Someplace in a column I’ve never published, I’m sitting by the deathbed of a Country Music Hall of Famer, pioneer and a man I considered one of my best friends.
He was “sharp as a tack,” as they might say and I can’t think of a more-apt description, even during his dying days, when I visited him often. He always was present and filled with smiles and love even though I'm sure he knew he was dying.
No need to go any farther there or to reveal who I’m speaking about, because, unfortunately, I’ve sat aside too many deathbeds, mostly regular folks, but sometimes a musician or someone else of popular note. Or my Mom’s or Dad’s. I loved them the most.
On this day I'm speaking of, the bleary-eyed fellow in the bed awakened from his medical drifting, looked at me, and smiled. “Hi John,” or words to that effect, he said.
He later corrected himself after the medical blear cleared up, and he called me by my own name – generally I’m known as “Tim” – and we talked some as I watched him continue toward death. Still sharp as a tack, I should add.
But I had taken no offense that when he had awakened he mistook me for John Prine – that was the “Hi John” of his greeting – because I really liked John and knew of his love for this fellow, a mutual good friend and confessor.
This was one of the incidents I thought about last night, April 7, 2020, when the expected news broke that John Prine, a great American songwriter and grit-observer of life, had died.
I really have no great John Prine stories.
I never wrote about him, other than an occasional blurb. At Christmastime, when I was writing about a homeless-helping-semi-organization’s efforts to come up with goods for the homeless, his wife, Fiona, and John became involved in this effort.
They wanted me to call, so they could endorse this drive. When I did, Fiona told me to call back and John would talk to me about it. But when I did that, he was not around. I actually think he was, but he didn’t want to talk about personal generosity. He was a humble man.
So Fiona, a kind woman, spoke for them both, quoting the great wordsmith, and "they" sort of issued a challenge to others that they should help my friend Stacie Huckeba’s homeless mission. Don’t need to go on more about this, but I enjoyed talking to Fiona and hearing her quote her rather humble husband with the incredible mind for words.
This morning, as I listened to a bit of Prine on You Tube, I rescued a blog post from a couple of weeks ago, that I’ll more or less regurgitate here, with additions and deletions, because it was about one of my favorite Nashville nights.
Here goes:
OK, so I'm standing outside the Belcourt Theatre on a sticky Nashville night.
It's about midnight and Hillsboro Village is quiet.
"Sam Stone" plays in my head for a moment.
It's just me, the Rev. Will Campbell and John and Fiona Prine.
I had met John before, but this was the first time we really "talked" as people. I wasn’t taking notes, was trying for no story. I was just talking with him as a guy. Or guys. One guy who worked for a newspaper and another guy who wrote some of American’s best life-observing songs. They both were rather cynical by nature.
The Rev. Will was a long-time close friend, who would call me frequently both at home and at the newspaper. He viewed me as "the last one left" who really loved the so-called "Outlaws," for whom he was the preacher and absolver and eulogist. He had started calling me when I worked for the old Nashville Banner and stayed with me when I worked at The Tennessean (Nashville’s morning newspaper.)
Our friendship blossomed because for years, so much of what was covered in the newspapers involved the commercial country acts. And I was stuck, in my heart, with the guys Will had nurtured. Years later, he told me that one day he’d share the details of the lonesome funeral he emceed or whatever you call it, for Waylon Jennings out in the desert. He got too sick to tell me that story though. Then he died.
Another friend, Billy Ray Reynolds, eventually described that sparse funeral for me. He’s dead too.
Anyway, back to that night in Hillsboro Village, which was Nashville’s hipster district before the conquest of East Nashville by white people.
John Prine and I talked about the concert we'd just seen.
Our mutual friend -- all of ours -- Kris Kristofferson had just finished a two-plus hour show.
I've seen Kris a score or more times over the years in concert. I also ran into him decades ago at the Tally-Ho Tavern. And his music mattered to my maturation. Still matters as I past maturation and ride too quickly the decline. Anyway, Kris and I long ago became friends and I cherish my relationship with him – and he’s not all that well anymore – and his wife, Lisa, and their children.
The night John, the Rev. Will and I spoke beneath the marquee had been after the best show I’d ever seen by Kris. Another old Pilgrim, Chris Gantry, had done the intermission. I’ve since learned to love him as well. He’s one of a kind and so was his heavily-Christed performance. I can say this now, this Christ stuff, because on the day I’m writing this, the Wednesday before Easter, Christ held his final feast and went to the garden. The rest is history, of course.
The Rev. Will was, I should note, the best Baptist preacher I ever met, and he could talk Jesus with anyone, without judgment. He liked Christ a lot.
Back to that marquee. John and Fiona and the Rev. Will and I all were waiting for Donnie Fritts, Billy Swan, Chris Gantry, Buzz Cason, Billy Ray and the rest of the "inner-circle" to finish paying their respects to Kris before we would go into the theater to visit with him.
Will told us about the long-ago demolished apartment house across from the long-deceasedTally-Ho, where Kris lived above him and the floor was so thin, he could fall right through. Maybe he did. That was a long time ago and details blur at times.
John talked about an album he was working on, and after I told him I’d like to write about it, he suggested that maybe I could come and meet up with him sometime to do a story or a column.
I knew his label's partner/boss, Al Bunetta, pretty well, since my wife, Suzanne, and I had "talked" Al and his wife, Dawn, through the process of adopting a child from Eastern Europe.
I had written about our experiences adopting Emily in Romania for the old Nashville Banner newspaper, and my tale inspired them. That's just an aside. I probably should note here that we also adopted Joe in Romania, but by then I was at the morning newspaper, for which I was working as a copy editor at that point, and they didn’t encourage me to write a story about it.
Al was John’s partner and more in Oh Boy Records. Suzanne and I had talked him and Dawn through the back-in-the-1990s rare adoption process of an Eastern European. Tragically, Juri, their son, died in a car accident at 19, but he had all sorts of love to absorb from the Bunettas that he’d never have gotten in the orphanage back in the Soviet colonies. Al’s dead, too, but he was a helluva character and I was fortunate enough to be at a celebration of adoptees out at the house he and Dawn and Juri shared.
Back to that warm night beneath the marquee in Hillsboro Village. ...
I was the entertainment editor for the morning newspaper by then, and I had gone to that concert with my friend, Peter Cooper, who was on my staff after I helped him escape Spartanburg, S.C., where I think the revenooers were after him. Or maybe the Marshall Tucker Band.
We enjoyed a scotch before the show at a nearby (since deceased) tavern. At show’s end, he had to rush back to the paper to write his review.
I lagged behind at the theater while he toiled in the fluorescent light 1100 Broadway, where there used to be a newspaper of some note, at least for a long time.
After spending the better part of an hour with Prine and Will outside the Belcourt and quickly ducking into the theater to talk to Kris, his wife Lisa and their kids -- then pretty young -- I went back to the newspaper office to see if Peter needed an editor.
Or a friend. Or company. We'd already had a drink. Nothing special. Twelve-year-old Dewar’s maybe. I don’t drink much anymore, but I’d savored that drink with Peter and with his wife, Charlotte, who didn’t go to the concert. She probably had a dry white wine.
But let me jump ahead to after I left the theater, where I’d spent an hour with Prine and hugged Kris and Lisa and as many of their kids as I could find.
From the Belcourt, I went back to the paper to see if I could help Peter with his review, edit his copy or just enjoy his company.
When I told him about Prine's offer for in-person album talking, Peter said he really wanted to do that instead of me.
I was a good boss and knew his affinity for Prine and his music, so I agreed. I was supposed to spend most of my time in stupid meetings playing games with corporate brass, anyway. The general premise was that I was supposed to learn about back-stabbing and ass-kissing and success. I left a few years later for my basement without ever learning those traits.
Anyway, Peter contacted Prine or maybe Al, and he was the one who ended up doing the interview and writing the feature. Probably better than mine would have been. Different anyway.
This story isn't going anywhere today. I'm in my office in Da Basement working, keeping the virus at bay, and I just stopped to think about that precious hour with the Rev. Will, long-deceased now but he loved me, and John Prine. And Kris and Peter and Lisa and the kids.
Funky Donnie Fritts had something to do with it, too. I loved him. He sure knew how to get someone else to pick up the tab, too. An adept expert at it. He’s dead, too.
A week or two ago, I wrote in a semblance of this blog that “If there is a prayer left in you during this horrible time, please send one to John, who at last notice was clinging to life because of this fucking virus.”
“Shit, I wouldn't mind a prayer or two myself and I'm doing OK,” I wrote. Still am.
I don’t need to repeat the rest of that column at all.
Other than to say that's all I've got today. Feeling more than melancholy … or is that worse than melancholy?
I wish I could be as happy as I was that night standing beneath the marquee with the Prines and the Rev. Will.
Funky Donnie Fritts had a lot to do with it, too.
And John Prine died Tuesday night of this COVID-19 virus bastard. It wasn’t a surprise. He was hardly the picture of health and cancer already had "killed him" twice.
Still, today, it’s a mighty mean and dreadful sorrow. I borrowed that line.
very well said...an amazing talent you have developed TG!
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