True Grit

 

I originally saw the Coen Brothers' True Grit the week after Christmas ten years ago. I’d forgotten just how good it is. Everything about it is spot on - the cast, the direction, and the adaptation from the original novel. The last third of the movie really - and surprisingly - provoked such an emotional response in me tonight, from the scene where Rooster Cogburn faces down the Pepper Gang by himself, to Rooster riding Mattie Ross to safety on Little Blackie. That night ride is so beautifully shot, and when Rooster has to put the horse out of its misery, it brings tears to my eyes. Yes, I’m a big John Wayne fan, but the Coen Brothers/Jeff Bridges version is in a separate universe from the 1969 film. It’s one of my favorite movies.

A John Prine Winter

 

Man, I still miss John Prine. The guy was an amazing artist, and from all accounts, an amazing human being as well. I still haven't gotten over his death from COVID last April. Standing outside today in a snowstorm with a bunch of fifth graders brought memories of his music to mind. Few performers can evoke a time or a place for me the way John Prine could, and with a cold winter wind blowing through me and snow pellets lashing my face, I thought of Prine's songs "Storm Windows" and "Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)". "Storm Windows" came out in 1980 and has been a part of my life for a long time. Here are the lyrics:

 

Storm Windows

By John Prine

 

I can hear the wheels of the automobiles so far away

Just moving along through the drifting snow

It's times like these when the temperatures freeze

I sit alone just looking at the world through a storm window

And down on the beach, the sandman sleeps

Time don't fly, it bounds and leaps

And a country band that plays for keeps

They play it so slow

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Well, the spirits were high till the well went dry

For so long, the raven at my window was only a crow

I bought the rights to the inside fights

And watched a man just beating his hand against a storm window

While miles away o'er hills and streams

A candle burns a witch's dreams

Silence is golden till it screams

Right through your bones

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Storm windows gee but I'm getting old

Storm window keep away the cold

 

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down

Don't let your baby down, oh no

 

Here’s what John Prine said about “Storm Windows”:

“I grew up on a four-lane highway. Lots of trucks. Lots of traffic. I used to have these spells every so often as a child where like the ceiling of the room was in normal perspective, but the doorway would appear much farther away than it was. Coupled with this, all noises seemed muffled and distant, particularly the traffic moving on the wet or snow-covered pavement. I was really in another world. I finally worked up the courage to tell my mother and father about it, and Mom made Dad take me to the eye doctor. I love them both.”

        

Another reason I have John Prine on my mind today is I went to Randy’s Records after work, waited outside for fifteen minutes until it was my turn to go in, and bought a boxed set of John Prine’s albums he recorded for Asylum Records. Not only did I get Storm Windows with the set, it also contained Bruised Orange, which was released in 1978. Here’s John Prine's intro to "Bruised Orange (Chain Of Sorrow)", and his lyrics to the song:

 

“I used to work at this Episcopal Church when I was like thirteen years old. I was saving money for a guitar and I'd go in on weekends and dust the pews up because round about then, a lot of people started going to church, so the pews would get real dusty. And I'd wax the cross up, vacuum the carpet and clean up the cup they put the wine in. Religion kind of lost its magic for me. I was a roadie for god."

        

"In the wintertime they used to call me up early on Sunday morning to come get the snow out, off the walk in front of the church, because if one of the congregation fell and busted their ass they'd sue the church for all the money they'd given it all those years. And I used to have to go in pretty early, about five thirty, six o'clock on Sunday morning to take care of the snow. I always thought it was a real strange time of the day, particularly on a Sunday morning. You normally see people are out late from Saturday night, or else people really had a job on Sunday morning, like a newsboy or altar boy or a bunch of people like that."

“I seen, I was going over one Sunday morning and this kid who was going over to a Catholic church, this altar boy, he got hit by a train. He was just kind of screwing around, walking down the track, looking at his shoes and he got hit. He was a pretty bad mess. And there was about six or seven mothers around the scene of the accident. They didn't know where their sons were at the time. They didn't know who had gotten hit, and it took about fifteen, twenty minutes to identify him. I always remember, like, the look on one mother's, on the other mother's faces. Not the ones that, the others had a big sigh of relief. And they tried to comfort the other one but they were too relieved to be very comforting.”

 

And that’s the story behind this song …

 

Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)

By John Prine

 

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley

Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley

On a cold winter's morning to a church house

Just to shovel some snow

 

I heard sirens on the train tracks, howl naked, gettin' nuder

"An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter"

Just from walking with his back turned

To the train that was coming so slow

 

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

 

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there

I sat on a park bench, I kissed the girl with the black hair

And my head shouted down to my heart

"You better look out below!"

 

Hey, it ain't such a long drop, don't stammer, don't stutter

From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter

And you'll carry those bruises to remind you wherever you go

 

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

 

My heart's in the ice house, come hill or come valley

Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley

On a cold winter's morning to a church house

Just to shovel some snow

 

I heard sirens on the train tracks, howl naked, gettin' nuder

"An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter"

Just from walking with his back turned

To the train that was coming so slow

You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder

Throw your hands in the air, say, "What does it matter?"

But it don't do no good to get angry

So help me, I know

 

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter

You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there

Wrapped up in a trap of your very own

Chain of sorrow

Man, I still miss John Prine.

Men Without Women

Randy's Records, November 14, 2020

Nowadays, unless it’s a new album by Bruce Springsteen, most of the vinyl records I buy have some emotional resonance for me, which means I mostly buy old stuff. If I can find an original pressing of a favorite album rather than a reissue, it’s even better.

In 1982, my brother Phil gave me the album Men Without Women by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul for Christmas. Little Steven is actually Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen’s best buddy and lead guitarist in the E Street Band. It’s a great album – Steve’s take on 60s soul music. Phil passed away in 2006, and my original copy of the album disappeared years ago. I finally found an original pressing of the album at Randy’s Records around 2017 or 2018, which made me really happy, because it had never – up to that point – been reissued on vinyl. Finding that album was also like having a little bit of Phil back with me, which I think was ultimately the point. Unfortunately, in December 2018, I took my new old copy of Men Without Women with me to a Little Steven concert at The Depot, hoping for an autograph, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I lost the album. I recognize that losing an album is really a #firstworldproblem, but I have missed having it in my collection ever since. Even buying the newly remastered CD version that came out this year did nothing to alleviate the sense of loss I felt over misplacing my vinyl copy.

 

Today, I finally decided that screw it, I was going to see if they had another copy of the album at Randy’s Records. I get nostalgic for deceased family members this time of year, so I didn’t even care if it was an original pressing or the new reissue. Because of social distancing and the exploding Utah COVID numbers, Tristen and I had to stand in line about fifteen minutes to get into Randy’s. Once I finally got in the store, I searched the record bins, but to my dismay, there wasn’t a copy of Men Without Women to be found, new or old. I finally asked a clerk if they had the album, and after debating with him over the title of the album (which I admit is a little weird; Steve Van Zandt named it after an Ernest Hemingway short story collection), he went in the backroom and found a copy from 1982 that even contained the poster that came with the first pressing. Not only that, it was in great shape and reasonably priced. You better believe I snatched up that sucker and paid for it without a second thought.

Right now Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul are singing the song “Forever” on my turntable – one of my all-time favorite love songs, and a song that never fails to bring a tear to my eye – and I’m reminded that life doesn’t always suck. Sometimes it’s pretty good.

 

If I Was The Priest

Right now, this song is everything ...

Bruce Springsteen wrote “If I Was The Priest” nearly fifty years ago. It predates his debut album on Columbia Records. In fact, “If I Was The Priest” is one of the songs Bruce played at his audition with the legendary talent scout John Hammond, who also discovered Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others. “If I Was The Priest” is a Bob Dylan-esque old west fantasy about Sheriff Jesus requesting Father Bruce’s presence in Dodge City, where the Holy Ghost also runs a burlesque show ("where they'll let you in for free and they hit you when you go"). Father Bruce ultimately declines Sheriff Jesus’s request to join him, because Bruce is overdue for Cheyenne. Hammond said he immediately knew Bruce was raised Catholic when he played the song for Hammond at his audition back in 1972. I first heard “If I Was The Priest” nearly thirty years ago, on a bootleg recording of Bruce's audition tape. It’s been a favorite of mine ever since.

 

Bruce’s new album, Letter To You, is a rocking meditation on the loss of loved ones, and how their presence still haunts and influences our lives. My description makes the album sound like a bummer, but it isn’t. It’s actually quite joyful. Bruce wrote most of the songs for the album after the last member of his first band, The Castiles, passed away recently, leaving Bruce the last surviving member of his teenage band. Besides the new songs Bruce wrote about death and ghosts, Bruce recorded “If I Was The Priest” – along with two other unreleased songs from back in the day – with the E Street Band, for which I am very happy and grateful, because now we have a full band version of this amazing song. Bruce has what sounds like a gospel choir backing him up, and Steve Van Zandt contributes an outstanding guitar solo at the end of the song. It sounds like they recorded “If I Was The Priest” in 1975 instead of 2019. That’s a high compliment.

 

I was listening to “If I Was The Priest” full blast this afternoon while driving northbound on I-15 after picking up Tristen’s boys from their dad. Seven-year-old Maxwell complained about the volume, but ten-year-old Harrison told me how much he liked the song. Smart kid. Anyway, when the chorus of the song kicked in, I got a little misty eyed, because I realized how much my brother Phil, who is never far from my thoughts, would have enjoyed “If I Was The Priest”. It’s classic E Street Band rock and roll — which is the highest compliment I can give — and Phil would have loved Bruce’s rocking, slightly blasphemous take on the old west as much as Harrison and I were enjoying it. And ultimately, that’s the message of Bruce’s new album: music can help us feel the presence of people we love who are no longer with us. So Phil rode shotgun on the Fargo line — that’s a line from the song — with me as we headed home together, listening to a Springsteen masterpiece. The end.

 

70s Favorites: Underrated artists

Music from the early 1970s is my happy place. I made an iTunes playlist that consists entirely of music from that era that I listen to whenever I’m down or discouraged (which has been a lot, lately.) It’s funny, because I’m old enough to remember some of the music from the early 70s that I currently listen to when it first came out, but not all of it. My older brothers and sister didn’t listen to anything wilder than Simon & Garfunkel or The Carpenters – four artists I do like – so it was up to me to discover Who’s Next and Exile on Main Street on my own, which I did toward the end of the 1970s, when most of the contemporary music on the radio sucked.

 What I like most about music from the early 1970s is the quality and the diversity. Some of my favorite bands were at their creative peak, like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, The Stones, and The Grateful Dead. Classic country by people like Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and Buck Owens are a big part of my love for music from that era, as well as some superlative soul music by Marvin Gaye, Al Green, The Chi-Lites, and Stevie Wonder, among many others. But they weren’t the only game in town. Lesser known performers (for their era), such as Gram Parsons, Little Feat (a great, influential band that deserved to be bigger), Ry Cooder, and John Prine also put out some wonderful music. In the fall of 1973, Bruce Springsteen released one of his earliest and best albums, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle, to fairly dismal sales. And there is a 1973 jazz/blues album by veteran performers Big Joe Turner and Count Basie entitled The Bosses that I absolutely love.

 Anyway, I was listening to my early 1970s playlist in my car yesterday, and Ry Cooder’s version of the Civil War anthem, “Rally ‘round The Flag” caught my ear. Cooder is an amazing guitarist, and he turned that old song into a slow blues, and it’s pretty great. I actually discovered the album that it’s from, Boomer’s Story, in 2007, thirty-five years after it was originally released. Ry Cooder has done some incredible music over his long career, but it doesn’t seem like many people have heard of him. Cooder digs up old songs and reimagines them in different musical genres. On Boomer’s Story, Ry Cooder performs an excellent instrumental version of James Carr’s late 60’s soul classic, “Dark End of The Street,” as well as the WWII chestnut, “Comin’ In On A Wing and a Prayer,” in a way that makes you think the guys in the plane probably didn’t make it. Like I said, good stuff. I was even lucky enough to find an original 1972 vinyl pressing of Boomer’s Story at Randy’s Records a few years ago.
 

So today I am paying tribute to the early 1970s by posting some albums that most people probably have never heard, but if you care about good music at all, you should. If you were fortunate enough to hear Ry Cooder’s Boomer’s Story, Big Joe Turner and Count Basie’s album The Bosses, Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken, Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel, and John Prine’s Sweet Revenge when they were first released, I congratulate you on your superb musical taste, and I’m kind of jealous.

Excitable Boy

 

Late spring 1978, and there was an incredible new song playing on the radio. It was called “Werewolves of London,” and my late brother Phil and I fell in love with it immediately. It hit all the right notes with us: werewolves, rocking guitar (provided by the legendary Waddy Wachtel, we later learned), howls, and the deep baritone voice of singer Warren Zevon. My other late brother, Ray, informed us that he had heard the whole album playing in a record store in Provo, and everything else on it was just as good as “Werewolves.” Ray said the album was named Excitable Boy.

 

That was it. I had to have it. My fourteenth birthday arrived and Phil gave me Excitable Boy, in LP format of course. Ray was right; the whole album WAS just as good as “Werewolves of London.” There were songs about a headless, well-armed, zombie mercenary soldier named Roland, a psycho killer who does unspeakable things to his prom date (with back-up vocals by Linda Ronstadt), and an innocent man hiding in Honduras (because he went home with a waitress who turned out to be a Russian spy) who needed lawyers, guns, and money to get himself out of his predicament.

 

Excitable Boy blew my fourteen-year-old mind, and I had to share the album with my late best friend Don. Warren Zevon hooked him, too. I then scrounged the money together to purchase Zevon’s other album (he only had two at the time), his self-titled debut that he had released in 1976, and it was even better than Excitable Boy. I became a life-long Zevon fan, and his music seldom disappointed me. I even saw him live in concert in 1988 at the Utah State Fairgrounds, when he opened for Los Lobos (now THAT was a damn good show.)

 

Zevon died of mesothelioma in 2003 at the too young age of 56 (the same age I am now), but not before releasing one last classic album, The Wind. Also before Warren died, David Letterman devoted one whole show to an interview with and music by Warren Zevon, where he revealed the most important lesson he had learned about life, the immortal words “Enjoy every sandwich.”

 

Thanks, Warren.

 

John Prine and Me

 

My acquaintance with John Prine’s music started fairly inauspiciously with the album Prime Prine: The Best of John Prine, an okay introduction to Prine’s music, but not the best. I inherited that used LP indirectly from one of my sister's college roommates in 1979, when I was fifteen. I liked it well enough, but I listened to it only infrequently because I hadn’t yet developed the empathy and patience that Prine’s music required. However, because of Prime Prine, I did become acquainted with Sam Stone and a plethora of other great Prine musical characters.

 

Sometime between 1979 and 1988 I became a genuine fan of John Prine’s music. I bought the album John Prine Live in the summer of ‘88, when I was working for the US Forest Service. It’s a great album - John Prine duets with Bonnie Raitt on the definitive version of “Angel From Montgomery,” and it also contains my favorite version of his classic, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I love John Prine Live. That summer my dad became gravely ill and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Fortunately he was with us another twenty-one years. Prine’s music was a part of that awful time.

 

For over a decade after that, whenever John Prine released an album, it became the soundtrack of whatever was going on in my life at the moment. The Missing Years reminds me of my last winter at USU in Logan in 1991-92 and my last summer of working for the USFS in 1992. I bought the two disc anthology Great Days in September 1993 and listened to it almost non-stop that fall, my second year of teaching. Great Days introduced me to Prine’s back catalog, especially the 1973 album, Sweet Revenge, which became my favorite John Prine album. From the cover photo – one of my favorite album covers ever – of Prine with a screw you cynical smile on his face and his cowboy boots propped up on the passenger door of his convertible, to the title song, to “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” to “A Good Time,” Sweet Revenge is classic John Prine.

 

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings came out in the spring of 1995. I bought it at my favorite record store at the time, Rock’s, in American Fork, UT. The album – especially the song “Lake Marie,” one of Prine’s greatest – reminds me of teaching at Midway Elementary that year. In Spite of Ourselves came out fall of 1999, right after I got married. In Spite of Ourselves is an album of country duets between John and a variety of great female singers. The high points of the album were two songs that he did with Iris Dement, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Not The Jet Set” and Prine’s original “In Spite of Ourselves,” another of his greatest (and funniest) songs. It’s a paean to a couple who love each other in spite of their foibles. That was something I aspired to in my marriage, but wasn’t succeeding at very well.

 

In 2005, at the height of George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Prine released Fair and Square. I was working as a principal at a charter school in Midway, UT, and I was separated from my (now) ex-wife, not for the first or last time. That album contains the song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” probably Prine’s most overtly political anthem. In it Prine sings:

“Have you ever noticed?

When you're feeling really good

There's always a pigeon

That'll come shit on your hood

Or you're feeling your freedom

And the world's off your back

Some cowboy from Texas

Starts his own war in Iraq”

Prine said one of his reasons for writing the song was “Jeez, if I get hit by a bus I would sure like the world to know that I was not a Republican.” I could definitely relate to that.

 

John Prine died on Monday, April 6, 2020, from complications from COVID-19. I cried when I heard about it, because it felt like I’d lost a friend. But John Prine’s songs - sad, funny, and supremely humane - will always be there for me. Vince Gill best described how Prine’s music makes me feel in his 2006 song “Some Things Never Get Old”:

“Makin' sweet love to that gal of mine

My first taste of bluebird wine

Eatin' watermelon down to the rind

Any old song by brother John Prine”

 

That’s a pretty good legacy.