At the top of the fourth chapter of Tom Piazza’s new book Living in the Present With John Prine, Piazza quotes Mississippi writer Barry Hannah: “Good old boys know there’s something unsmiling at the heart of things. That’s why we like to laugh.”
Prine was known for his wry perspective and profound grasp of the realities of life, but he always seemed to be having a good time trying to make sense of it all.
“The thing that made John so special wasn’t that he was a clown,” Piazza tells the Scene. “John was always a lot of fun, and he was funny, and we laughed a lot, and that’s so much a part of his appeal to people and to me and to our friendship. But it also is worth remembering that the reason that fun was so much fun was that there was a real understanding of the parts of life that aren’t fun underneath.”
In Living in the Present With John Prine, Piazza balances the joy of being present with John Prine with the absence that came after his death. Though there’s a heaviness of loss underpinning even the funniest stories in the book — John Prine had a jukebox that would smoke if you plugged it in, for example — Piazza doesn’t dwell too much on the heavy. There’s a strong sense of delight running through the whole narrative, even though underneath there is so much loss.
Piazza’s friendship with Prine started around the time Prine put out The Tree of Forgiveness in 2018. As part of a story for Oxford American, Piazza and Prine took a road trip to Florida together, and Piazza interviewed him along the way. The piece, as well as Prine’s album, got a lot of attention. But even after the story went to press, the two would meet to hang out in New Orleans, where Piazza has lived for years, and in Nashville at Prine’s place on Overton Lea Road. Piazza says that, even then, interviewing and writing about Prine was never a question-and-answer session. It was just two folks sitting down to yak, pick on the guitar and maybe grab a bite to eat.
“I was not interested in trying to dig into John’s psyche and ask him what his conflicts were or what his regrets might’ve been, or any of that kind of stuff,” Piazza says. “It wasn’t important. It wasn’t important to me given who he was. He was exactly the person you encountered or I encountered, or anybody else encountered. There was nothing that I wanted from John that I didn’t get every minute that we were together. I never wanted or needed more from John than him to be himself and for me to be able to be myself. And I think that’s the secret to almost any successful relationship.”
"I've been ticked-off ever since I read Pluto was no longer a planet,” says John Prine, sitting at the dining table in his Green Hills home. H…
Because of this lack of explicit interrogation, Piazza’s book works like the unveiling of a friendship — the story of someone learning more about a new friend.
Any fan of Prine would look forward to reading something that gives a little bit more insight into his day-to-day life, and though Prine always said he didn’t want to write a memoir, he eventually did approach Piazza about collaborating on one. Likewise, Piazza hadn’t been much interested in writing memoirs for musicians, but he said this was an offer he couldn’t refuse. With Prine, Piazza knew it could be different — they could hang out like they always did, and he knew they’d have a good time.
As it happens, their work on the memoir began at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Piazza sat down for his first recorded session for the memoir in February 2020, and they made plans to get together two weeks later for their next session. In that first chat, Prine talked about his early life experiences in Chicago and Nashville, his friendship with the legendary Cowboy Jack Clement and a bit about touring, among other things.
What happened next is well-documented. Prine died in April of complications from COVID. Piazza knew he would eventually have to reckon with what to do about the book, but first he had to grieve. Still, it would be a loss to let that material from their first official meeting go unseen by others, but Piazza wasn’t sure exactly what route he would take with what he had. Ultimately, it took him four years to write the portion of the book that covers Prine’s death.
“There was something there that I felt was worth sharing with people,” Piazza explains. “Because I knew the sense of loss that I was experiencing with John’s death. This may sound, well, sound off-the-table, but I knew that there would be thousands and thousands of other people who were feeling the same sense of loss and grief.”
Piazza had a feeling that there was a story he could tell — a story about “friendship and loss and gratitude and everything that goes into those ingredients that might be worth somebody’s time to read.”
With the blessing of Prine’s family — including his wife Fiona Prine, who even penned a lovely foreword — Piazza began to write a different kind of story. The book he ended up with is both a personal memoir and a straightforward biography of a beloved musician.
“Sooner or later,” he writes toward the end of the book, “you are left with the question of where to put the ashes, what to write on the headstone, literal or figurative, how to properly memorialize a life. And how to walk away without turning your back.”
A songwriter’s songwriter, a singular human and a guiding light for generations of musicians is gone. On Tuesday, April 7, John Prine died of …
A particularly moving aspect of the book is when Piazza meets folks like Jason Wilber, Prine’s guitarist of more than two decades, as well as Prine’s brother Dave, who had quite a bit to do with his younger brother’s proclivity toward music.
“[Dave] had this awe of what John had become, what John had made, what John had made of his talents and his sensitivities, and he was as in awe of it as anybody else was,” Piazza tells the Scene.
John Prine elicits good stories from other people — people loved spending time with him because of his intellect and humor, Piazza says. Of course it would have been preferable to spend more time with John Prine himself, but Piazza’s experiences with meeting Dave Prine, Wilber and others helped him more fully grasp who John Prine was.
“I realized that what I was wanting when I was writing that book was some way to, and I think I say it in the book, was some way almost to bring John back into the present,” Piazza says.
More upcoming book events:
- Oct. 7 at East Nashville Beer Works: Spooky Book Fair Pop-Up
- Oct. 18 & 19 in downtown Nashville: Southern Festival of Books
- Oct. 27 at Parnassus: John T. Edge, author of House of Smoke, with Margaret Renkl
- Oct. 30 at Vanderbilt’s Special Collections Library: Stephanie Burt, author of Super Gay Poems: Poetry LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall
- Nov. 9 at The Bookshop: Justice Reads Book Club with the Tennessee Innocence Project
- Nov. 18 at the Ryman: Kamala Harris, author of 107 Days
- Nov. 19 at Parnassus: Susan Orlean, author of Joyride, with Ann Patchett
Our preview of the season’s most exciting art, music, book, theater and film events
