In our 2017 feature, we looked at how John Prine took the folk scene by storm, wowed his hero Bob Dylan and inspired today’s country stars
Today, Prine is giving his own version of a “Homes of the Stars” tour. “There’s Waylon’s old place,” Prine says, gesturing at a big Victorian brick house on Music Row. “Used to be outlaw central for a while.” He points out the house that once belonged to Cowboy Jack Clement, the former Sun Records house engineer who wrote several rock & roll classics, including Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” Cowboy, as Prine calls him, is the reason Prine came to Nashville.
Prine’s office feels like a clubhouse: There’s a pool table, black-and-white family photos, a pinball machine and Christmas lights all over. Prine loves Christmas; back when he was single, he kept a tree in his house year-round. It’s one in a long series of Prine’s endearingly eccentric qualities. He’ll also pack at least four bags of luggage for his weekend tours – everything from framed family photos to Heinz ketchup tocomics when I was in my thirties, and then I started subscribing to them.
Though the Prine family grew up in Maywood, Bill Prine drilled into the kids that they were also from somewhere else: Paradise, Kentucky, a small coal-mining town where Bill grew up before moving north to find work. “One time I went to school and they asked us all to find out where our roots were,” Prine says. “It’s goin’ around the class, and the kids were going, ‘I’m Swedish-German’ or ‘I’m English-Irish.’ They got to me and I said, ‘Pure Kentuckian.
When Prine played “Sam Stone” at his first-ever performance, an open-mic night at Chicago’s Fifth Peg in 1969, he was greeted with icy silence. The “Jesus” line made many audiences angry. “They’d start to have an argument with me when I was onstage,” says Prine. Though his record sales slowed down, Prine’s writing grew more adventurous and profound. “Jesus the Missing Years” theorizes what Christ might have done during the 18 years of his life unaccounted for in the Bible, while “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” uses the sad story of Sabu Dastagir – the Indian actor from 1937’s– as a meditation on loneliness. “Who writes songs like that?” Mellencamp asked onstage at Prine’s PEN Award ceremony. “Two people come to mind: God and.
“I was totally involved in his wild years,” Hooter corroborates. Hooter shares a few stories, like the one about Prine’s tropical-fish tank. One night, while they were out barhopping, Prine’s heater shorted out and killed all of his fish. Prine was distraught. He had become attached to a goldfish that had grown to a pound and a half. After storing it in the freezer for months, Prine took the fish to a taxidermist and had it mounted, explaining it was the family’s favorite pet.
Surgeons removed the tumor, taking a chunk of Prine’s neck with it. The surgery left his head permanently slumped, which means he spends a lot of time staring at his shoes when he walks. It also makes him stick out in public – he’s used to getting stared at, especially by curious children. “I didn’t think there was any use in me wearing a turtleneck sweater,” he says.
Prine says there’s one downside to finding happiness late in life: His writing has slowed down. “The one thing I can’t remember about writing songs is just how fucking simple it is,” he says. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who’s been co-writing with Prine, says Prine can write when he wants to: “These phrases you’re looking for – they just pop out of his mouth,” Auerbach says. “Like it’s magic or something.
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