John Prine: Bruised Orange: Song-By-Song Discussion Thread

Thank you for your extraordinarily kind words, but at the moment the only "instant classic" I can fully apply myself to is my dissertation manuscript. It takes pretty much all the muscles in my head and sadly has nothing to do with Prine (or Dylan, or The Beatles ...) I also think, IMO, that my Prine interpretations are far too intertwined with my personal experiences to be fodder for any publication.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in a house that was about 50 yards from a set of railroad tracks. As kids growing up in the 70s,, when parents weren't electronically connected to their children 24/7 and you walked out to the corner every day to make your own "play date", we spent way more time hanging out on and around those tracks than any reasonable adult logic would dictate. And there were stories (urban myths? parent-authored cautionary tales?) about kids who were chopped into pieces by a commuter train (which flew by at about 5 times the speed of the freight trains). But when I was about 12, the for-sure real thing happened. My parents were ambulance corps volunteers, and assisted in gathering the victim's parts (much as Prine described). Maybe that has something to do with this song resonating so deeply for me.

About 20 years ago I had a really good friend names Sarah. Sarah's favorite word was "unacceptable!" She was a very kind person, and wanted everyone to treat everyone else that way. When they didn't, she'd fume ever so slightly and say "Unacceptable!" One night, over many cold beverages, Sarah and I contemplated the meaning of life until the wee hours. Right around closing time, I proffered "Life ... is about accepting the unacceptable". Which brings us back to "Bruised Orange". How do people deal with the absolutely atrocious? I don't want to go anywhere near spoilers that ruin someone's night at the movies, but if you've seen "Manchester By the Sea", there's a great example of attempting (or choosing not to attempt) to accept the unacceptable.

I'm always happy to share music with friends and students when they ask me about a given songwriter, group, or genre. But I generally avoid giving anyone a song unilaterally. But I wave that rule for "Bruised Orange". I've given the song to a number of people who I felt were faced with accepting the unacceptable. Because this song, more than any other (IMO), exemplifies what Dylan meant by Prine's Midwestern existentialism. I don't want to go places that might get this thread shut down, but let's just say that one of my least favorite commonly-used phrases in the English language is "Everything happens for a reason". I think Prine will tell you that the mother of that altar boy never found a reason.

I've been coaching for a bit more than 20 years now, and I've had my share of players who beat themselves up after a mistake, or let the aftermath of a lost point spill over into the next point. I say "If you can prove to me that that behavior improves your performance, I'll encourage you to keep on doing it. But since we're both pretty sure it does the opposite - cut it out!" So there you are in life - with your child suddenly dead for no good reason, or the girl with the black hair, seemingly out of nowhere, kicking you to the curb (the gutter, in fact) when you thought you two were a couple for life. So, Prine the life coach says, "If you can prove to me that asking unanswerable 'why?' questions, wallowing in anger, or embracing nihilism makes your life better, than keep right on doing those things. But since we're both pretty sure they're doing the opposite, as hard as it may be - cut it out!"

 

I think today we've going to take a bit of a breather at the end of Side 1 (for you vinyl fans). Sabu will cool his heels in the waiting room for a day.

The theme I hear on side 1 is that while we often can't control what life sends our way - little hiccups (a faulty car wash mechanism, a swarm of custard-hungry bees, sore knuckles, aching feet, cold bath water) or major disruptions (divorce, accidental death), we can control how we respond to it. And Prine tells us four times over (five, if you include moving on from the woman who doesn't want his love) to see the humor in it the best you can, and don't wallow in negativity even when it is catastrophic.

 

Hey, it ain't such a long drop don't stammer don't stutter
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter
And you carry those bruises
To remind you wherever you go

My favorite lines from the song. Joan Didion once wrote that the reason why she kept a diary was in order to stay in touch with the person she used to be. Because that person will come knocking at your door at 3AM some night and it's best to remember who they were so they don't knock you for a loop . Or something like that. Anyway, I don't know if that's what these lines mean (especially the last two), but I take them that way and they ring very true. That's certainly one of the reasons why I listen to music, to remind me of the demons at my door (best not to forget about them) and to free me from them. That's also why I write.
His way of reckoning with life, living in acceptance rather than struggle and anger is very zen like in a way and a laudable approach to lifes many pitfalls. It's lovely to be able to listen to the song and hear that voice emit words that you wouldn't expect to hear from a voice so graveled . Not sure if I agree with him but the song is entrancing enough that I will hear him out. Over and over and over. Great stuff.

 

When I first came across a handful of Prine albums in a box my big brother left behind when he went off to college (he'd apparently moved on to things cooler than Prine in the middle 70s), I enjoyed them but approached them with a bit of snobbery. It was probably the image of the guy sitting on haystacks who admitted to having a closet full of overalls. Plus my notion (heck, I was 12, maybe 13) that country music was hokey and kind of backwards in its thinking. Funny how after all these years of MY education, Prine has gotten so much smarter. I hear Zen Buddhism, existentialism, and echoes of Thoreau (who surely would have blown up his TV if he lived to have one).

The lines you chose remind me of two things. One, from Oscar Wilde, via Chrissie Hynde, "We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". And from Bob Weir/John Barlow, "What's to be found racing around? You carry your pain wherever you go". I think, as you suggest, that Prine means to tell us that it's a short trip from the diamonds to the gutter, or vice versa ... so don't forget that fact when you're in either place. Be humble when things are going your way, but don't lose sight of a better day when they're not. And also that we have little choice but to carry our "bruises" with us (we can't run from them, as Weir/Barlow point out), although that shouldn't mean that we fixate on overprotecting ourselves from further bruises.

 

For anyone who REALLY wants to do their homework:

"The Elephant Boy" (starring Sabu), the entire movie apparently (No, I haven't watched it)

 

Lots of great, thoughtful stuff in this thread. I'm not surprised. The two quotes below particularly strike me for how they reach beyond the text of "Bruised Orange" to bigger questions it touches on.

Like you, I'm hesitant to tap into what seems like a pulsing vein but perhaps... disruptive. That said, as usual I agree with your stated position on the song and that expression.

My context for the song is the Great Days anthology. As on this album, on that collection it is immediately followed by "Sabu," another song in the throes of "Midwestern existentialism," albeit with a light and humorous bent. After that is the song "Automobile," about which I remember nothing except my Pavlovian reflex to hit "skip" -- partly because the song never grabbed me but partly because that one-two punch of "Orange" and "Sabu" has a natural coda in "Killing the Blues," the rare cover in his catalogue.

Thanks for this. Now it's going into a file of random sentences and passages I dig through from time-to-time. Some pithy, some deep, some simply worth being reminded of. That and a dime'll get you a dime, of course. Less after PayPal takes it's bite so I'll just tip my hat and say thanks.

As to the song itself, it's long been one of my John Prine favorites and I'm somehow (not) surprised that others find it similarly striking in how it evokes a unique personal recollection and subsequent reflection. The opening verse's scenario is just that piercing. For my part, this is a difficult song to comment on since it is hard not to call out an autobiographical note with it and that's something I've been prone to doing and usually means I'm slacking. But whatever.

I was twenty or so when I discovered this song. By this point in my life I'd already had three friends die. One of them I'd lost touch with when we were maybe eleven since he went off to a different school. When I was a sixteen year-old-latchkey kid, while getting ready for school I had the local news on, hoping they'd announce a snow day. A reporter gave the name of a sixteen year-old named Greg E----- (a strange lapse since he was a minor) had been killed. He'd had headphones on and was walking down train tracks until hit from behind. Memory fails me but I assume it was after school the day before.

Like others here, it unnervingly stirred my imagination. An accident? Suicide? Then the reminder that even kids aren't immune to death. From the first time I heard "Bruised Orange" it was inseparable from memory and the verses that follow often became echoey wallpaper since my mind would focus on the triggered memory and my own "Mid-Atlantic existentialism." That's not to say the rest of the song is a slouch. The chorus is memorable -- and valuable. The verses work but, truth told, part of me feels they dodge complexity in favor of relatability. Is that a flaw? No. A missed opportunity? Maybe... if it were a different songwriter. It feels right. It just doesn't have the heft is all and it'd be hard to pull off. For me it doesn't matter because that first verse does plenty of heavy lifting. In my mind, this is probably John Prine's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Everybody Hurts," "Lean on Me," etc. but with more gravitas. Besides, there are such strong lines and images throughout and the occasional cleverness (e.g., "head says to the heart you better look out below) never veers into the silly or undermines the various narratives threaded by the quasi-self-help (but never mawkish) chorus and its genuine if not universal wisdom.

As a point of conversation, I am curious about the use of the words "mad," "madder" and "angry," though. Seems to me the song has more to do with despair. True, sometimes we do "throw our hands in the air and say what does it matter" when angry and maybe a story like the "altar boy's" could stir anger but in the context of the song I just don't associate that emotion as cleanly, particularly since the church is directly invoked such an incident could trigger anger at "G-d" for "allowing" this to happen. Dunno. Who knows; we're all wired differently.

Just now, while resisting the edit reflex, I re-read the lyrics. One of the links is to a site called "Genius," in which users can add commentary and footnotes. It's always hit and miss. Often enough there are factoids or analyses. Here's that page. One contributor writes (unsourced):

The page also mentions a video of Prine telling the story. This is probably it. I'd already favorited and forgotten this fantastic watch from 1980. In it Prine is driving around and points to the actual alley and church as he recalls the song. it then cuts to a live-on-TV performance:

​

One more autobiographical bit. In my early thirties I used to hang out with this friend, Kenny, who liked going to this particular bar. Strange since neither of us drank/drink. Must've been the darts or a specific waitress. For whatever rason, we went every few weeks. Being a converted train station, it was right beside tracks and a road crossing. The details are fuzzy but one night Kenny, who taught drums across the street, said the roads had been closed earlier. Someone got hit by a freight train. He was nonplussed, saying it happened every few weeks. Usually late at night. Usually someone leaving the bar -- drunk, depressed or both. When trains rolled by conversation usually had to stop because of the loud, low and long rumbling. A train passed that night while we ate and I couldn't get the song out of my head.

 

You nailed my experience exactly. Well, except the brother. I had to find John Prine on my own (in my case through covers by 10,000 Maniacs, R.E.M. and Nanci Griffith). I started with Prime Prine, the only thing my local Kemp Mill Records stocked. Had I seen they haystacks I probably would have moved on and not looked back. Two years later when I did finally buy his debut (in DC, the day I went to the British Embassy about getting a student visa) I still turned up my nose, but that song list... wow. I needed to know what had been left off of Prime Prine.

Around that time, my younger brother was an avid David Letterman watcher. He'd tape it every night. He told me I just had to see this funny song where this guy sings "hamburgers, cheeseburgers." Not long after I had to get The Missing Years. He became a fan, too, but not as much. He prefers Nick Lowe and Randy Newman.

Great fodder. Time to hunt down those songs.

 

I'm always trying (probably too hard) to tie little strings between songs.

IW's comment about people expressing anger towards God over the altar boy's senseless death immediately brought me back to "Fish & Whistle" - "Father forgive us for what we must do, You forgive us, and we'll forgive you".

I re-listened to side 1 today. I was taken by the appropriateness of the sympathetic production - not really country, not really folk, generally delicate and discrete but foot-tapping nonetheless. Sometimes I imagine where life might have taken Prine if his first album had similar production, and was not strangely geared for and marketed to country fans (did I mention the hay bales already?) Kristofferson "discovered" the next Dylan, and Atlantic put him on "Hee Haw" (figuratively).

 

We can't have a comprehensive thread without touching on the "happy enchilada" story. Here it is, courtesy of the "Live" album.



For a while, Prine was telling the "grumbally beads" story as an addendum. Fats Domino put out "Margie" in 1959 when Prine was 12 or 13 (it was the b-side to "I'm Ready"). Prine loved the record, and was especially taken with the line "Don't forget your grumbally beads". Since he had never heard of grumbally beads before, he assumed they were something exotic and cool that one could only get in Fats' home town, New Orleans.

Check it out, about 10 seconds in: Fats Domino - Margie (1959) (HQ) »

Spoiler

Fats actually sings "Don't forget your promise to me".

 

On to Side 2

"Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone"

The original studio version:



Lyrics:

The movie wasn't really doing so hot
Said the new producer to the old big shot
Its dying on the edge of the great Midwest
Sabu must tour or forever rest.

Hey look ma
Here comes the elephant boy
Bundled all up in his corduroy
Headed down south towards Illinois
From the jungles of East St. Paul.

His manager sat in the office alone
Staring at the numbers on the telephone
Wondering how a man could send a child actor
To visit in the land of the wind chill factor.

Sabu was sad the whole tour stunk
The airlines lost the elephant's trunk
The roadie got the rabies and the scabies and the flu
They was low on morale but they was high on...

 

The version from "Live", which entertainingly fills in the "Sabu" back story, with varying degrees of veracity.



Some background on Sabu:

Sabu was a 13-year-old elephant rider in India who spoke no English when he was "discovered" and cast as the lead in the 1937 British film "The Elephant Boy" (linked a little ways upthread). The movie was based on a story by Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps due to the success of "Elephant Boy" (or coincidentally), RKO in America made "Gunga Din" in 1939, also set in India and based on a Kipling story. RKO wanted Sabu for the title role, but the British studio would not lend him out. Riding the popularity of these Kipling-based movies, Sabu appeared as Mowgli in "The Jungle Book" (long before the Disney animated version, or the recent remake, obviously). With the outbreak of World War II, Sabu came to Hollywood, which is where he stayed for the rest of his life. He eventually expanded out to playing adults, and not just performing with animals. But Prine's assertion that Sabu was a 38-year-old man who played a 14-year-old boy doesn't land far off the mark. With his career in serious decline in the mid-50s, Sabu made several B movies (maybe B-) that exploited his former fame. He returned to riding his elephant, and being referred to as "the jungle boy" or "the stable boy". Interestingly, Prine was 10 or 11 when these movies were released (1956-1957). Did Sabu really go on this promotional tour of the Midwest, maybe in the winter of '56-'57? Did the tour make a stop in Maywood, Illinois, or somewhere near by? You'd have to ask HIM I guess (or have better Googling skills than me). BTW, Sabu was actually managed by his brother, and died of a sudden heart attack at age 39.

From the "Great Days" booklet:

"I was flying out of Minneapolis-St. Paul, toward the end of a tour. I had this vision of the look on Sabu the Elephant Boy's face in the old jungle movies: he always had this dazed and confused look. And I saw myself in the mirror. I just looked like "What am I doing here?" When things get really crazy for me or confusing, I usually turn to humor and try to explain the situation in a song.

It was one of those songs that kind of wrote itself. I wasn't even sure, while I was writing it, what I was writing about. I wouldn't show it to anybody for about a month. I was pretty introspective at the time, going through a very low period emotionally. And that song, I'm not sure I saw the humor in it initially. But as soon as I started singing it, people really dug it."

 

Totally agree about the sound of the record (and yes, I do listen the original vinyl LP version. ) As I said in an earlier post, after being disappointed by overproduction on Common Sense back in '75, Bruised Orange was a huge relief in '78, a return to form.

"Writing in Rolling Stone in 1978, Jay Cocks proclaimed that 'Steve Goodman is likely the best and certainly the most congenial producer Prine has ever had' and added 'No matter when you play it, Bruised Orange carries the chill of Midwest autumn beyond autobiography...into a kind of personal pop mythology.'" (Wikipedia)

 

The "Sabu" discussion has been a nearly overwhelming tidal wave.

My impression is that Prine didn't want to play this song to anyone close to him when he first wrote it because they'd think it was written by a man suffering from depression, or a substance abuse problem, or both. And yet it's FUNNY.

Before moving on I'd also like to point out what Prine referred to as the "Hurry up and wait" guitar playing (a line he surely learned in the army). The guitar tempo picks up and slows down in bursts - sort of like life on the road for a performer (the show being the quick burst, the travel and monotony/loneliness being the slow parts). It's also a bit like someone addicted to ...

When I was a fairly young, naive person, I thought that the performer and the road crew (I was smart enough to know we were no longer talking about Sabu) were high on GLUE, but the singer was self-censoring (but hey, what else rhymes with "flu" and is something you can get high on?) It's my impression now that the self-censoring is just a (darkly) comical way of saying they were high on anything they could find.

I will close out my 2 cents on Sabu (while hoping someone else hops in with something) with a passage I happened across last night. It's about the writing of, of all people, Soren Kierkegaard. And yet it made me think of Prine and "Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone".

From William Hubben's "Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Kafka":

"Born of dissatisfaction and coldly critical of any imperfection, (irony) remains egotistical and does not invite consent in spite of its possible truthfulness. But humor reveals understanding. It has a warm, forgiving, and sympathetic note and reconciles us with weakness or sin, whereas irony remains haughty and critical. There is, then, in humor the suggestion of a religious conscience, a sense of tragedy combined with the comic, and a promise of hope or reconciliation. But it may also contain a note of loneliness and even pain; it is frequently beyond communication and born from suffering."

 

Track 7 - "Aw Heck"



I could be as happy as a sardine in a can
Long as I got my woman
I could run stark naked and live in and old oak tree
Just as long as she's with me
My woman.

The cannibals can catch me and fry me in a pan
Long as I got my woman
I could get the electric chair for a phony rap
Long as she's sittin' in my lap
My woman.

I'd run a mile, just to see her smile
And put her lovin arms, around my neck
Aw heck
My spine starts a tingling, and bells start a ringling
When she's with me, can't you see.

They could torture me and stretch me like a rubber band
Long as I got my woman
I could jump off a cliff and never have no fear
Just as long as she is near
My woman.

If you've never noticed it before, listen to the lead guitar approximate being stretched like a rubber band, and jumping off of a cliff.

 

The version on "Live" provides the back story for the song's title, and also lets us know that the genesis of this song dates all the way back to Prine's army days!

 

Well, I guess I better jump back in or I'll lose my song-by-song thread following privileges!

Generally I don't think too much about the musicianship of these Prine songs, focusing entirely on the lyrics. However, I like Aw Heck a lot for the guitar and the piano. (And, yes, the lyrics are hilarious.) 1978 is right in my own country-rock period (Ozark Mountain Daredevils/New Riders/American Beauty-Working Man's Dead etc etc) so this song fits right into this.

 

A couple of other random thoughts which, by the way, seems the cost of listening to Prine!

Sabu and glue sniffing: I grew up in Japan, going to school in Tokyo. Early 70's, right outside Shinjuku station, east exit, with the police box right there: there would always be guys with their noses deep into plastic bags, sniffing. They're probably government ministry officials now!

Trains: I'm rather surprised (shocked?) by at least two posters here having personal stories of friends/acquaintances/neighborhood kids being killed by walking the tracks. Again, in Tokyo there's an awful lot of trains but I don't know of any "I think I'll walk the line" stories (other than my own, as an adult, AFTER the trains stopped running for the night). There were people killed by the trains, but it was always suicide. I do remember seeing train employees walking the tracks picking up, just outside our school grounds.

 

You wouldn't lost your privileges, but after two or three songs in a row with no responses I might give up posting.

The funniest lyric to me is "I could get the electric chair for a phony rap, just as long as she's sitting in my lap". I'm no expert on electric chairs, but wouldn't this do her in as well?

 

Going back to Sabu for a moment,I thought of that song when I watched the movie Fargo. I don't know why...

 

Bruce Springsteen, song "Nebraska" (also album title, 1982), inspired by the 1958 Charles Starkweather killing spree:

Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap

Bruce was, and is, a huge JP fan (he sang harmony with him on Take A Look At My Heart, 1992), and now that I think about it, the Nebraska album, though several shades darker in overall tone, might be considered kind of a companion piece to Bruised Orange, IMO, although there certainly isn't any of Prine's redemptive humor to leave you feeling satisfied -- by the time Bruce's collection of songs is done, the listener invariably feels more or less depressed.

(And I'll have to check, but I think that notion of someone having their "baby" with them on the hot seat might have originated in some old pre-war blues songs...)

 

Um ... Midwest ... "the land of wind chill factor".

Another Midwestern existentialism song, loaded with angst and isolation and asking "What am I doing HERE?"

 

Coincidentally, Prine and Springsteen also crossed paths in one of my posts today over on the Lou Reed "New York" thread:

A couple of random thoughts with regard to "Xmas in February":

What are the odds that Lou picking "Sam" as the name of his drug-addicted Vietnam vet who had great trouble readjusting to home life was a coincidence and not a nod to John Prine's similar vet, Sam Stone?



Is Lou paying a nod to Springsteen's equally despondent Vietnam vet in "Born in the USA" by having Sam lose his job at the Steel Mill (the name of Springsteen's seminal group?) rather than the refinery (Where the man said "Son, if it was up to me"?)

 

Hate to be a thread laggard again myself, but a few thoughts about the idiosyncratic Sabu.

(Sidebar: Looking at the liner notes again for the first time in ages, I see that's Bonnie Koloc adding those fetching harmony vocals on the chorus; she was another mainstay at the Earl of Old Town in Chicago during the early '70s along with Prine and Steve Goodman, and I always liked her quite a bit.)

As previously noted or alluded to, who else but Prine could've written this song, no matter whether or not they were under the influence of booze, pills or airplane glue? His unusually powerful sense of empathy for others is clearly at play once again -- his apparent point of departure for the song was, he said, the "dazed and confused" look on Sabu's face in some of the old films, and for JP, I guess that's all it takes sometimes.

After re-listening to the album track, some film references came to mind, other than the ones featuring Sabu: The Harder They Fall (starring Humphrey Bogart, 1956); Requiem For A Heavyweight (starring Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, et al, 1962) and even King Kong (original 1933, remade since). Morality tales, about greed, exploitation, and "power" -- how low the human race can sometimes sink. To me, having the Elephant Boy on a tour of the frozen Midwest to prop up box office receipts for the true beneficiaries, the moneymen, seems to fit within the traditions of those other movies. Again, what are the true depths of human immorality?

Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone -- another John "I Write and Sing About The Human Condition" Prine classic. It was great to hear it again.

 

Let me just say that even though I am not offering any commentary, I have been keeping the album in rotation as this thread rolls along, and you guys are definitely enriching the listening experience

 

You're like a machine - always a fresh insight that was right under my nose but that has never occurred to me! "The Harder They Fall" so seldom gets its due among Bogart's many great films. Like Prine in that airport in Minnesota, all Toro wants to do is go home. They can keep the promised (and never delivered) fortune. And while the new producer and the old big shot (or Prine's tour manager, or whoever was running Asylum after David Geffen departed) might not have the malicious intent that the Rod Steiger character has, Prine clearly felt like a circus attraction at this point in his career. I'm guessing he was generally playing clubs, since his records never really sold and widespread popularity (well, as wide as it would get anyway) was still about 15 years away.