Things To Do |

Documentary celebrates folk singer John Prine and his timeless music

A few months ago, the renowned 93-year-old television producer Norman Lear (“All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Good Times,” “Maude”) was asked if he still watched television.

The assumption was that he might respond with “No. Too much junk.” But instead he said, “I do watch a lot, but the trouble for me is that there is too much good stuff to be able to see all of it.”

He has a point, and so you might have been otherwise occupied on a couple of January nights and thus missed seeing an old and dear and profound talent sing and talk on WTTW-Ch. 11.

John Prine was the subject of a 30-minute documentary aired twice on the station. It was made by Mike Leonard, the former and distinctive “Today” show correspondent.

“Prine has always appealed to me,” says Leonard. “I can remember first hearing him, playing his records late at night and thinking that he was writing about everyday life, people like us.”

At the time, Leonard was a construction worker scratching out a living and trying to support his wife and their three kids.

Music was an important part of his life. Growing up in the northern suburbs, he was a lousy student, a shy and aimless high school kid when he climbed over a fence at Ravinia one night and sneaked into a concert by Bob Dylan. “And that changed everything. His lyrics touched me, and it was the first time I ever valued words. I decided at the time that I would be a creative person. I just didn’t know how.”

He interviewed Prine twice for “Today” during his more than three decades on the show and did so again last fall, filming and interviewing during Prine’s engagement at SPACE in Evanston and later at the Mark C. Smith Concert Hall in Huntsville, Ala.

This was for the TV series Leonard and his friend Mary Kay Wall have created. It’s called “inCommon with Mike Leonard,” 30-minute programs on such topics as time, acceptance, hope and humility, all being broadcast on WTTW. The topic of the Prine show was creativity.

“I have been talking to a lot of kids, young people who seem to be afraid of being creative,” says Leonard. “They think that being creative involves some kind of wild thinking, thinking outside the box. But I think Prine is a great example of the power of thinking inside the box.”

Or as Prine says in the show, “For me it’s more like writing about what you know.”

Leonard and Wall have a website, www.thetellingwell.org, which is where you can find the Prine program and see a singer-songwriter now 69 years old, his neck and jaw disfigured by bouts with cancer and his voice similarly roughed up.

He talks of being fearful that the cancer treatments would leave him no longer able to speak, let alone sing. But he can still do both and, as Leonard says in his splendid narration, “nothing can diminish the power of his words.”

Those of us of a certain age will watch and in so doing be transported back in time to those nights in the early 1970s when Prine, born and raised in suburban Maywood and working as a mailman, burst onto the folk scene at such places as the Fifth Peg or Earl of Old Town.

“I’m John Prine and these are some songs I wrote,” he would plainly say, and he immediately became part of a folk-star roster that also included such grand talents as Bonnie Koloc, Steve Goodman, the brothers Ed and Fred Holstein, Jim Post and memorable others. The first person to review Prine’s music was the late film critic Roger Ebert, who wrote, “Prine’s lyrics work with poetic economy to sketch a character in just a few words.”

His career has been lengthy. He has traveled the world to perform. His songs have been covered by artists of all ages and musical genres. Awards have been plentiful, praise universal.

Dylan, not one to toss off frivolous admiration for the talents of others, once told an interviewer: “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs. I remember when Kris Kristofferson first brought him on the scene. All that stuff about Sam Stone the soldier junkie daddy and Donald and Lydia, where people make love from 10 miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that. If I had to pick one song of his, it might be ‘Lake Marie.’ I don’t remember what album that’s on.”

It’s on 1995’s “Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings” album, Bob, one of the 20-some albums that have poured from Prine over the decades, ever since his striking debut, “John Prine,” in 1971.

The television show features performance clips from the past, and the contemporary stuff has great power but also poignancy. Prine was first diagnosed with cancer in 1998, squamous cell carcinoma of the skin on the right side of his neck; major surgery removed a substantial amount of diseased tissue. Late in 2013 he announced that he would be undergoing surgery for lung cancer, saying there was “no reason why I won’t fully recover.”

And so, there he is on screen, playing and talking about his work, his music — about such timeless songs as “Sam Stone,” “Angel from Montgomery,” “Paradise,” “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” and … there are so many.

One of the greatest, “Hello in There,” was inspired by John Lennon, he tells us, and brought him to tears when he wrote it.

He is self-effacing: “As far as guitar picking, if I make the same mistakes at the same time every day, people will start calling it a style.”

The first time he ever played in public was on a dare, singing at an open mic. “I played three songs and nobody clapped. They just looked at me. I thought, ‘I must be worse that I thought.'”

He is charming and introspective and inspiring.

Talking about Prine’s music, Leonard says, “(He writes) songs that endure just as Prine has endured, the resilient artist soldiering on, his time-worn voice and scarred body emblematic of the human frailty that is so often the hallmark of his lyrical storylines.”

Off camera, Leonard asked Prine if he ever tired of singing and playing what are essentially the same songs for 45 years. Prine said, “The songs continue to grow.”

On camera he says, “I always feel like every song is the last song.”

“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.

rkogan@tribpub.com

Twitter @rickkogan