time.

 

For over a decade after that, whenever John Prine released an album, it became the soundtrack of whatever was going on in my life at the moment. The Missing Years reminds me of my last winter at USU in Logan in 1991-92 and my last summer of working for the USFS in 1992. I bought the two disc anthology Great Days in September 1993 and listened to it almost non-stop that fall, my second year of teaching. Great Days introduced me to Prine’s back catalog, especially the 1973 album, Sweet Revenge, which became my favorite John Prine album. From the cover photo – one of my favorite album covers ever – of Prine with a screw you cynical smile on his face and his cowboy boots propped up on the passenger door of his convertible, to the title song, to “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” to “A Good Time,” Sweet Revenge is classic John Prine.

 

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings came out in the spring of 1995. I bought it at my favorite record store at the time, Rock’s, in American Fork, UT. The album – especially the song “Lake Marie,” one of Prine’s greatest – reminds me of teaching at Midway Elementary that year. In Spite of Ourselves came out fall of 1999, right after I got married. In Spite of Ourselves is an album of country duets between John and a variety of great female singers. The high points of the album were two songs that he did with Iris Dement, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Not The Jet Set” and Prine’s original “In Spite of Ourselves,” another of his greatest (and funniest) songs. It’s a paean to a couple who love each other in spite of their foibles. That was something I aspired to in my marriage, but wasn’t succeeding at very well.

 

In 2005, at the height of George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Prine released Fair and Square. I was working as a principal at a charter school in Midway, UT, and I was separated from my (now) ex-wife, not for the first or last time. That album contains the song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” probably Prine’s most overtly political anthem. In it Prine sings:

“Have you ever noticed?

When you're feeling really good

There's always a pigeon

That'll come shit on your hood

Or you're feeling your freedom

And the world's off your back

Some cowboy from Texas

Starts his own war in Iraq”

Prine said one of his reasons for writing the song was “Jeez, if I get hit by a bus I would sure like the world to know that I was not a Republican.” I could definitely relate to that.

 

John Prine died on Monday, April 6, 2020, from complications from COVID-19. I cried when I heard about it, because it felt like I’d lost a friend. But John Prine’s songs - sad, funny, and supremely humane - will always be there for me. Vince Gill best described how Prine’s music makes me feel in his 2006 song “Some Things Never Get Old”:

“Makin' sweet love to that gal of mine

My first taste of bluebird wine

Eatin' watermelon down to the rind

Any old song by brother John Prine”

 

That’s a pretty good legacy.