Episode 746 - John Prine
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuckanutters?
Marc:What the fuckabillies?
Marc:What the fuckalberries?
Marc:Yeah, how are you?
Marc:Mark Maron here.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:Nice to have you.
Marc:Welcome back.
Marc:You were here last week.
Marc:And welcome to all the newcomers.
Marc:You're in a safe place.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's been a crazy few days.
Marc:I could tell you about it.
Marc:My birthday was Tuesday.
Marc:I turned 53 years old.
Marc:And I'd like to share with you exactly how that went.
Marc:I'll tell you a little bit about my secret life that you don't always know about.
Marc:Sometimes I take gigs.
Marc:Sometimes I use my skills that I've honed and and whatever it is that I do in here.
Marc:Sometimes I take them out and I I'm a I'm a moderator, a talker to a people for hire on occasion for big events.
Marc:And, you know, they're not exactly what I do in here, but they're something different, and there's a different way I can use whatever skill set I've come upon.
Marc:But, all right, so you guys know on Saturday night I did two shows at the Wilbur.
Marc:And then Sunday, I came home and got my shit together.
Marc:Monday morning, I went to work at the show shooting glow with the ladies.
Marc:I shot till about 430, took a shower in my trailer.
Marc:A car came and picked me up, took me to LAX, flew to Dallas, Texas.
Marc:Got there at 1 in the morning, checked into the Omni Hotel, which seemed to be situated in some futuristic landscape that seemed to be devoid of a city.
Marc:I did not see a city.
Marc:I don't know how Dallas works, but there was no sort of figuring it out then.
Marc:Checked into a suite, set my phone.
Marc:All I had was one bag, one night.
Marc:Just brought a shirt and some underwear and my socks, new socks.
Marc:Toiletries.
Marc:Got up the next morning, swept for about three hours, woke up 645, went downstairs, met the guy in charge of the event, met Dr. Michio Kaku, the physicist, and then we went over to the convention center, which is connected to the Omni.
Marc:to uh to be in conversation at shop.org's retail digital summit 2016 we were the keynote event i was going to talk to dr kaku about the future for 45 minutes did a little meet and greet with strangers took a few photos with the good doctor
Marc:Then did a dry run, checked the sound, and there we were in a convention center in front of about 1,000 people.
Marc:Some of them hung over, some of them eating breakfast, some of them drinking coffee, a lot of them looking at their phones.
Marc:And we went through the sort of traditionally stiff...
Marc:keynote speaker at a conference event and uh it was a little dicey at first because it's not my uh it's not necessarily my wheelhouse but dr kaku is an interesting dude i should probably get him in here
Marc:But, you know, he has his his riff.
Marc:He has his his angle, his speculations.
Marc:I have my curiosity.
Marc:Unfortunately, I'm not always upbeat about the future.
Marc:And it seems to me that everything that could be seen as a positive about the future can be horrifying.
Marc:So I played with the idea of of interviewing him in front of a hopeful and excited room full of digital retailers and just everything he talked about happening.
Marc:I would just go, oh, God, no, no, not that.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:You mean they'll just be able to read our minds?
Marc:We're just going to have a contact lens in our eye that we can blink and shop with and go on the Internet?
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:What about our souls?
Marc:I didn't do that.
Marc:I played ball.
Marc:We had a nice chat.
Marc:It got interesting because there is a you know, you sort of he has a few angles that he works.
Marc:And then at some point I just broke down and went straight up WTF on him.
Marc:And I said, tell me what what is a day?
Marc:What is what is a physicist do in a day?
Marc:And he was very funny.
Marc:He said, basically, we try to finish up where Einstein left off.
Marc:And that set me up for a couple of nice jokes, and I woke up the people.
Marc:Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.
Marc:Then I got out, spent an hour sitting, trying not to fall asleep, got a car, went back to the airport, flew home.
Marc:That was my birthday morning.
Marc:Yeah, exciting stuff.
Marc:Some part of me thinks I should have went, oh, no, I can't.
Marc:No, you mean you'll be able to talk to all your appliances?
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:What about humanity?
Marc:Did not do it.
Marc:Next time.
Marc:I'll tell you, maybe when I get him in here.
Marc:Maybe when I get him in here.
Marc:Today on the show, the Honorable John Prine, one of America's great songwriters, will be here to talk.
Marc:I was definitely humbled and excited to talk to Mr. Prine.
Marc:I'd seen him a while back when I went to see that Bright Eyes kid.
Marc:He was good.
Marc:But speaking of music, the singer-songwriter Margot Price, who I love, will be on the show here in a couple weeks.
Marc:But she's a great country artist, and she's new, and she's just spectacular.
Marc:And she's heading out on tour this weekend.
Marc:She starts in Austin, Texas this Sunday, and then she's heading out all over the country.
Marc:Go to MargotPrice.net for tour dates and tickets.
Marc:I love her.
Marc:Her album, her first album, the solo album on Third Man, it's one of the great country records.
Marc:And I'll stand behind that against any country record.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:You hearing me?
Marc:By the way, I just want to reiterate, I tried to watch a bit of the debates on my phone, but I was traveling.
Marc:But I got the gist of it.
Marc:And again...
Marc:I want to state in the most sensitive and empathetic way possible.
Marc:I understand some of my listeners are Republicans and we all have different opinions about who should be leader, what the world should be.
Marc:Maybe some of us have like-mindedness.
Marc:But I do want to state in a different tone, just as a public service, with an open heart, that if you believe in Donald Trump,
Marc:if you believe in him, period.
Marc:Not think he's a good leader, not anything else, because I can't even register that.
Marc:If you believe in him and that he is the right guy and a good man to be president of the United States, I just want to say this kindly.
Marc:You're a fucking moron.
Marc:See, now that was a little condescending.
Marc:Let me try to do it empathetically.
Marc:You're a fucking moron.
Marc:No, still a little.
Marc:It's hard to say that.
Marc:I'm sorry, but no, see, that's not the right tone.
Marc:Well, you're a fucking moron, and you're a sucker.
Marc:See, it's hard to say those kind of words that are very descriptive and don't mean...
Marc:good things about a person.
Marc:But you get the idea.
Marc:And it's not a matter of whether you like Hillary or not.
Marc:Many of you don't.
Marc:And it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or not.
Marc:Because if you're a Republican and you're going to support him for any reason, you're an embarrassment to your party.
Marc:And you're a fucking moron and a sucker.
Marc:Is that nice?
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:I don't care what you do with your vote.
Marc:Just if you put it with him, moron.
Marc:Sucker.
Marc:Bad American.
Marc:That's all the politics for today, folks.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that political moment.
Marc:Here's a little something about me.
Marc:Another part of my secret life, but I think I might have brought this up.
Marc:I'm in a movie that's opening.
Marc:If you want to check it out,
Marc:It's called Flock of Dudes.
Marc:It comes out tomorrow nationwide to select theaters, and you can get it on iTunes.
Marc:I'm in it with Chris D'Elia, Eric Andre, Hannibal Buress, Brett Gelman, Jeffrey Ross, Kumail Nanjiani, and Ray Liotta.
Marc:It's a hell of a cast.
Marc:Go to flockofdudesmovie.com to check out the trailer and get tickets.
Marc:I felt confidently funny in the one scene that I had.
Marc:I know I was funny.
Marc:I know I was wearing a tie.
Marc:So I know that.
Marc:And I do know that at that time, Eric Andre and I were not getting along.
Marc:And as some of you who listen to the show regularly, you know that we made up.
Marc:We are getting along now.
Marc:And everything is copacetic.
Marc:So you want to know more about my birthday?
Marc:I had an amazing dinner.
Marc:I'm just, you know, easing into John Prine.
Marc:My mommy called me on my birthday and sang happy birthday in a little girl voice, not on purpose.
Marc:It was nice of her, but it makes me a little uncomfortable.
Marc:My dad called me to tell me he was driving across country.
Marc:He was in Ohio and that Carnegie Hall should be great for me because everything sounds good there from what he hears.
Marc:The acoustics are very good.
Marc:So that was a positive thing.
Marc:My brother wished me a happy birthday.
Marc:So many people wish me a happy birthday.
Marc:It's nice.
Marc:I'm 53.
Marc:I feel like this is a pivotal age.
Marc:I feel like that I'm entering old manness in earnest, 53.
Marc:I'm not saying I'm an old man, but this is a transition.
Marc:I'm now 50-something, as a woman on Twitter said.
Marc:Now I'm officially 50-something.
Marc:I don't have a problem with it.
Marc:I don't feel that much different.
Marc:I think my knees are giving out a little bit, though.
Marc:But maybe that's just today.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm tired.
Marc:So, Sarah and I went out to... You know the actor Andre Royo?
Marc:Well, he's been a guest on the show.
Marc:And way back when he was a guest on this show, played Bubbles on The Wire.
Marc:Great actor.
Marc:And he had mentioned that his wife, Jane Choi, has this restaurant, Atwater, called Canelé.
Marc:I hope that's how you pronounce it.
Marc:But the place was fucking great.
Marc:I'm just going to tell you about the food.
Marc:They make these giant ciabatta breads.
Marc:They're astounding.
Marc:They're moist with like olive oil and they're crispy on the outside.
Marc:And for an appetizer, we got a melon and cucumber salad with some feta cheese on it and a plate of shishito peppers.
Marc:You know, pan-fried, pan-roasted with an egg on top with garlic in it.
Marc:Maybe some shallots in there.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:And then I ordered a salt-roasted branzino.
Marc:And there's this sort of parsley, onion, and caper salad that comes with it.
Marc:And Sarah got this vegetarian chickpea dish with some sort of chickpea pancake, I believe.
Marc:And then for dessert, it came out with candles.
Marc:So that phone call paid off.
Marc:Came out because they knew it was my birthday.
Marc:A ricotta pound cake with fresh whipped cream and strawberries and a few candles on it.
Marc:Spectacular.
Marc:And I've decided, fuck it, man.
Marc:What good is life if you don't eat ricotta pound cake when it's available?
Marc:Or ricotta cheesecake for that matter.
Marc:And I want to thank Andre and his wife Jane for treating me to dinner.
Marc:That was very nice and unexpected.
Marc:And I'm doing it publicly because I believe.
Marc:I believe.
Marc:I like that restaurant.
Marc:It was fucking good.
Marc:Now, John Prine.
Marc:an American master, an amazing storyteller, an amazing songwriter, a beautiful guitar player, a guy with a history, a man who has been humbled in a lot of ways and has a beautiful, slightly cynical, slightly dark, poetic take on humanity.
Marc:I mean, he's amazing.
Marc:He's put out, I think, over 20 albums in his career.
Marc:And his new album coming out tomorrow, it's called For Better or Worse.
Marc:It's an album of duets.
Marc:He's singing with Alison Krauss, Miranda Lambert, Fiona Prine, Amanda Shires.
Marc:You can get it on iTunes and Amazon and wherever you get music.
Marc:And here's the thing that I realized about John Prine.
Marc:All his songs are terrific.
Marc:But he's one of those guys, not unlike a lot of musicians I've talked to, where a lot of people know him for a few songs.
Marc:And there's nothing wrong with that.
Marc:You know why?
Marc:You know why?
Marc:Because even on his first fuckin' album, 1971, okay, the first album, I believe it was self-titled, on that record, you have Sam Stone and you have Angel from Montgomery.
Marc:Sam Stone and Angel from Montgomery are two of the greatest American songs ever written.
Marc:No doubt, there's no arguing that.
Marc:Like, I listened to Sam Stone before I talked to Prine.
Marc:Tears.
Marc:Tears.
Marc:Every fucking time I listened to it.
Marc:Angel from Montgomery, whether he's singing it or whether Bonnie Raitt's singing it, mind-blowing.
Marc:Deep emotion.
Marc:Not quite tears with Angel from Montgomery because there's something confident about that one.
Marc:Sam Stone is just brutal and beautiful.
Marc:And Dear Abby, 6 O'Clock News, Hello in There.
Marc:All these songs are timeless and perfect.
Marc:And if you can do that in your lifetime, if you can make one or two or five or up to 20, as John has, amazing things that will outlive you and be timeless, what else, what more can you do?
Marc:You've done it.
Marc:But I'll tell you, man.
Marc:Just listen to me.
Marc:Do me a favor.
Marc:After you listen to me talk to John, go listen to Sam Stone, and then listen to Angel from Montgomery, and then listen to Hello in there.
Marc:Now, there's a lot of other songs, and I know that if you're a John Prine fan, you're like, come on, dude.
Marc:Those are just the big ones.
Marc:Everyone knows those.
Marc:That's okay.
Marc:A lot of people listening might never have heard of John Prine, and I'll go with those.
Marc:I'll go with those.
Marc:Sam Stone, man.
Marc:Anyways, it was a complete mind-bending honor to talk to John Prine, and that's what you're going to listen to me do right now.
Marc:yeah you know i i don't know what to do with the clutter you you got a room like this at home where where is that any uh i live in nashville yeah any room that they leave to me my wife leaves to me yeah i love it when she goes in to straighten it up yeah i can't find anything if she straightens it up you know there's a there's an order to it and it's sort of it's cozy you know the more stuff you're surrounded by from your life what do you got in there
Guest:junk basically but I think it's really important for some reason because I've kept it and about every three years I'll find something I haven't seen in years and years and I'll put it back why I don't throw it away I don't know but
Marc:You know, I wonder about that, too, you know, when I sit in here, because I think like, you know, maybe I could just get rid of a lot of this stuff and a lot of the stuff that, you know, I I don't know if I take time to look at it or not.
Marc:But like you said, sometimes you have that moment with something and it'll take you somewhere.
Marc:Even if it's for a second.
Marc:And I just don't want to turn around and put it in a wastebasket.
Marc:Right, or throw it away because then you've lost a time travel machine.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, it would be good if it was like cash or something you stashed away and forgot about it.
Marc:The surprise cash.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:I don't think I have any of that.
Guest:Do you?
Guest:I haven't found it yet.
Guest:How long have you lived down there?
Guest:Lived in Nashville since 1980.
Guest:I moved there from Chicago.
Guest:I was born and raised in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Marc:Yeah, like what town?
Guest:Maywood.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Right off of Madison, so we were neither north side or south side like we were.
Guest:Half a block off of Madison.
Guest:Yeah, and what did your old man do?
Guest:He was a tool and dye maker at the American Can Company.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, he'd moved up there in the 30s from western Kentucky to get factory work because there was no, unless you wanted to work in the mines or you're
Guest:family had a little business or something there wasn't really a lot of work in uh-huh in uh that part of kentucky so him and a lot of his cousins and stuff dripped it up towards cleveland detroit chicago for factory work uh-huh and if you did get work you usually sent for somebody else back home and they'd come live with us and
Guest:They'd try it out and either move back to—my dad always thought that he was going to go back to Kentucky, so he raised us as if we were from Kentucky, even though we were born and raised in the Chicago area.
Guest:And what does that mean to be raised like you're from Kentucky?
Guest:Well, he always thought that he was going to make enough money to move back there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He rented the same house for 38 years.
Guest:He could have paid for it three times.
Marc:In his mind, we're all going back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I remember in particular, they asked us at school, it was like third grade or something.
Guest:go home and find out what your origins are, where your parents are from, what countries.
Guest:And a little girl in front of me, the next day in school, a little girl in front of me stands up and goes, well, my mother's family's from Sweden and my father's family's from Germany.
Guest:And I stand up and I go, pure Kentucky and the last of a dying breed.
Guest:You know, that's what my dad taught us to say.
Guest:Yeah, so there was a Southern pride.
Guest:Yeah, but we were Chicago kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But we sure appreciated Kentucky because of his and his and our mother's enthusiasm for the area.
Guest:That's where they were both from.
Marc:And is that what now what kind of what kind of situation was there down there?
Marc:Because I don't know much about Kentucky, but I'm always taken with hearing stories about the South because there seems to be a much more elaborate and sometimes Gothic history of that region.
Marc:Like I've been to Lexington.
Guest:But I don't know where... That's totally different.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's going towards eastern Kentucky.
Guest:And Lexington is very... Well, because of the horse farms and everything, it's kind of... High class.
Guest:Yeah, high class, but also not far from Lexington as you'll find...
Guest:that aren't, you know, they're just barely going.
Marc:Yeah, a few miles away, there's a little, not much indoor plumbing necessarily.
Guest:In eastern Kentucky, far eastern, right by the West Virginia border, that's even, that's totally different.
Guest:That's real Appalachia.
Guest:That's Hadfields and McCoys.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And where was your family from?
Guest:The western part of Kentucky.
Guest:I live in Nashville now.
Guest:And if I go 90 miles straight north, I'm in Muhlenberg County, and that's where my parents are from.
Guest:You're in the land of your origin.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:And when you were growing up, did you spend time down there?
Marc:Did your grandfolks?
Guest:Mainly in the summer times.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:I'd go down and visit aunts and uncles.
Guest:Big family.
Guest:My granddad.
Guest:Big family.
Guest:And we still have a family.
Guest:reunion where we all uh-huh these are all all the uh my mom's sisters my dad's family they're all gone uh-huh and um the cousins still get together you know your cousins yeah you know some of them you haven't met before their children sure
Guest:their grandchildren it was kind of the idea my mother told me as we were growing up and going to the family reunion that she always hoped that after their day had gone that the kids once a year tried to get together and keep in touch with your with your family which is mostly a good idea yeah yeah right you know and sometimes it's very interesting it's like thanksgiving is labor day right
Marc:So are we talking 50, 100, 30?
Guest:Sometimes it's as little as 30, and sometimes it'll be up around 90.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah, and what's great now is...
Guest:a lot of them i hardly know i have to ask the kid little kids i don't know who yeah right but it goes over a period of three four days we spend it right together in kentucky yeah is there still family property there or you just meet there no there's no family property no nobody had nobody had any savings that love family property you know
Marc:And where did you first hear the music that moved you to do music?
Marc:Like your grandfather, what kind of man was he?
Marc:I don't know if they're connected, but I'm placing it in Kentucky.
Guest:Both my grandfathers were from Kentucky.
Guest:One was a carpenter.
Guest:That was my father's father.
Guest:And as soon as he would get done with the job, he would pull his family up and move.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:To the next city for the next carpenter job.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:My dad went to something like nine different elementary schools up north and down in the south.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He had a southern accent, and he stuttered, and he was the new kid in school.
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:So he said he learned how to fight, like, right away, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Tough guy.
Marc:And who played music?
Marc:What was the music in the house?
Guest:It was the radio.
Guest:My dad loved country music.
Guest:He'd sit at night and he'd drink beer by the court because he claimed it was more like draft beer.
Guest:If you sat there and poured a glass from the court.
Guest:And he'd have the radio sideways, an old zenith in the kitchen window facing the south.
Guest:And we had a good country station in Chicago, WJJD.
Guest:But on the weekends, you could pick up the Grand Ole Opry.
Guest:If you tilted it right?
Guest:The weather was right and you tilted it right.
Guest:And he'd sit in there with his quarts of beer and have me sitting next to him with Orange Pop.
Guest:And I'd be listening to Webb Pierce and Johnny Cash.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, Hank Williams Sr.
Guest:And just a...
Guest:All this stuff, and I listened to it because of my dad's love for it.
Guest:I realized that many years later.
Guest:But meanwhile, I was growing up listening to rock and roll.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And I had my oldest brother, Dave, who's 10 years older than me, decided to teach himself to play guitar and fiddle.
Guest:and mandolin, and he needed somebody to play with him for rhythm.
Guest:So he taught me how to play old-timey country music.
Guest:Like just three chords?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And after I learned them, when I wasn't accompanying him,
Guest:I tried to play some of my favorite songs, and they didn't sound like the records, so I made up my own words.
Guest:That was it?
Guest:I started doing it since I was 14.
Guest:And was he playing bluegrass music with those instruments?
Guest:Not quite bluegrass.
Guest:It was a precursor to bluegrass.
Guest:They're referred to as old-timey music.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:So, like, who would those artists be?
Marc:Oh, boy.
Marc:Like old-timey country, like swing music?
Guest:Yeah, I'll tell you who revived it was during the...
Guest:the big folk thing of the late 50s and early 60s is New La City Ramblers.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:They went and got a lot of those archival stuff.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:And brought them back again.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What was their label?
Marc:You know, were they on a... They were on Vanguard, I think.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I think you're right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So it's interesting about that, about that folk revival and just sort of this digging through the musical pile of America, that it was a real conscious thing.
Marc:It was a reaction, wasn't it?
Guest:Yeah, I think it was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it seems like it's coming around.
Guest:We spent a lot of time over in Ireland because my wife's from there.
Guest:Oh, that's the most beautiful place in the world.
Guest:It is gorgeous.
Guest:We're getting ready to go over for about a month and a half this summer.
Guest:Oh, you lucky bastard.
Guest:Yeah, I love it.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:We got a place in Galway.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:I envy you.
Marc:You know, it's like I'm not I've got no roots there.
Marc:You know, my roots are Eastern European Jew.
Marc:And for some reason, I go to Ireland and I'm like, I feel like I'm home.
Marc:This place is it's beautiful.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:Does she have family there?
Guest:Yeah, that's what we go back.
Guest:She's got five sisters still.
Marc:And they're all in Ireland?
Guest:And her mother, yeah.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah, they're all in Ireland.
Guest:And Fiona and I, we had a long distance romance in the late 80s, early 90s.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:And I'd go over there whenever I had more than a week off.
Guest:How'd you meet her?
Guest:I met her at, I did a couple of shows over there.
Guest:We did a festival that was around, what they were doing was getting guys like me and Guy Clark and American folk and singer-songwriters together with Irish bands.
Marc:Oh really, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And we did about three days in Dublin.
Guest:At the Vic?
Guest:No, no, this is a venue that became the venue.
Marc:Oh, the Vicar is what I was at.
Marc:The Vicar, I think, is what I was at.
Guest:Yeah, Vicar Street.
Guest:This was the old, it was down by the river, I forget what they called it then.
Guest:We were the first music in there.
Guest:It was the old train station?
Guest:Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Marc:So American folk artists with Irish bands.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and Fiona.
Marc:I think they're still doing that.
Guest:Yeah, my wife Fiona, she worked at one of the big studios in Dublin.
Guest:She managed it.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And where U2 cut and everything.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So she was in the music scene there, and she came down to hear these things they call the sessions.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And that's how we met.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Did she know you before?
Guest:She said she came and saw me when she was 16 years old.
Guest:That would have been the first time.
Guest:that I ever played Ireland uh-huh and what year would that have been what would never been 1980 okay so she came to see me and uh she's been thinking about you ever since well she had me I was in the back of her mind at least
Guest:You made an impression.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:After the sessions, after this thing, they threw a party for all of the artists.
Guest:And it was a horseshoe-shaped bar.
Guest:And a buddy of mine was standing about 10 feet away from me, holding the guitar up and saying, hey, John, come on over, let's play a few tunes.
Guest:I couldn't physically get from where I was.
Guest:To him, because the bar was like 10 deep in each.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I had to go around the long end, the far end of the bar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where she was standing.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And a little red-headed blues singer that I knew in Ireland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And her just said, come here, John Prine.
Guest:Meet this girl.
Guest:And we've been together ever since.
Marc:So that's sweet.
Marc:So you guys have been together since 1981, 80, 1980?
Marc:1988.
Marc:And this is, you've been married, you've been married before.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Twice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the music business.
Guest:Yeah, that's the music business.
Guest:You stay on the road.
Guest:Yeah, and those are the songs.
Guest:You know, it's a sad fact, but it's true.
Guest:It is, right?
Guest:Some of the best songs are written.
Guest:If you're a songwriter and somebody breaks your heart, boy, there's some great songs down there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:There really is.
Marc:Yeah, but you get to a point, maybe I don't know if you've gotten to this point, where you're like, I don't know if I need another one.
Guest:No, I know I don't.
Guest:Yeah, I know I don't.
Guest:Sometimes when I'm going through periods of not writing, people will say to me, what do I have to do, leave you in order to get you to write a song?
Yeah.
Marc:Well, when you were writing the songs, the Ireland thing, though, we were sort of talking about folk music, and I felt like we were moving in a direction where you were about to talk maybe about the folk music of Ireland.
Guest:I noticed this was about seven, eight years ago, that the buskers on the street...
Guest:Out in Galway and Dublin were starting to play the old-timey songs.
Guest:The country songs.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Like pre-bluegrass.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:That was becoming popular amongst, I'm talking about 18, 19, 20-year-olds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And here I'm going.
Guest:How did they hear that?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Why is that becoming popular again?
Guest:Isn't that interesting?
Guest:It really is.
Guest:And it does it on its own.
Marc:And it's also some sort of full circle because I think those Celtic rhythms are definitely part of the Appalachian catawak.
Guest:That's where it started.
Guest:It came from Scotland and Ireland.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:That rhythm and the way of playing and I think some of the fiddle too, right?
Guest:And the ballads about taking a girl down the river and murdering her and drowning her.
Marc:All those happy Celtic themes.
Guest:That was a successful date.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:But when you started out, so you're listening to Grand Ole Opry music and your brother's doing that type of music, the old-timey music, and your dad's listening to what's becoming modern country or the great country artists, and you're listening to rock and roll, and the folk explosion certainly hadn't happened yet.
Marc:So what do you do?
Marc:fiddling around with?
Guest:I went with the way my brother taught me to play, which was old-timey music and bluegrass.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And it was familiar to you because you listened to country.
Guest:Yeah, and I wrote my songs with the only way I knew how, if my brother would have been a big Chuck Berry fan,
Guest:Right.
Guest:Maybe I would have learned electric right from the start.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And wrote my songs to a different blues sort of bass thing.
Guest:But it just happened that that's the way he taught me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wasn't going to go to somebody else and learn how to play rock and roll.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you're probably better off, given the thoughtfulness of the lyrics and the sort of, you want the lyrics to be up front.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And there's something about country music that lends itself to putting the lyrics up front.
Marc:It's about the story.
Guest:If you're not Chuck Berry, it's hard to tell a story in rock and roll.
Guest:I think that's true.
Guest:A complete story.
Marc:that's really true and i think like i get what you're saying about the because it seems to me that you know just getting back to that you you starting to hear that old time in music on the streets in ireland sort of led to you know uh the mumford and sons and the you know and what in a sort of resurgence of uh of singer songwriters in that vein we're seeing a lot of that now it's it's a it's sort of an amazing thing because your generation of guys are the guys right before you i mean there were some heavy dudes around back then that that did uh
Guest:that did thoughtful uh you know i i think it's primarily country music i guess you could call it folk music what do you call your music uh pretty good it's country music right yeah it's but you go to nashville when i first got to nashville yeah i didn't move there to become a country star sure i just moved there because uh that's where i was having fun you know
Marc:Well, yeah, and it's interesting, though, because your music is straightforward and it does come from that source that I notice in a lot of the records, the tone of the record, you're always going to be you.
Marc:You're going to write John Prine songs.
Marc:You're going to play John Prine songs.
Marc:But depending on who's in the studio with you or who's producing the album and what they're going to bring to it, it really changes the sound.
Marc:And I guess when you do that, like I listen to the record...
Marc:Which one did I listen to?
Marc:Pink Cadillac yesterday.
Marc:That, you know, you're working with some of the Sun guys, some of Phillips guys.
Marc:And then Sam come in and did two songs on us.
Marc:Yeah, but this is Sam, what, in his 70s, right?
Guest:Yeah, but he was... He was on it?
Guest:He was on it.
Guest:He's a wizard, right?
Guest:I think...
Guest:Initially, he came in the studio because he saw his boys were doing a project and he wanted to give them an extra push.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I don't think it was my singing ability that drew Sam Phillips.
Guest:But you were a known guy.
Guest:Sam Flames, he heard my voice.
Guest:He thought it was so bad that he would stick around and try and fix it.
Guest:That's what he said.
Marc:Is he still around now?
Guest:No, Sam passed about eight, nine years ago.
Marc:I talked to Peter Gralnik about his book about some record.
Marc:Amazing book.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it goes all the way back.
Marc:When you met him, were you at the original place in Memphis?
Guest:Well, they had sold that.
Guest:Oh, yeah, now it's like a museum.
Guest:It became a museum.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But Sam in 61 had built a Sam Phillips recording service on Madison, and that's where we ended up cutting it.
Marc:And what was, because it was a different record.
Marc:I mean, it was a dramatically different approach.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And when you were in conversation with someone like Sam Phillips about your John Prine songs, you know, what did he bring to him?
Marc:What did his boys bring to him?
Marc:What was their idea?
Marc:Sam spoke in parables.
Guest:He looked also like a character from the Bible.
Guest:He had these big bushy eyebrows.
Guest:I think he saw himself as a character from the Bible.
Guest:He would get in your face and...
Guest:It looked like the burning bush was behind him, you know?
Guest:And he'd tell us, like, on a ballot, he would say, oh, now you boys are walking down the street.
Guest:You're covering both sides of the street.
Guest:That is so nice.
Guest:And then he'd go, now let's talk about sex.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He says, I want something, like, he said, I want to do push-ups, too, you know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he would get, like, all of a sudden, like, a preacher, you know?
Marc:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah, so, like, it was pretty, it was just cool working with him.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And do you like that record?
Guest:I love it.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:When we delivered that record to Asylum Records out here in L.A., boy, about five guys listened to it and then four of them left the room and one guy leaned over to me and he said,
Guest:John, I don't think what you have here is what you want.
Guest:And I thought, wait a second.
Guest:What did he just say?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they just, the kind of records that were on the charts then was squeaky clean.
Guest:They were good music now.
Guest:Steely Dan.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, making great records.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it was perfect technical stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the Eagles were making perfectly technical records.
Guest:Right.
Guest:All good music and everything, but I wanted some noise.
Guest:I wanted it to sound like five individuals in a room bumping into things.
Guest:Playing.
Guest:And playing.
Guest:Being in it.
Guest:We paid for the noise, and they didn't appreciate it.
Marc:Was that one of those moments where you're like, I gotta start my own label?
Guest:That was probably the beginning of it for me.
Guest:I had one more record I owed them, and I went and did it kind of half-hearted and said, that's it.
Guest:What, that was the next record?
Guest:Yeah, Stormwindows, which was actually more songs I'd written for Pink Cadillac.
Guest:Leftovers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But let's go back because, you know, this is an amazing thing about your your presence in music.
Marc:And I and I don't know anybody else other than and I don't know if people make this comparison.
Marc:I imagine I'm not that original, but but that there's very few people who are respected for their poetry and for their their their songs as much as like you and Leonard Cohen.
Marc:Leonard Cohen sort of holds his place.
Marc:He does.
Marc:And there's about four records there that are undeniable masterpieces.
Marc:And I think you're the same guy.
Marc:You're in the same place.
Marc:I listened to Sam Stone this morning.
Marc:And I think most people, if they don't know that song, should know that song.
Marc:So I listen to that song, and I'm crying again.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now, when that song came out of your heart and your mind, and that is one of your most well-known songs, and the power of that song transcends war or conflict or anything, and speaks to a darkness and a pain that is eternally human, what do you think of that song?
Marc:Do you feel like if that were the only song you had written, that you would be like, that's a great song?
Guest:I did feel all that about that song when I wrote it.
Guest:Also, though, I thought that that song, if somebody would have made me a bet, I would have thought that the appeal of that song might have gone, this was 1971 when I put it on record.
Guest:I thought by 75 or 76 that would be a song because some songs are deemed political.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They wear themselves out.
Guest:You go on the time marches on.
Guest:And I didn't know that that song would stay.
Guest:Those veterans are all still around.
Guest:And the veterans from other conflicts are still coming home.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Messed up.
Guest:They go through all this training to go to combat and then come back.
Guest:And nobody, it's like people are incarcerated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They just throw them back on the street and say, okay, man, you're a citizen again.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good luck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Good luck.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If you need some health coverage, we got a place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Come check in occasionally.
Guest:You can find it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, no, the tragedy of that and also the tragedy of, you know, American life on a certain level, too.
Marc:I mean, there's something that spoke to that in those songs and some of the other masterpieces.
Marc:You know, Angel from Montgomery was another one that was a window in to a sort of American heartache that never goes away, you know?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:When I wrote those songs, I think I was trying to explain things to myself more so than find an audience for it because I thought it was a hobby for me.
Guest:I didn't think I was doing this.
Guest:What, songwriting?
Guest:Yeah, I didn't think this was something that you could make a living out of.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And surprise.
Guest:Oh, yeah, exactly, yeah.
Marc:But the other thing that's amazing about those songs and about your particular song craft is there's a simplicity to it, but the turns of phrase are so fucking good.
Marc:It's like you deliver the first line of the cupwit and you're kind of like, what's going to happen?
Marc:Oh!
Marc:Yeah!
Marc:You know, and it's so tight and it's so economic.
Marc:Now, like, and I know you probably hear that about your poetry and about your songwriting a lot, but how much, when you sit with a song, how much word math do you do?
Guest:It's, um...
Guest:When you got a good one, I can hardly write fast enough.
Guest:I feel like a court stenographer.
Guest:I feel like I'm taking the song down and putting my name on it.
Guest:But I was just the first one to hear it.
Guest:It comes in like...
Guest:all tied up in a bow.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:So a whole thing.
Guest:It's there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's other ones you got to work on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I don't like it when it appears that you've done too much work on it because it shows to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Especially with repeated performances.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Of a song where you know you really had to work and patch and glue things, you know.
Guest:But don't you think you might be the only one that knows that?
Guest:Probably.
Guest:Probably.
Guest:Probably, unless I tell somebody, they don't know that.
Marc:Yeah, unless you get off stage and go like, I can't listen to that coming out of my head anymore.
Marc:But like other songs that make me cry, Souvenirs, wow, even Sour Grace, which is a little more, it's not as heavy, but Souvenirs is like heavy, man.
Marc:I mean, you know, it's beautiful, but it's heavy.
Marc:Now, when you release these things into the world or when they move through you, do you feel a relief now?
Marc:Because I saw you here a while back when Conor opened for you.
Marc:Right, I'd agree.
Marc:Yeah, and that was amazing because you're traveling pretty lean.
Marc:The band is a guy on bass, sometimes stand-up bass, and that kind of miraculous guitar player you got there.
Marc:Yeah, he's great, Jason Wilber.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the drummer and you and, you know, and, you know, Connor.
Marc:What was very funny is because I talked to Connor, you know, you listen to him and he's sort of a natural songwriter.
Marc:It's a it's a weird natural gift for him.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And and, you know, with songwriters, the guys I've encountered, you know, I want them to be heavy hearted dudes that live a hard life.
Marc:But some of them, they're just they just got a thing.
Marc:He's got a thing, and he's up there with a full band, and he's spitting and dancing and putting everything he's got into it, and it's good, but then you come out just with your gravitas and you being you and your lean little outfit there, and everybody quiets down, and it's just a beautifully balanced evening of a dude that we can all just sort of relax.
Marc:He doesn't have to jump around.
Marc:The songs will speak for himself.
Marc:He's going to say some funny stuff, and we're all going to be moved.
Marc:Real professional.
Guest:Well, I tell you, it took me a long time to settle down and enjoy that.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The first 20 years or so, I kept thinking somebody was going to throw something at me or stand up and go, what in the hell are you doing up there?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it just stayed with me.
Marc:Did that happen?
Marc:Were you playing in those environments?
Marc:No, not really.
Guest:I was well accepted from the get-go.
Guest:But you just had it in your head?
Guest:It was in my head.
Guest:I'm going to be found out.
Guest:It was like eight months after I first stepped on a stage that I had a record contract.
Marc:See, that's interesting.
Guest:I sang for the first four months.
Guest:I didn't quit the post office because I was like, don't quit your day job.
Marc:Right, yeah.
Marc:I don't know what's going to happen.
Guest:And I started making three times the cash that I was making with a regular salary at the post office.
Guest:I would get that in cash under the table for singing.
Guest:That's my hobby, singing songs three nights a week.
Guest:I could sleep the rest of the week.
Guest:I was at the pinnacle.
Guest:Yeah, that was it.
Guest:You made it.
Marc:I'm fooling them.
Marc:I got it.
Marc:So that's what you did.
Marc:So you were playing songs when you were a kid, and you were playing with your brother, and then that was your job?
Marc:You were a mailman?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How was that for you?
Guest:It was like being in a library with no books.
Guest:You'd go out on your mail route and spend six hours out there walking around, and it wasn't like the movies where people go...
Guest:Hello, Mr. Mailman, how are you today?
Guest:People never talk to me.
Guest:After three years, one lady had a COD for her.
Guest:That's the first time I saw her, and she said, when's the Regner guy coming back?
Guest:I said, I am your Regner guy.
Marc:Was that in Chicago?
Guest:Yeah, and even in the further western suburbs.
Marc:Now tell me, did you write those songs on your mail route?
Guest:I wrote Hello in there on the mail route.
Guest:I wrote Sam Stone on the mail route.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:I mean, there's not a lot to do once you're on the right street.
Marc:Now, with Hello in there, was that provoked by a moment?
Guest:No.
Guest:Best I can remember is me hearing John Lennon sing Across the Universe.
Guest:And if I remember right, it had quite a bit of echo or reverb on his voice.
Guest:And I got to thinking about talking into a hollow log and going, hello, hello in there.
Guest:And that led to thinking about talking to a person that's trying to get through to them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then that led to talking about old people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's how it came about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I like picking names.
Guest:Back in my early songs, I loved picking the right names for the right characters.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:You know, Donald and Lydia and the guy, Rudy, and Hello in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Rudy was the dog across the street.
Guest:The lady would come out at 4 o'clock every afternoon and go, Rudy, Rudy.
Guest:He'd come in for dinner.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I went, that's the name of this guy's buddy, Rudy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I just like getting the sounds of names.
Marc:Well, that's an important thing about it.
Marc:I talked to Jason Isbell about that.
Marc:I had to learn from Nick Lowe.
Marc:He wrote that song for Johnny Cash, The Beast in Me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Hell of a song.
Marc:Right, sure is.
Marc:And I just wanted to believe that Nick Lowe lived that life.
Marc:I wanted to believe that I was talking to the guy that lived it.
Marc:It must have been a part of him in the song.
Marc:But he said to me, he said, I write songs.
Marc:They're not all me.
Marc:And I'm like, come on, they got to be you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, I think like when you put this emphasis on names, you know, that song starts to take a life of its own.
Marc:You start to build a life around, you know, that becomes part of the poetry of it.
Marc:And those people become real that come out of you, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And so they're part of you, but they're not necessarily you.
Right.
Marc:exactly but they're kind of all of us yeah right that's the thing about hello in there is a sort of like it's a beautiful sentiment you know about respect and and and understanding of people who are aging and abandoned in a way just by virtue of the fact that they've lived long enough to be ignored right wow man it's heavy shit so
Marc:Because the thing, it's like the blues music, too, where you're talking about heavy-hearted stuff, but the release of them through music, it actually has the opposite effect.
Guest:I always thought I called...
Guest:My outlook on the world, I call it optimistic pessimism.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Admit that there is a problem.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is the problem.
Guest:Give the characters names.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then say it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's kind of like the blues getting rid of it.
Guest:And you just state it.
Guest:And if there's a humorous aspect to it, then that enters into it, too, as it does in daily life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People just don't walk around all the time with their head down.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It gets so bad, it gets funny.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know?
Guest:It should.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It gets so bad, it gets funny or it gets ugly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you can only cry so long until you start laughing about it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, hopefully.
Marc:Again, that's the best case scenario.
Marc:So now let's talk a little bit about your relationship with Steve Goodman.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because Steve Goodman, I didn't realize until this morning that he passed away so young.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I remember he had a lot of records out for a cat who passed away at 36.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I remember seeing him when I was a kid.
Marc:My parents took me to see him.
Marc:The City of New Orleans was the big song, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you aligned yourself with him pretty early as a producer and as a cohort, right?
Guest:Well, Steve, he was well into the Chicago folk scene when I came along.
Guest:What was that scene?
Guest:Who was there?
Guest:Steve Goodman, Fred Holstein, Eddie Holstein, the Holstein brothers.
Yeah.
Guest:This was after, in the 60s, there was a scene, evidently, in Chicago that had kind of mirrored the Greenwich Village scene, you know, from what I understood.
Guest:And then it kind of died out in the late 60s when, like, psychedelic music got big and everything.
Guest:Psychedelic music won.
Guest:Late 60s and early 70s, Steve Goodman came along.
Guest:I came along.
Guest:The folk scene started.
Guest:Coming back?
Guest:Getting back.
Marc:So you guys were just two different guys playing?
Guest:I was thrown into the same well, and Steve was kind of the king of it.
Guest:He knew every club owner knew him, and Steve came to check me out.
Guest:And he was like Little Caesar.
Guest:He was just like Edgar G. Robinson.
Guest:Steve was about five foot one, and he'd walk up to you and get right in your face and poke his finger in your chest when he's talking to you.
Guest:And I'm going, who is this guy?
Guest:I'd heard a tape of him singing City of New Orleans, and I had pictured in my mind,
Guest:that he was a tall beanpole of a guy with a little goatee.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And here this little guy comes in, you know, in my face.
Guest:We became a media friend.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he started taking me around and introducing me to people.
Guest:And it was because of Steve that I got my first record contract.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Even before he did.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It became his shining moment.
Guest:He opened some shows for Christopherson, and Christopherson was blown away with Steve's songs and said, man, you need to go to New York and get a record contract.
Guest:He says, no, you need to come across town and listen to my buddy, John Fry.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That was the kind of guy Steve Goodman was.
Guest:It was his lightning bolt moment.
Guest:And he said, no, no, you got to get in the cab and hear my buddy.
Guest:He loved you.
Guest:He really did.
Guest:And that's when you met Christopherson?
Guest:Yeah, that's when I met Chris.
Guest:Chris came and listened to me.
Guest:I had a club where it was closed already.
Guest:The waitresses were counting the tips.
Guest:The floor had been mopped.
Guest:I was waiting to get paid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had my guitar in the case.
Guest:Chris comes in with an entourage, and we put four chairs down, and I sat right in front of him on the mic and sang my set.
Guest:He bought me a beer and said, would you get back up there and sing those songs again and anything else you have?
Guest:And I did, and Chris was just... He was obviously blown away.
Guest:He loved it.
Guest:And at the time... Were you a fan of his?
Guest:Yeah, and I couldn't think of a...
Guest:More of a person that I wanted to play my songs for more than Chris Christopherson.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I connected with his stuff that he was country, yet he was doing stuff like Bob Doe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was really saying something in his songs.
Guest:And there was nobody else I would have rather in the world played my songs for.
Guest:And here my buddy Steve Gubbin dropped him in my lap.
Guest:Yeah, and play him twice for it.
Guest:Exactly, right.
Guest:Yeah, it was crazy.
Guest:It was crazy.
Guest:Are your memories of that night clear?
Guest:They are.
Guest:I got home and I sat on the edge of my bed.
Guest:My first wife, she was asleep and she woke up and I just said, man, you won't believe what happened.
Guest:It just happened to me.
Guest:I said, Chris Christopherson heard my songs and then he wanted me to sing them all over again.
Guest:I said, they actually liked me.
Guest:It was good, you know.
Guest:What'd she say?
Guest:She said, okay, well, go to bed and think about it in the morning, yeah.
Guest:But it was... That's amazing.
Guest:It was a moment, you know, that was for sure.
Guest:Chris was the one that introduced me to Bob Dylan back in 1971.
Guest:How'd that go?
Guest:All of a sudden, Chris says, hey, come on over.
Guest:Carly Simon was opening shows for Chris.
Guest:Chris said, hey, come on over to Carly's place.
Guest:He goes, I got somebody I want you to meet.
Guest:Me and Goodman go over there, and we're there for about a half hour, and there's a knock at the door.
Guest:It's Bob Dunn.
Marc:Oh, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he hadn't been seen in public for about five years.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he had the accident?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was really trying to be low-key.
Guest:He's up in Woodstock?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think he'd found a place back in the village by then.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:It was close to it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he comes in, and...
Guest:We start passing the guitar around, and about the third song I sing, Bob starts singing with me, and I think, my record's not out yet.
Guest:I'm thinking, how did he know my songs?
Guest:He had gotten a Jerry Wexner Atlantic and sent him a
Guest:a pre-copy.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:He already knew the words to a couple of my songs.
Marc:He's checking out the competition.
Guest:I mean, I wanted to run to a phone booth and call, I don't know who, call home and tell them what I'm doing.
Guest:This is still the first record?
Guest:Yeah, this is when, this is before everything, you know, exploded for me.
Guest:I'm sitting in New York City playing my songs with Bob Dylan.
Guest:It was really crazy.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:Chris was my biggest supporter.
Guest:Chris, I gotta say that,
Guest:I didn't realize this until after I was in the music business for a while.
Guest:Chris didn't introduce me to his manager.
Guest:He didn't introduce me to his publisher, his label.
Guest:He didn't try and steer me anywhere except towards good people and just let things happen.
Guest:And I don't know many people in the music business that wouldn't at least say,
Guest:hey, well, come on with me and I'll publish your music or something.
Guest:Chris didn't want to do anything but good things to me.
Marc:Well, yeah, he's like, I have no sense of, he's a powerful dude as a presence and as an artist.
Marc:Certainly as a human.
Marc:Yeah, I have no sense of him as a person because I don't know him, but I know his songs, I know his acting work, and I know that he seems intimidating to me.
Marc:He's not really.
Guest:I mean, yeah, he just has that thing about him.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He wrote some good songs, man.
Guest:Well, he sure did, and he sure put Nashville back in a real good place.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:How so?
Guest:By writing those songs.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It gave a new standard to open some doors.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, for Nashville people, because country music is very conservative.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:I'm not talking politically.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It takes a lot to change back then.
Guest:What's entrenched.
Guest:Chris came along singing songs, not just love songs, but songs about people being in bed.
Guest:They didn't talk about that.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:We assumed that George and Tammy were having sex, but they didn't talk about it.
Exactly.
Marc:They didn't take the ribbon from their hair.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So Chris, like, just sort of eloquent his songs were, but they were still down at home.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah, and that's something you share with him.
Marc:He must have seen you as a kindred spirit.
Marc:Well, he did, and I didn't believe it.
Guest:Yeah, it happened just like a dream.
Guest:Yeah, it's amazing.
Marc:And I imagine Dylan like, you know, I can't get a sense of him.
Marc:How the hell can you?
Marc:You know, what Dylan are you dealing with?
Marc:You know, he's a fascinating guy and he's obviously written some great songs.
Marc:But I imagine that Bob Dylan heard your songs and immediately knew it was something that he probably couldn't do.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Dylan writes Dylan songs, but your songs are so efficient and poetically beautiful and full of an energy that isn't verbal fireworks necessarily, but something that kind of grows as you hear it.
Marc:You know, I imagine he was like, you know,
Marc:God, that guy's just nailing it and it's so tight.
Guest:But there's no way that, I can't say this for Christopherson, but if Bob Dylan hadn't come along in the 60s and wrote those songs he did before he went to the electric and the stuff afterwards,
Guest:um none of you would be there there's no way i would i would uh uh wrote a bluegrass song maybe or something yeah i wouldn't have tried to go through that he he not only opened the door for people he made that door yeah and said here's the door right come on in you know and like um there's a i guess i can't imagine how many people wouldn't have taken that step to be a songwriter or something if
Marc:bob hadn't done that first right and i forget though you know like it's easy to forget just that bob dylan has done everything yes that like you know it's one of those things where you know you're gonna do what you're gonna do and then you're gonna look up at the you know mountain that is bob dylan right and that's what that is like you know because he did uh he did blood on the tracks nashville skyline he did some very sort of earnest country folk records and it's because he had a big love for country music he still does i believe
Marc:Yeah, no, he's out there too.
Marc:These guys who are 80 going... I don't think nobody... You do this for so long, what else are you going to do?
Marc:I guess that's true.
Marc:I mean, so you don't want to sit down?
Marc:No?
Marc:If you sit down, you're going to rest, you know?
Guest:do you go back to the post office i don't know no no you know well what about just not work that and i do that very good yeah you're good i really do yeah i'm good at hiding i leave the house so it appears to my family that i'm going to work or something uh-huh i don't come home till about five uh-huh yeah yeah this way it still looks like i do something yeah yeah
Marc:So now the other guy, so you came out, you're sort of the second wave folk revival then.
Marc:So Dylan was the first.
Marc:Is that how that works?
Marc:That's the way I saw it, yeah.
Marc:And who else was in your group?
Marc:Was Tim Harden one of you guys?
Guest:Well, because of the way I was brought up, it was Bob Dylan and Equal Doses of Hank Williams Sr.
Guest:Right, sure.
Guest:Because I was trying to impress my dad.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Those are good songs.
Guest:I wrote the song Paradise for my dad.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That was his story, and I wanted him to recognize himself in a song.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:He did.
Guest:My dad died about two months before my first record came out, and I was able to play the record for him.
Guest:I took a tape.
Guest:I bought a tape player and I didn't have a vinyl thing on my record yet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had a tape and I played it for him.
Guest:And Paradise was the last song.
Guest:on the record, and he got up when Paradise started and he left the room.
Guest:And he walked into our dining room, sat in the dark, and then came back in the room.
Guest:And I said, well, what'd you leave the room for when I played your song?
Guest:And he said, I wanted to pretend it was on the jukebox.
Marc:I thought you were going to say he got choked up.
Guest:Well, he probably did.
Guest:That's why he left the room.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:He didn't want to show me.
Guest:Actually, the only time I can remember ever seeing my father cry was when Hank Sr.
Guest:died.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I was just a little kid, and I saw my dad sitting by this big radio down in the basement, and the news had come out about Hank Williams dying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my dad just like thought, you know.
Guest:Fell out, huh?
Guest:He was the guy for working people and country people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He sang what their life was about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Great songs, right?
Guest:Great, great songs.
Guest:And his voice was, it had that thing in it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he was, what was he, like in his 20s?
Guest:27, I think.
Marc:Isn't that crazy, man?
Guest:It really is, considering how many great songs he wrote.
Marc:Yeah, it's amazing.
Marc:I was talking about Buddy Holly the other day, who wrote some pretty amazing songs, and a lot of songs.
Marc:I think he was pretty young, too.
Marc:He was very young.
Marc:So Cropper and Dunn.
Marc:So Cropper, how do you hook up with him?
Marc:How do you decide to do a record with Steve Cropper?
Marc:And what were you trying to get?
Marc:Did you want some of that stacked sound in there?
Yeah.
Guest:I met Steve, I guess I met him out here and got to talking with him and found out he was still back in Memphis.
Guest:I made my first record in Memphis at the old American Studios, Chip's Moments Place.
Guest:And I liked, there was something about Memphis.
Guest:It's only 200 miles from Nashville, but it is so different.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Memphis is more deep south.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Where Nashville, back then at least, identified more with Charlotte, North Carolina.
Guest:It was southeastern.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And Memphis was... Does that mean more big city in a southern way?
Guest:Wanting to be.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Wanting to be more a big southern city.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And Nashville now is bustling.
Guest:It is a big southern city.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I love it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, I love going down there.
Guest:And it's growing like crazy every day.
Marc:I'm surprised Jack White hasn't pulled you into the studio yet.
Guest:I have not had the pleasure of meeting Jack White.
Guest:You have not met him yet?
Guest:No, but I love him.
Guest:I love his playing.
Marc:Oh, he should get you in there.
Marc:He'll have you come over for a one-off.
Marc:He'll just cut a single with you.
Marc:I don't seek out people.
Guest:I prefer bumping into them.
Marc:How do you not bump into that guy?
Marc:in nashville he's you know you certainly know him from about a mile away he's a big tall dude well i would imagine you know our time will come yeah i hope so uh so all right so you do that record with uh with steve and you know what's your relationship how much with because it looks like you got you know jackson brown's on there doing his uh backup vocals and he's another guy i imagine has a tremendous amount of respect for you jackson i knew real early when he did his first album he came through chicago and played the
Guest:the little folk club with goodman and i got started uh-huh that saturate before using yeah oh yeah and he had one great song after another on there crazy so we met here at jackson early on and he became a buddy of ours as the few times we came out to la early on and bonnie and bonnie me and bonnie were buddies from the get-go yeah we used to tour uh her her bass player freebo
Guest:Bonnie.
Guest:Bonnie had a dog named Prune.
Guest:And Bonnie's brother, Steve, would drive the station wagon.
Guest:We'd go out on tour together, and it was just great.
Guest:She's a hell of a guitar player, huh?
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:I mean, Bonnie was, even at that age, when she was in her early 20s, she could play the bottleneck guitar.
Guest:She was not messing around.
Guest:She learned from the masters, you know.
Guest:Where did she come from?
Guest:Bonnie...
Guest:You know, her dad was John, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The, you know, Broadway musicals and... Oh, really?
Guest:...pajama game.
Guest:He was the guy.
Marc:No kidding.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So she's a New York kid?
Guest:Yeah, and they were Quakers.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And Bonnie was raised, I believe, I think more out this way.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:You know, but she went to school around Boston...
Guest:And fell in with that Boston, what was left of the folk scene in Boston, which was a heavy bass blues thing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:That's where she picked it up.
Guest:She picked it up.
Marc:That's interesting that she comes from that, like John Hammond Jr., another guy.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I mean, her body came from a...
Guest:a musical family but it was a total different different type different part of music you know and she just picked up on the blues early on and loved it loved it and that's what she wanted to do you know john hammond jr i admit john i hadn't seen him now in years but hell of a player
Guest:He surely is.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And think to be the son, like his dad.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:His dad, without his dad, no Bob Dylan.
Guest:His dad.
Guest:No Billie Holiday.
Guest:His dad's right up there with Sam Phillips.
Guest:No doubt.
Guest:Those guys.
Guest:They knew enough to record the geniuses.
Guest:They weren't musicians themselves.
Guest:They were very intuitive to know whether somebody really had something unique.
Guest:And they would recognize it and give them space to grow.
Marc:And also, well, J.D.
Marc:Souther, another great songwriter.
Marc:Yes, J.D.
Guest:'s wonderful.
Guest:The last time I saw J.D., me and my kids, one of my boys were out here with me the last couple days.
Guest:He reminded me when Snakes on a Plane came out.
Guest:Me and my boys wanted to go see it.
Guest:There was nobody in the theater, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just before the lights go down, there's one other guy.
Guest:It's J.D.
Guest:Souther.
Guest:So we go sit with J.D., and we all watch Snakes on a Plane.
Marc:That's weird.
Marc:That's an odd moment.
Marc:And is that your brother he played on that record too?
Guest:On Common Sense?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's see, Dave played on a couple of my records, but I don't think he played on...
Marc:On Common Sense?
Guest:On Common Sense, yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:And was that, did he have a music career of his own?
Guest:My oldest brother, he just had an old-timey band, and they played around Chicago.
Guest:Forever?
Guest:Yeah, he was, my brother was a musician, Dave Priney.
Guest:He's still in Chicago, and
Guest:Dave was a whiz kid.
Guest:Dave was the brain of the family.
Guest:He actually went to college and got a degree.
Guest:Still around?
Guest:Yeah, and he would lecture.
Guest:He's retired now, but he still plays music.
Guest:Yeah, you guys tight?
Guest:We played music down at the family reunion together.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:I'd try and get up there for a Cubs game.
Guest:Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Guest:Well, that's good that you got the relationship still, huh?
Guest:Oh, definitely.
Guest:I love my brothers.
Guest:And how many you got?
Guest:I had three, and we lost one a couple years, about five years ago.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:My brother Doug.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a retired Chicago policeman.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Living up in Northern California.
Marc:Oh, that's pretty up there.
Guest:Yeah, he was a wild one of us.
Guest:Doug was the one that I wanted to be like.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Doug was the guy that drove around on a motorcycle.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He'd drive it one block and push it for three blocks.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So after you did, when you made your own label, and you still have Old Boy Records, so that was after Stormwindow, so everything after that is all you.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It's all your stuff.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And you got a new record coming out soon?
Guest:Yeah, we got a record called For Better or Worse.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a collection of boy-girl duets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I did that one about 15 years ago called In Spite of Ourselves.
Guest:Wasn't Lucinda on that one?
Guest:Lucinda was on in spite of ourselves.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We and her sang two Hank Williams songs, aren't we?
Marc:Isn't she something?
Guest:Lucinda's otherworldly, I believe, as a poet and a songwriter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's determined, too.
Guest:She goes out there and does it.
Guest:Real deal.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I've had her in here.
Marc:She's out on the road all the time, too.
Marc:Yeah, she's wonderful.
Marc:And who's on this one?
Guest:This one is, we got Alison Krauss, Iris DeMint, and I love Iris, and Susan Tedeschi.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:She came in with a George Jones song I'd never heard before.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Called The Color of the Blues, and me and her tore it up.
Guest:Man, she turned out to be, we're real good buddies now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All it took was one song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she's just a great performer.
Guest:Great singer, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we got Miranda Lambert.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And Casey Musgrave.
Guest:And some of the new girls, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Kathy Mateo.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Who am I leaving now?
Guest:Harley Williams.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:You know, she's Hank Jr.
Guest:'s daughter.
Guest:Yeah, I have her record.
Guest:We did a song that her grandma was famous for.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That Audrey used to sing with Hank Sr.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Called I'm Telling You.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, and when she found out that was the song I wanted her to sing, she was just thrilled to be able to sing one of her grandma's songs.
Marc:Oh, that's sweet.
Marc:And now, how about original material?
Guest:What are you churning out these days?
Guest:I'm writing very slowly, you know, and trying to get 10 that I really like, and hopefully by the beginning of next year, getting another John Frye record out there, you know.
Marc:I'll tell you, man, you've had a rough go of it health-wise recently.
Marc:I've been really lucky with it, too.
Marc:I'll tell you.
Marc:It sounds like it was some heavy stuff, man.
Marc:It was, but at the time, I felt...
Marc:Well, you got hit with one cancer, right, first?
Guest:I did, and it was neck cancer, but it actually turned out the primary was at the base of my tongue.
Guest:And so it was smaller than the head of a pen, so it took them a long time to get that.
Guest:Once they did, it didn't spread anymore, but they had to do some radical surgery on my neck in order to get rid of the nodes that had already been affected by it.
Guest:And I got a great doctor down in MD Anderson in Houston, Texas.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And boy, he said, I'm going to get this and I'm going to stop it from spreading.
Guest:And this is what we have to do.
Guest:And once you find the right doctor, the doctor that you believe in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you got...
Guest:something like anything related to cancer that's half of the you've licked it then sure because you can put yourself in their hands yeah i keep telling people that if like if you don't feel intuitively that you're talking to the right person go talk to another one yeah right because they all have different ways they want to do it yeah that's the scary part and he didn't he didn't get your vocal cords or anything no he he didn't know he knew i was a singer but yeah turned out my radiologist
Guest:He was a fan and he wasn't supposed to tell me.
Guest:So he actually built a little shield just over my vocal cords.
Guest:When he got the radiation?
Guest:Yeah, to keep the vocal cords from getting the hardest part of the, the hottest part of the radiation.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:When he told me he was doing that, I said, have you ever heard me sing?
Guest:I said, if I can talk after this, I said, I can sing.
Guest:It might sound different than I did before, but I said, all I do is say words and then at the end of the line, I'll draw it out so people know it's the end of a sentence.
Guest:Did he get a laugh out of that?
Guest:Yeah, he did.
Guest:It turned out he had all my records.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:And then you got hit with another one.
Guest:Just about five years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Excuse me, there was lung cancer.
Guest:But, I mean, they must have caught it.
Guest:Within a couple of months of it just starting.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Only because if you're a previous cancer patient, you get checked out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like normal people don't.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I would get a chest x-ray every six months for no other reason than... You had cancer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they saw this right away.
Guest:They asked what I wanted to do, and I said...
Guest:Please go in and cut it out.
Guest:Tell me that I don't have cancer no more.
Guest:That's what I want you to do.
Guest:They did.
Guest:They didn't have to follow it up with radiation or chemo.
Guest:It was that fresh.
Guest:It was that new.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:And I guess unless you go get regular tests, you wouldn't get it that early.
Guest:Oh, you got lucky.
Guest:Yeah, I've just been extremely lucky both times with the cancer that I got the right doctors.
Guest:Yeah, you seem good.
Guest:I feel good, you know?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:So when you come out to Hollywood now, what are you out here for this time?
Guest:This time is purely stuff I never do.
Guest:I'm doing interviews because of that record that's coming out.
Guest:Yeah, and well, I'm looking forward to it.
Guest:And you hung out with Sturgill the other night.
Guest:Oh, I had a great time.
Guest:Sturgill's wonderful.
Guest:I met him about a, I guess it was just about a year ago, and I heard his second record, Matter of Modern.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I thought, boy, this guy's, he's on to something.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's really got it.
Guest:Whatever it is, he's got it.
Guest:Yeah, real deal.
Guest:And he ended up doing his latest record in the studio that I'm kind of a partner in.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I'd drop in every once in a while.
Guest:Here, one day, he'd have a steel player in there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Next day, they had these horns, R&B horns.
Guest:And then I dropped it a third time, and he had a Moog synthesizer.
Guest:And I thought, all right, Sturgill, you're doing it.
Guest:He's got a vision.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Mixing it up.
Marc:Well, there's a whole crew down there that are really sort of like getting back.
Marc:Not unlike, I think, the folk revival, there is a sort of true country music revival going on with that guy Cobb, the guy who, what's his name?
Guest:Dave Cobb.
Marc:Yeah, Dave Cobb.
Marc:that seems to really get like what those George Jones records sounded like and what those Waylon Jennings records sounded like before, you know, I think country got a little desperate commercially that there was a way of producing country records that was clean but, you know, specifically country sounding.
Marc:You hear that or am I making that up?
Marc:No, I do hear it.
Guest:What Nashville became is it became commercial.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really commercial.
Guest:They were...
Guest:If they can make money doing that, no matter what they call it, they're going to keep on doing it until it stops making money.
Guest:But I agree with what you said about this coming along, this wave of songwriters like Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton and that.
Guest:It's all...
Guest:i truly believe in music goes and it goes in circles you know yeah people don't take so much of yeah whatever you call it right and they want the real stuff again and it's coming around i'm gonna be 70 this year and so i've seen it happen before it just it takes you just gotta have patience yeah wait till it comes around again yeah what i do is
Guest:I'm able to go out anytime and play as much as I want or as little as I want.
Guest:And people come.
Guest:I'm lucky that the people are still out there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:They want to hear those songs.
Marc:They love you.
Marc:They love you.
Marc:And it's a real honor to talk to you, and I thank you for coming by.
Marc:Mark, thank you.
Marc:Beautiful.
Marc:Beautiful man.
Marc:Beautiful music.
Marc:Amazing story.
Marc:I was beside myself to spend time with that guy.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour to see my upcoming tour dates.
Marc:All right?
Marc:I got sweet, man.
Marc:Boomer lives!
.
.