Austin City Limits: John Prine (Lickonavision, KLRU-TV, PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched an Austin City Limits program, filmed in 2018 but not released until 2020, featuring the singer-songwriter John Prine – someone I should have liked better than I actually did. I found the song he contributed to Bette Midler’s first album, “Hello In There,” absolutely wrenching (and a welcome respite from the camp that so often afflicted Midler’s records, especially early on: I remember the big peace festival at the Rose Bowl in 1982 in which she was only scheduled to be a guest M.C., told a tasteless joke about people licking the insides of bedpans, and then abruptly switched gears and sang an impromptu a cappella chorus of “The Rose”) – but for some reason I never sought out Prine’s own records and he remained terra incognita for me for virtually his whole career. John Prine was one of the first celebrities to die from COVID-19 (on April 7, 2020) and I remember Stephen Colbert doing a quite heartfelt tribute to him, including having a woman (just who I don’t remember) who sang one of his songs. Prine had appeared on the Austin City Limits program several times, but this program was the last, filmed in 2018 and intended to promote a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, but also to showcase some of his most famous songs. John Prine was one of those artists who developed a hard-core cult following while never cracking the upper levels of superstardom, and as with a lot of other cult artists I suspect the problem was his sheer quirkiness; like the late Warren Zevon, Prine was a “singer-songwriter” stylistically but did a lot of playing around with expectations and wrote songs that took unexpected turns both melodically and lyrically instead of doing the sort of “sensitive” heart-on-the-sleeve material that gave the phrase “singer-songwriter” a bad name.

Not knowing Prine’s songs well, I wrote a cue sheet and probably got a lot of the titles wrong, but here goes: he began with a song I guessed was either called “Knocking on Your Screen Door” or “In the Summertime” (why, oh why, doesn’t Austin City Limits give us chyrons with the song titles the way the local version, Live at the Belly Up, does?) and then did a song called “Egg and Daughter Night (Crazy Bones)” that was inspired by a story he heard from someone who went to one of his gigs. The someone said he was from Lincoln, Nebraska and he recalled from his teen days something he and his friends called “Egg and Daughter Nights,” in which farmers would come to Lincoln to sell batches of eggs they’d raised – leaving their daughters, whom they’d brought there, alone with almost nothing to do. The young boys from Lincoln would hook up with these “egg widows” and get them in bed (or over a hay bale, or however they arranged to have sex with them), and they called the Thursdays when the farmers came to sell their eggs “Egg and Daughter Nights.” Prine said he didn’t believe the story but he liked the phrase “Egg and Daughter Nights” enough he was going to work it into a song, which he did. Then he did a relatively straightforward but still emotionally complex love song called “Come On Home,” and a song he said had four co-writers (he didn’t specify whether one of them was himself, though the Web page on this show, https://acltv.com/2018/06/06/john-prines-triumphant-return-to-acl/, lists Prine, Dan Auerbach and Pat McLaughlin as composers – only three, not four) and might or might not have political content, depending on how you read it. The song was called “Caravan of Fools” and it has political content if you think all politicians and all people who work for them or believe them are just deluded self-dealing fools.

Prine’s next song was called “The Lonesome Friends of Science” and was inspired by something that really ticked me off – the decision by a couple of scientists in a room (at least that’s how he described it) that Pluto was no longer a planet but now a “dwarf planet” in the same category as the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. That’s something that irks me, too – especially when Neil DeGrasse Tyson, one of the most pretentious people currently walking around on this planet, went on Stephen Colbert and boasted about it, saying that de-listing Pluto was one of the proudest achievements of his career. (Ever since then I’ve been unable to stand the man.) Prine’s next song was dedicated to his wife and called “Boundless Love,” though even in what might at first seem like a straightforward love song to his significant other he inserted bits of typical Prine loopiness that kept it from getting too sappy. He also did a song called “Illegal Smile” that apparently went back to his first album from the 1970’s and then brought on a younger singer named Tyler Childers. Childers duetted with Prine on a song called “Please Don’t Bury Me” in which Prine said that instead of being stuck in the ground, when he passes he wants to be cut up in pieces and fed to his friends. (I’m presuming this isn’t what actually happened to him when he did go!) Then Chliders got to sing solo on a song dedicated to his own wife, “Lady May.” Childers is younger, hotter (he’s a big blond bear type and he doesn’t suffer from the weird fate that made Prine look like the Asian oracle in a bad movie about the East – according to Google, “In early 1998, Prine was diagnosed with squamous-cell cancer on the right side of his neck. He had major surgery to remove a substantial amount of diseased tissue, followed by six weeks of radiation therapy,” and though I’m glad for him that the therapy was a success and he lived 22 more years, it gave him even bigger jowls than Richard Nixon’s) and has a better voice, but he doesn’t have the mythic cred of Prine and his almost 50 years in the music business (from his first album in 1971 to his death in 2020).

Prine got the audience to sing along with him on a song called “Lake Marie” that he said was inspired by a Native American legend that they had discovered two white babies, Elizabeth and Marie, by the sides of two of the Great Lakes and had therefore named the lakes Elizabeth and Marie; it was the hardest-rocking song he did all night (the only one on which his drummer used sticks instead of brushes). The show closed with “Paradise,” an ironic (to say the least!) song about how Prine tried to reconnect with his childhood in Mecklenburg County, Kentucky – only to find that the mountains his dad had taken him to during his boyhood no longer existed because the Peabody Coal Company had obliterated them after extracting the last bits of coal they had contained. A more openly Leftist folksinger (I believe it was David Rovics, though I’m not sure) later wrote a song about the same thing – the so-called “mountaintop removal” in which a coal company literally blows up the top of a mountain to extract the coal within, then high-tails it out of the area and leaving an unsightly and toxic mess no one left behind has the money to clean up – but I liked Prine’s better. Judging from this show, John Prine was as talented as I’ve always heard he was – indeed, I could hope for a CD or DVD release of this show, especially since the above-cited Web article mentions songs he performed at it that weren’t on the version aired on TV (including “Angel from Montgomery,” the star-making hit for Bonnie Raitt which Prine wrote) – a songwriter who could project insights about the human condition and leaven the High Seriousness most singer-songwriters projected with droll humor – and he pronounced the “t” in “often”!