23 min
"Dig This With The Splendid Bohemians" - FROM THE BOHEMIAN ARCHIVES- OUR TRIBUTE TO THE SONGWRITING MASTER, JOHN PRINE, WHOSE BRILLIANT WORK WAS SO EXTRAORDINARY THERE IS NO LABEL CAPABLE OF DOING IT JUSTICE DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS
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- Music
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-favourite-john-prine-song/#
Bob Dylan is one hell of a wordsmith. His ability to capture the mood of the times in just a handful of well-honed phrases once earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he initially turned down only to begrudgingly accept later down the line. One wonders if he rejected the honour out of fellow feeling for the great John Prine, whose body of work contains some of the finest turns-of-phrase in the 20th-century folk canon.
Prine always seemed slightly surprised by his own talent. While working as a mailman in Chicago, he began attending open-mic nights at the Fifth Peg. Although initially reluctant to sing himself, John was forced to take to the stage after one performer threw down the gauntlet. On stage, he was modest almost to a fault, seeming to fade into the background. His songs, on the other hand, stood tall and proud, many of which seemed so different from the usual folk balladry coming off stage that he felt embarrassed singing them: “Some were so different that I hesitated to sing them for anybody because I thought I hadn’t heard anything like this before,” he once recalled. “And I thought, ‘Is it because it’s really good, or is it because it’s so awful?’”
Bob Dylan would have agreed with the former. The pair met for the first time in New York. Prine had just been to watch Kris Kristofferson perform in Greenwich Village and ended up tagging along with the singer-songwriter after the show. After making himself comfortable in Carly Simon’s apartment, Prine heard a knock on the door. It was Dylan, fresh from a long hiatus after his motorcycle crash: “We got introduced and pretty soon the guitars came out,” Prine recalled. “I got to singing one of my songs called ‘Far From Me’. My first album was three weeks away from being released and all of a sudden Bob Dylan starts singing along. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I know all your songs, but how do you know mine!’”
During a conversation with The Huffington Post many years later, Dylan would label Prine’s lyrics “pure Proustian existentialism,” and “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” But it wasn’t just Prine’s capacity as a writer that impressed Dylan. “And he writes beautiful songs,” he continued, expressing his adoration of songs like ‘Sam Stone’, in which Prine sings about a drug-addled Vietnam veteran who eventually dies of an overdose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Prine was actually drafted into the US Army during the conflict and was inspired to write the song by his fellow soldiers. It was perhaps real-world experience such as this that lent his lyrics such clarity, lyrics that Dylan found intensely moving.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-favourite-john-prine-song/#
Bob Dylan is one hell of a wordsmith. His ability to capture the mood of the times in just a handful of well-honed phrases once earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he initially turned down only to begrudgingly accept later down the line. One wonders if he rejected the honour out of fellow feeling for the great John Prine, whose body of work contains some of the finest turns-of-phrase in the 20th-century folk canon.
Prine always seemed slightly surprised by his own talent. While working as a mailman in Chicago, he began attending open-mic nights at the Fifth Peg. Although initially reluctant to sing himself, John was forced to take to the stage after one performer threw down the gauntlet. On stage, he was modest almost to a fault, seeming to fade into the background. His songs, on the other hand, stood tall and proud, many of which seemed so different from the usual folk balladry coming off stage that he felt embarrassed singing them: “Some were so different that I hesitated to sing them for anybody because I thought I hadn’t heard anything like this before,” he once recalled. “And I thought, ‘Is it because it’s really good, or is it because it’s so awful?’”
Bob Dylan would have agreed with the former. The pair met for the first time in New York. Prine had just been to watch Kris Kristofferson perform in Greenwich Village and ended up tagging along with the singer-songwriter after the show. After making himself comfortable in Carly Simon’s apartment, Prine heard a knock on the door. It was Dylan, fresh from a long hiatus after his motorcycle crash: “We got introduced and pretty soon the guitars came out,” Prine recalled. “I got to singing one of my songs called ‘Far From Me’. My first album was three weeks away from being released and all of a sudden Bob Dylan starts singing along. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I know all your songs, but how do you know mine!’”
During a conversation with The Huffington Post many years later, Dylan would label Prine’s lyrics “pure Proustian existentialism,” and “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” But it wasn’t just Prine’s capacity as a writer that impressed Dylan. “And he writes beautiful songs,” he continued, expressing his adoration of songs like ‘Sam Stone’, in which Prine sings about a drug-addled Vietnam veteran who eventually dies of an overdose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Prine was actually drafted into the US Army during the conflict and was inspired to write the song by his fellow soldiers. It was perhaps real-world experience such as this that lent his lyrics such clarity, lyrics that Dylan found intensely moving.
23 min