RIP John Prine

I heard John Prine's "Hello in There" when I was quite young, not even 25, in fact. A tale about an elderly couple looking back on their life with disappointment, if not flat-out nihilism, "Hello in There" contains one line that my nervous system has hosted for decades: "She sits and stares through the back door screen." "I don't want to end up like that," I told friends and, on the cusp of 50, I've done a good job of avoiding that fate. For one thing, I'll probably never have a back door. For another, I trust I'll be looking at a movie screen to get in one more masterpiece before I die. Film and music keep me passionate, keep me going.

But that's to miss the point of the song entirely. However much we've been touched by grace (or luck), we need to take care of one another, if only to acknowledge someone else's existence:

"So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't careSay, 'hello in there, hello'"

That other-oriented sentiment is not easy to pull off in popular music of any stripe, even country, although the most gut-wrenching chord changes ever recorded certainly help. So much rock, for instance, is about individual transcendence/annihilation. Because I've avoided staring out a back door screen, I like to put "Hello in There" in conversation with the Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See the Light," the coda of which is a radical act of other-orientation as it asks, "How does it feel to be loved?" It feels like heaven, Lou. Thank you.

But before (and to get to?) that point, Reed is euphoric in self-absorption: "There are problems in these times/But, ooh, none of them are mine!" As Ellen Willis noted in her beautiful essay on the band in Stranded, this is just the flipside of Zombie Lou's "I just don't care!" stance in "Heroin":

"Enlightenment has begotten spiritual pride, a sin that like its inverted form, nihilism, cuts the sinner off from the rest of the human race. Especially from those people who, you know, work very hard but never get it right. Finally we are left with yet another version of the spiritual paradox: to experience grace is to be conscious of it; to be conscious of it is to lose it." (83)

And yet we have the music of John Prine. "Hello in There" is touched by grace but never conscious of it. Instead of fading out, it cuts off curtly to emphasize the song's message not the singer delivering it. Indeed, the message is available for anyone to deliver, even David Allen Coe. Prine's oeuvre is a music for and about people who work very hard but never get it right. It's a music that knows no greater sin that cutting oneself off from the rest of the human race. And it's a music with many lessons to teach us during an era of physical distancing meant to save each other's lives.