Like with Hüsker Dü, asking me to pick a favorite John Prine album is a foolish question whose answer could change from day to day, but I could make a decent case for this one. It has undisputed classics like "Please Don't Bury Me," "Dear Abby" & "Grandpa Was a Carpenter," plus personal favorites like "Christmas in Prison," "Blue Umbrella," & "Mexican Home." At the same time, the writing & performance has a tone that was unusual for Prine, making it kind of an outlier in his catalog. John Prine was the poet of front porch soliloquies, of kitchen tables before the breakfast crumbs were wiped away. His lyrics are plain & unfussy, punctuated by lightning bolts of visionary intensity where you least expect. Among his homespun wisdom, the prevailing tone was always one of compassion--except here on Sweet Revenge, he sounds hardened. It's there in the album title, in the cover (compare his rock star denim-clad sunglassed cigarette attitude to the "aw shucks" hayseed portrait on his debut), in the vocal delivery more often full of piss & vinegar on songs like the title track, "Onomatopoeia" & "Nine Pound Hammer."
That's not to say there isn't compassion though: "Christmas in Prison" is one of the most heartbreaking songs he ever wrote, taking the perspective of a convict who has to spend, well, Christmas in prison without his beloved. Its lyrics are perfect Prine, romantic without being corny, unique without being pretentious: "She reminds me a chess game with someone I admire/Or a picnic in the rain after a prairie fire." Then there's "Blue Umbrella," which I don't think is a very popular song--I've never heard anyone talk about it, & I don't think John played it live very often, if at all. Sure, maybe it's a little close to that James Taylor MOR radio sound, but that doesn't make the lead guitars any less lovely or the lyrics any less poignant. Like Steve Earle's "Goodbye's All We've Got Left," this one's for everybody who ever got dumped, knew it was coming, but was still so blindsided that they couldn't process it right away.
The production is perfect: Arif Mardin leaves plenty of sonic space for every instrument to shine; even in thickly-textured songs like "Often Is a Word I Seldom Use" with its brash horn arrangement & squabbling harmonica, Mike Leach's bass is still audible. Leach is lowkey a star of this album, from his octaves to his scale runs to his walking basslines, always locked in & always up front, interweaving with Prine & Young's guitars, sometimes even playing off the vocal like in "Christmas in Prison," up to the moment it ushers in the delicate brushed drums that carry the final verse & chorus to its conclusion.
The album's emotional climax is "Mexican Home," where the singer's sneering attitude over the record's course is revealed as a socialized masculine response to deep pain--the loss of a father, the alienation from a mother, the confusion at a world spinning too fast. The Motown girl group "doo doo-doo" backup vocals give it an uplifted, almost epic feel, meanwhile the lyrics speak of distance, regret & the anticipation of a coming storm. "The air's as still as the throttle on a funeral train" might be the most breathtaking line Prine ever wrote, & he just casually tosses it in after a dumb pun about windows feeling no pain. To me, Prine's Mexican home, like Guy Clark's LA freeway, is symbolic of the wrong turns you take in life, the spots you find yourself in because one thing led to another & before you knew it you wound up here, & you find yourself hoping you can make it back.
I'm surprised it took us 94 entries in this series before we got a John Prine album. I have lots more to say about him as an artist, but I'll save those for subsequent CDs. For now I'll just conclude by saying that he's been gone for over 2 years & I'm still missing him like it was yesterday. Rest in peace to an irreplaceable all-time great.
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