There stands John Prine

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

So good, Kris Kristofferson said, that he ought to have both his thumbs broken: this would have been about 1971-ish when John Prine was (with Loudon Wainwright and ah, maybe David Ackles or even Elliott Murphy) part of that set of young guitar guys who were supposed to graduate into being the next Dylan. But Prine had a flattened-out plainsman’s voice more like Lefty Frizzell or Webb Pierce, those two classic American truck-stop jukebox mainstays with songs like “My Baby’s Just Like Money” or “There Stands the Glass” that could have matched perfectly any of the songs on Prine’s early Diamonds in the Rough LP, and Prine also had an uncommon capacity for compassion somehow compounded (instead of erased) by long years in both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Postal Service. By the time Kristofferson heard him playing guitar in Chicago—probably working out early signatures like “Sam Stone,” with the famous line about “a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes” inspired from the futility of Army life, Prine told Crawdaddy’s Ann Purtill in 1972—Prine was a honky-tonk guitarist with a humble and hopeful soul, who told Purtill about songs he’d written while he thought about the meaningless lives that people lead, and the moment when they recognize that emptiness, and also about how his dad kept asking him how come he’d never written a song as good as Hank Williams. But I think on the next record John Prine got pretty close— “Yes, I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You,” which if it didn’t make Williams then it surely equaled Webb—and he kept his own voice, too, going on and writing about war (“Take the Star out of the Window”) and love (“Far From Me”) and loneliness (“Angel From Montgomery”) with truly wounded precision. Twenty-five and he writes like he’s two-hundred-and-twenty, Kristofferson had said—and that was back when John Prine was just barely starting out.

JOHN PRINE AT THE CERRITOS CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS 12700 CENTER COURT DR | CERRITOS 90703 | CERRITOSCENTER.COM | MON 8PM | $30-57 | ALL AGES

Tags: cerritos center, crawdaddy, john prine, kris kristofferson