“…Felt Just like Sunday on Saturday Afternoon” Memories of a Timeless Songwriter in a Timeless Time

by Jessie Rothwell

John Prine’s lyrics were brilliant; full of wit yet deceptively simple. Many of his lyrics reduce me to tears even now, almost 30 years after I first heard them. Yet at this moment, minutes after learning of his death, while there’s a huge pink moon slinking behind clouds outside, it’s Nick Drake’s lyrics that I am thinking about:

And none of you stand so tall
Pink moon gonna get ye all

Covid has already killed other musicians and artists, but this is the first one that feels heartbreaking to me. It feels personal.

I think it’s because I first heard his music when I was a teenager, and I have followed him ever since. It was my high school boyfriend Jeff who introduced me to him, whisking me up one summer evening and driving us to Wolf Trap to see Prine play. I was immediately hooked, partly because Jeff, who I thought was the cutest thing on two legs, sang along with Prine on some of the funniest and most bawdy lyrics. At that first show, I remember Prine’s encore included the song, “Ain’t Hurtin Nobody” and in the first few lines of that song, he sings: “…got my hand in my pocket, thinkin’ bout you…”

I was sixteen and far from innocent, but when Jeff turned to me after that line and  grinned, I still felt my cheeks get hot.

*          *          *

I’m driving through the Kern Valley near Bakersfield, California. It’s late March, things are blooming and there’s rushing water below the road and walls of rock framing it. I have that rare feeling of “there’s nowhere else in the universe I’d rather be than right here, right now.” My car stereo is playing John Prine’s song “Donald & Lydia,” which, at least today, is my favorite John Prine song. At the end of the song, the steel pedal plays this ostinato, this mellow yet cheerful down-and-up triad, first by itself, then with guitar accompanying it, and somehow that melody on that instrument is like the sonic realization of where I am. It’s like that melody represents the rushing water and the blooming flowers and the road winding through a pass with rock on either side. I feel like my car and by extension my body, are part of the music.

“Donald and Lydia” is about the kind of loneliness that wraps itself around you, wants you to forget to eat or leave the house and just “read romance magazines up in (your) room” all day. So many of Prine’s songs are about loneliness, and, therefore, the human condition. I think despite the fun of watching my high school boyfriend laugh at the perverted humor in some of Prine’s songs (e.g. “The Sins of Memphisto” or “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian”) this is the bigger reason I resonated with his music from the get-go. 

*          *          *

I listened to Prine’s version of “Clay Pigeons” nonstop for months after L and I broke up. It had been an intense, up-and-down, but mostly white-hot 8 months of being together. He was three weeks out of a 17-year relationship when he and I met, and I knew better, but got involved anyway. I told myself I wasn’t in love with him, that we were just sleeping together, until I couldn’t tell myself that anymore. I was terrified he would break up with me first and it was the first time I’d ever been the one to initiate breaking up. It was horrible — just as bad as being broken up with — at least in the case where you don’t want things to end. I knew that L cared about me, which made the aftermath even more unbearable. I eventually felt some anger, which helped me get past the intense desire to pick up the phone and call him, but mostly I was just heartbroken over the fact that we seemed like a good fit who came together at the wrong time. Over and over as I drove around Los Angeles that next winter and spring, into the summer months where I was homeless and on-the-verge of leaving LA, I listened to Prine sing: 

I’d like to stay, but I might have to go to start over again. Might go back down to Texas, might go to somewhere that I’ve never been. And get up in the mornin’ and go out at night, and I won't have to go home. Get used to bein’ alone. Change the words to this song, start singin’ again

It made me cry every time. At first it just made me think of L — of the moment in his life that I came into, and how he was so determined to, as the lyric goes:

 … Change the shape that I’m in, and get back in the game, start playin’ again…

But over time, and now when I listen, I think about my place in life soon after L and I were over. L was sorting things out through the months we were dating. But my life was about to erupt in a cataclysmic way just a few months after I last spoke to him. So the song morphed into being about me, too, especially because for a long time, I stopped doing writing and performing music, something I had always done. The idea of trying to start playing again, or singing again, rings so true I feel my breath stop when I hear those lyrics. That’s the thing about great songs: they can be SO specific and SO universal at the same time. They can morph to make sense in different ways at different times.

*          *          *

At a living room concert I hosted, a friend of mine and I did a duet of Prine’s “Paradise”. At the 50th anniversary party for my best friend’s parents, both Prine fans, I serenaded them with “Big Ol’ Goofy World”. I transcribed an arrangement of “Angel from Montgomery” for a jazz transcription class I took in grad school. The song “All the Best” still reminds me of Jeff, the boyfriend who introduced me to Prine, and of our break-up in my junior year of high school. Several years ago as I was learning the guitar for the first time ever, part of the process of auditioning at schools to study music therapy, I learned the chords to “Hello in There” and started accompanying myself (badly) while singing it. Of the songs I know well, there’s hardly one I don’t have sweet or bittersweet associations with.

Appropriately, the last time I saw John Prine play was in the same place I saw him for the first time: Wolf Trap. It was two years ago already, though it feels like yesterday. The same friend whose parents I serenaded with Prine on their 50th anniversary, invited me to join her family on Wolf Trap’s lawn, where crowds smush in to picnic on blankets lined up next to each other with almost no grass between them. Standing at the back of the lawn you could only see people and their little cloth rafts, all decorated with cheese and baguettes and fruit and tubs of fried chicken and coolers of booze. It was a beautiful early June night and we got some glow stick necklaces and I put one on my head like a crown.

That night as I watched him perform, I realized that, despite never having met him, I felt like I knew John Prine. That might sound like a cliche, and I know I didn’t actually know him. But he never seemed to have a stage persona and I think it’s because he didn’t. I have heard that he really was the same man offstage as onstage and I believe it. He was able to be so wry and funny while digging so deep into trauma, sadness, loneliness. That last night I ever saw him, in 2018, he played a few of his most brilliant songs, including “Hello in There,” “Paradise” and “Angel from Montgomery.” When he introduced “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” he made a comment about how he wrote the song as a protest against Vietnam. Then he mentioned the current administration and said we still have to protest and no one would stop him from doing so. And I fell in love with him even more.

He played “Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody,” which was perfect, because at that first show I ever saw, that song was brand new. It made me think of Jeff at the time, and now I think about him again, as I write this, and wonder where he is during this pandemic, and if he’s healthy. And I think about all of the years and the hundreds of shows — not just Prine’s but all of them — that I’ve seen since I was in high school. There’s a knot in my throat as I think about the fact that not only will I never see John Prine play again, but I don’t actually know when I’ll see ANYONE perform again. I don’t know when I’ll get to perform again. Already I have had several of my own upcoming performances get cancelled.

On the phone with my partner the night Prine died, I choked through tears to tell him about how so many of Prine’s songs take me back to half a lifetime ago, to seminal moments and experiences, and how my experience of music — and thus of life — is different because of him, and how when I think of Prine’s songs, I think of so many people I have loved. I will grieve John Prine because I know he had more music and more love to give; the world feels cruel and capricious for letting such a genius die at only 73 (side note: it’s a little scary that I now say, “only” in front of the age 73). As humans, we look to make sense of everything in life — we want things to have meaning. But now a musician who has influenced me for more than half my life is gone, and there’s no rhyme or reason to that.

In addition to grieving for Prine himself, his death was the event that spurred my grieving a former life, one that may never come back. Starting in my early adulthood, when I moved to New York, my lifestyle revolved around going out to see live music. I had moved there to pursue a music career and nothing else seemed more important than going to shows, soaking up everything from the music itself to performers’ stage presence, to how musicians interacted with people offstage, especially whenever I joined a group of musicians for a post-show drink. I remember the moment I realized, at age 21, how much the space affected my experience of the music. I realized I especially loved going to shows in smaller, more intimate spaces. I remember realizing not long after that how important the post-show drink was — almost as important as the show itself — because it was a chance for musicians and audience members alike to reinforce the connection people felt while the music was happening. Some of the best conversations of my life have been right after transformative live music experiences, debriefing with my friends and strangers who would become friends. There may have been many times when I was out at a crowded bar or club that I was annoyed by the tight space; by people’s sweat flying as they danced, or when someone got jostled and beer spilled on me. Now that scenario feels like a luxury, to be that close to other people.  

My days of going out to shows every night may have ended long before coronavirus, but live music is still one of the great loves of my life. I appreciate Zoom as much as the next quarantined-person-who-normally-has-an-active-social-life — twice a week now I am attending Zoom rehearsals with the two music groups I sing in —  and I am impressed that musicians are continuing to create and perform that way. But I can’t get used to a world where virtual presentation becomes the norm, or where I have to deal with laptop screens freezing at a climactic moment in the music, or where I can’t feel the energy and connection coming from the stage, enveloping the audience in sound, making the molecules in the room flutter and meld with the harmonies. I need to be in the same space with the performers. I need to stand beside my friends Elin and Zlati as we sing, to feel the buzz created when voices sing close harmonies. So much of my experience of music comes from the beautiful imperfection inherent in performing art — the lovely surprises and foibles that arise in-the-moment, and the singular bond you feel with both artist and audience when the energy is right there.

John Prine had a way of making me feel like I was sitting on the floor at his feet while he played and sang and told stories — even while he was onstage and I was on a picnic blanket several-hundred feet away from him. I wish I had known him in real life, but feeling his music deeply, and knowing I’ll always be able to listen to it, softens the horrible blow of his death.     

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

Jessie Rothwell is a writer, musician and educator from Washington, D.C. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, the Furious Gravity installment of the Grace & Gravity journal series, and on Minnesota Public Radio's Classical blog, and her poetry is forthcoming in Breadcrumbs Magazine. Her music has been performed around the U.S., and when there isn't a pandemic getting in the way, she performs with Orfeia, a traditional Balkan women's vocal ensemble.