John Prine: 1946—2020

I saw my first and only John Prine concert last December with my girlfriend Emily, her parents, and some of their friends.  He died this week from complications of coronavirus. Some have described his shows as something like a religious experience. For me,  the Prine concert I saw was more than that, it was grief therapy. 

Prine taught me that joy and pain create a harmony. They form the songs of life and death, songs he was more talented at writing and crooning than perhaps any other country musician in the last century. 

In his 1978 song “That’s the Way the World Goes Round,” Prine comically recounts an absurd near-death experience, somehow describing happiness in hypothermia and poverty: 

I was sitting in the bathtub counting my toes / when the radiator broke, water all froze. / I got stuck in the ice without my clothes / naked as the eyes of a clown. / I was crying ice cubes hoping I'd croak / when the sun come through the window, the ice all broke. / I stood up and laughed, thought it was a joke. / That's the way that the world goes 'round.

But Prine didn’t always laugh off pain and suffering. He often sang about the moments when humans don’t escape from the chill of the frozen water, the kind of moments so many, including Prine himself, have faced in the last few weeks, and many will face in the future. Humans die, and Prine wrote about this fact unflinchingly while offering us a way to live on with our grief.  

A few months before we saw Prine, Emily’s cousin Hunter, a senior at Indiana University who was set to be the first in her immediate family to graduate from college, died of cancer. 

Hunter stood less than five feet tall. Her height, or lack thereof, along with her constant sweetness and curiosity, made her the forever baby in the family. Hunter was like a little sister to Emily, and a granddaughter to Emily’s parents Dave and Beth. For two decades, they all lived next to each other in a tiny, southern Indiana town, where generations have worked at the nearby military base. Other cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents lived just a short walk down the road.

Hunter got engaged after she was diagnosed, and as the cancer spread through her body, her fiance Dakota decided to give her a wedding, even if it wasn’t exactly as they had planned. Friends and family gathered in the front yard outside the home of Hunter’s parents, where her family and hospice cared for her. On the day of the ceremony, we doubted Hunter would be able to get out of bed, but with the literal support of her family, and what her doctor simply called willpower, she managed to walk out the door to the altar. 

It was something Prine might have written a song about. 

Five days after the wedding, Hunter died.

Her nearly incomprehensible death tugged at all of us last year as we gathered for dinner in the hotel lobby across the street from the Bob Carr Performing Arts Center in Orlando a few hours before Prine’s concert would begin. 

Looking across the lobby, while we munched on complimentary buffalo wings, we spotted Prine,  wearing dark sunglasses, exiting an elevator, presumably headed across the street for a soundcheck. We walked over to say hello, and told Prine we were there to celebrate Dave’s 70th birthday. Prine wished Dave, about to see something like his thirtieth Prine concert, a happy birthday. Beth promptly requested a hug from Prine, and the aging musician kindly agreed. They embraced and he walked off before a larger crowd could swarm him. 

A few hours later we sat on red velvet seats in the middle of the theater, eye level with Prine and his guitar. Prine’s energy easily filled the high-ceilinged venue theater that might have been more appropriate for the music of Bach or Tchaikovsky. Even when his band left the stage and he stood alone under a spotlight, with his guitar across his belly, he had everyone entranced. 

Prine moved us from bliss to heartbreak and back. From songs like “Spanish Pipedream,” about escaping to the country with a lover, planting a garden, and living on peaches alone; to songs like “Sam Stone,” about a traumatized Vietnam veteran who destroys his family because of an opioid addiction that ultimately leads to overdose and death. 

And then, as the concert came to end, Prine and his band turned to the jammy, lengthy rock song, “Lake Marie,” an epic about the history of the area around the Illinois-Wisconsin border. The guitars of Prine and his band swelled, until the song neared its ends with the lyrics: “Standing by peaceful waters / peaceful waters / ahh baby, we gotta go now.” 

The band kept jamming, and Prine danced off the stage, showing us how to live, full of sadness, joy, and hope, all at once.

I left the concert sadder than before, tender, ready to cry at any moment, but also relieved, and inspired to live better. I know Emily and her family were also soothed by Prine. 

It wasn’t until this pandemic, that I realized how the therapy he provided at that concert in Orlando stuck with me.

I was on a Zoom call last week with 26 of my best friends and neighbors. We have a tradition of gathering every Tuesday evening for dinner, reflection, and sometimes dance parties. This was our first since the pandemic swept across the country. A few of us, including me, danced in front of our webcams.

It was a relief, but a stark reminder of one of the many parts of life we have, at least temporarily, lost, the freedom to hug and swing each other around on the dance floor. But then I realized this is a moment Prine would have written a song about, and the thought brought me comfort, even as I cried.