Dear John Prine . . .

 “So listen up, buster, and listen up good.

Stop wishing for bad luck and knocking on wood.”

~John Prine, “Dear Abby,” 1971

I’ve been with John Prine longer than I’ve been with my husband:  40 years and going strong, no end in sight.  In spite of all the water under all the bridges, I clearly remember being introduced to his music by my grad school neighbor and friend, Bob G.  Bob’s apartment was right inside the courtyard gate.  Often I’d come home soul-drained from a day of teaching, writing my thesis, studying for comps, and dodging departmental politics.  If Bob’s curtains were open, I knew I’d be waylaid for conversation.  If I heard him chanting “nam yo horen gekyo,” he was distracted and I had safe passage to my own door.

Bob eventually introduced me to all sorts of interesting things like duck l’orange, American Buddhist missionaries, and the appeal of friends with benefits.  But the best and most enduring gift he gave me was an introduction to John Prine by way of Dear Abby from the 1971 debut album, which by then was already 11 years old and still mostly obscure. 

Carefully Bob set the needle down in the groove before the song, and I listened.  I was a country music fan then, and there was something sort of country about this song.  But then again, no.  It was something else:  A little Mark Twain in the humor, a little Bob Dylan in that nasal twang and the sheer perfection of the poetry, a little Voltaire in the philosophy, a little Woody Guthrie in the ethos.  When the song ended and Bob moved to lift the needle, I stopped him.  We listened to the whole, perfect album:  Sam Stone, Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore, Donald and Lydia, Hello in There, Spanish Pipedream, and—be still, my heart—Angel from Montgomery.  It was vinyl paradise.

I shut my eyes to listen, but I could feel Bob watching me closely.  Every time I caught him at it, he’d flash me another illegal smile. Something changed between us that afternoon.  He’d given me both a gift and a test.

That’s the paradox of John Prine fans:  We feel like a chosen group of people specially enlightened to the joys and jinxes of our common humanity.  There’s nothing elite about his music, but knowing and loving John Prine becomes a kind of litmus test for our most important relationships.  It’s a way of asking, “How human are you at your core?” 

I’ve done this myself time after time.  I meet someone, begin to get to know and enjoy them, and before long it’s time to slip them a John Prine song to plumb the depths of their soul:  how real, how accessible, how funny, how scarred and vulnerable are you?  In my experience, it’s proven true every time.  I tested my husband before I married him, and we raised our kids on John Prine.  Odds are if you’re in my inner circle, you’ve passed the John Prine muster.

Prine’s fans are legion and likely to multiply with news of his death, so it’s odd that we regard ourselves as an exclusive group.  We come from every possible demographic a sociologist could identify, but we form a tribe of our own.

The first time I saw John Prine in concert was in 2007 at the gorgeously refurbished Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix.  Milling around the lobby before the show was a perfect microcosm of society:  bejeweled women in evening gowns with men in tuxes, Hell’s Angels, hippies old and young, shit-kickers, queers, professional types, anarchists, working class types . . .  and everyone infused with the egalitarian spirit of the night as if we had everything in the world in common.  For those few hours, we did.

The second time was in 2009 at the theatre-formerly-known-as-the-Dodge.  That crowd was much less diverse, more evenly divided between country music fans and aging hippies.  We had perfect seats, once the drunk guy ahead of us who kept offering to fight everyone around him was removed.  Then the warm-up act from Hell took the stage.  They were called the Grascals, they were sponsored by Mobil Oil, and their most memorable song was (I swear I’m not making this up) “Satan Knew My Grandma Well.”  Margaret Atwood coined a perfect term for people like this:  petrobaptists.

I sat there wondering how even John Prine would be able to redeem this.  When he came out, he was careful to thank the Grascals, noting that unforeseen circumstances had prevented his regular warm-up act from arriving in Phoenix in time to perform.  It felt like a wink and a nudge to all of us who’d been sitting there wondering what in the actual Hell just happened.  Then he took up his guitar and immediately reclaimed the night with everything we wanted to hear.

There is a spirit in John Prine’s music that transcends religion because it reminds us how absurdly wonderful it is to be a human being.  We are strong and helpless and wise and stupid, stingy and giving, fiery and frozen, lonely and reaching, remote and traumatized, lost and found.  We are all of that, and John Prine loved us enough to tell our stories.  His worst insult—reserved for George Bush—was to observe that “some humans ain’t human,” and even then he seemed to understand how a person could go that wrong. Religion has so often taught us to love the Creator but hate the Creation.  John Prine understood that each of us is half-saint and half-sinner and that equation makes us ridiculously lovable. 

How fitting that his last album is The Tree of Forgiveness.  Ultimately, that was the gospel of John Prine.  It is a rare soul who leaves us laughing through our tears and loving our fellow travelers in spite of ourselves.

In the end, what matters is legacy.