Dan Einstein & the Essence of What Matters: Unfinished Business, Prine & Sweet 16th's Grace

“He doesn’t talk to college papers,” said the voice at the other end of the phone.

“But college students are the future. They’re the next generation of fans,” I protested.

“He doesn’t talk to college papers.” CLICK.

I blinked twice. John Prine had a mail order record label. No one I knew knew who he was. Who was this rude person who wouldn’t even listen. I lamented for this empathetic soul who’d written about an OD’d Viet Nam vet, forgotten old people, a middle aged housewife shipwrecked in her marriage. If only Prine knew...

And then John Prine booked into the Carefree Theater, which ran smart movies and the occasional concert. Even though it was West Palm Beach, Doug Adrianson, my editor at The Miami Herald, would understand the value of this performance. He immediately assigned the story. 

The concert promoter was thrilled. A million people across the state would read the feature; it would help sell tickets on the other Florida shows they were promoting. Just one thing: I wouldn’t talk to that Dan Einstein. They could set-up the interview, but I wasn’t speaking to the rude man who’d hung up on me.

The day before the appointed time, Jeff Chabon, Fantasma Production’s publicist, begged me to please call the management office. “He’s a great guy,” he insisted. “We went to college board stuff together: him from UCLA, me from Arizona.”
“He’s a jerk. I don’t care.” I responded.
“Holly, they want to make sure you’re not a psycho.”

“You don’t want me to make this call...”

Sometimes you do what you gotta do. I picked up the phone, listened to a half-baked apology, said I didn’t care. I asked tersely, “Is it okay for him to call me now?” 

“Yes, tomorrow at 2.”

“Great.”
”He doesn’t like doing interviews, just know that.”
“Okay. Thank you.”

And at 2 pm on the dot a slightly sand-papered voice called, asking, “Is Holly there?”
We talked for over two hours. About so many things, the Midwest, Aimless Love, old songs, home cooking, country music, Johnny and Rosanne Cash, traveling the country – and not being too famous, just famous enough.

When I took a job at a competing paper, my story was spiked. When I went to review the Carefree show for the Palm Beach Post, because I knew small labels lived by people knowing they’re out there, they put me front row. Prine stepped over the speakers during the opening “Lulu Walls,” said, “Hey, Holly...,” scared me to death and forgot the next verse of his song.

Waiting after his set to apologize for wasting his time, Prine could’ve cared less. He wanted to tell me about Tribute To Steve Goodman, the tribute recording for his best friend who’d died from leukemia. Told me I should call the office and get a copy.

“Your office doesn’t like me,” I said. He laughed.

“Well, you call,” he encouraged. “And they’ll send it to you.”

“The Palm Beach Post isn’t that important,” I explained back in the days when advance cassettes on good tape was a meaningful expense.

“They’ll send it,” Prine assured, eyes twinkling. “Because I’m gonna make’em.”

Calling for the advance music, Dan Einstein asked if we could clear the air. Chagrined by the killed story, apologizing profusely, I agreed. He told me about the late folk singer, who I knew from Alex Bevan, my childhood idol who’d opened several Midwestern runs, about his sense of humor, love of baseball (especially the Chicago Cubs), his amazing family, his years long battle with leukemia. You could tell this voice on the other end of the phone really cared.

Barely out of college, I summoned the courage to tell him the story of visiting my aunt in Chicago as a young teen and seeing Goodman’s “Soundstage” on the local PBS station. So fired up by the broadcast, I made someone drive me down to the tv studio, where I was sure they would be loading out the gear. It was dark and abandoned when we got there.

That made him laugh. He promised to send me the advance cassettes, to Fed Ex them three day “because we’re a small label, and, well, we cut costs where we can.”

In the middle ‘80s, the idea of “running a label” for an artist with actual traction seemed crazy. Sure, Alex Bevan, my idol, had Fiddler’s Wynde, but he had the local record stores and his shows to sell records at. John Prine – or Steve Goodman – were nationally known. Major accounts weren’t going to deal with a handful of titles here, a new release with maybe 100 copies there. And yet, with the customer cards and mail order business, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were making it work.

Dan Einstein was figuring out how to do the impossible. Over time, he figured out how to not just get the rack jobbers and accounts to do business with them, but to pay upon delivery. In a net 90 day business, Goodman and Prine were strictly COD. It took years, but they got there.

It was fascinating to hear the machinations of building allies, the stories behind pulling off the concert at the Aerie Crown Theater in Chicago with the local folkies, plus Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Arlo Guthrie, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

He would tell me stories, too, about the punk heyday in LA. Going to shows at the Masque, Madame Wongs, the Starwood. Tales of the Germs, X, the Cramps and the Screaming Sirens, booking the Motels at UCLA long before “Take The L” and “Only The Lonely” were hits. Through his eyes and words, I got to glimpse the raw demi-monde of a scene that felt like fire.

Sometimes I think we’d invent reasons to call each other, to just talk. Him, a college drop-out staking his claim with a small artist management company where he could build these crazy labels, me a music critic for an outer ring daily paper and freelancer with a growing national reputation through Tower Records Pulse!, Trouser Press, Performance, Rock & Soul, Billboard, HITS and Mix.

When Billy Vera had a moment with “At This Moment” during Michael J. Fox’s famous breakdown on “Family Ties,” Dan told me about Vera’s band the Beaters, about Peter Bunetta the drummer and emerging producer. The Palm Beach Post was early on that story, breaking two days before the Associated Press.

In the winter of that year, I was going to be in Nashville doing interviews and a little media training for CBS Records. He was going to be there for publishing administrator BUG Music’s new office celebration. “We should meet,” he said. 

I wasn’t so sure. What we had on the phone was great. Why ruin it? Why run the risk of... What? I didn’t know, but that first call, that first hang up nagged at me.

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be fun... and maybe I can get you into the show BUG’s doing with John, and John Hiatt, Dave Alvin, Marshall Chapman, some more people.”
And so, we met. Sat at Tavern on the Row, laughing and making small talk like we’re always known each other. He wasn’t as old as he seemed on the phone, and he really liked to laugh. We could’ve sat there from the end of the day to the show, but he had to go check on Prine. He left me with, “You’re on the list. I’ll see you there.”

Days when you go from interview to interview, a media training session wedged in, maybe a meeting with someone like Tony Brown to hear what he’s excited about can be exhausting. Was I going to even be awake by 10? But it was Prine, Haitt, maybe Peter Case, too.

The venue, long since bulldozed for what is now the massive Warner Nashville Building, was low-ceilinged and poorly ventilated. Just walking in, it was so hot, you felt the humidity. Unzipping my coat, looking around, I couldn’t find him... I just sat down where I could find a table, a little disappointed. Of course he has to work; he had the headliner. He was busy. What part of this did I not know? But before the first act came on, there he was, dragging a chair behind him. He knew that late, there wouldn’t be one; he brought his own.

That was Dan. Ahead of what needed to happen, ready with the solution.

After the show, he took me back to say “hi” to John, who admonished him to make sure I got to my car. Standing on the corner of 16th Avenue, the small talk continued until he finally kissed me. It was not Paris after the war, but it was a dam breaking. Stammering, because I’ve never ever thought in those terms, I kissed him back, then said, “I think we should probably go home.”

Whirling, it was one of those, “he likes me” moments. The knowing someone who you really think is smart actually truly likes you. You drift through the next few hours, sleep some, but a little more electric than before. What did it mean? Did it matter? Who knew...

Walking into Warner Brothers the next morning, I was greated by Janice Azrak barking, “You slut! You whore!” and regaling all in earshot about seeing me kissing some boy on the streets of Music Row last night. There were no secrets in that era Nashville, what was I – in a bright pink winter bomber jacket – thinking? Trying to explain, it was a pile-on. Embarrassed, shy, what do you say?

Nothing. I didn’t even know where the boy was staying. I didn’t have time to think.

Rodney Crowell, the great white interview whale, was that afternoon. After three years of asking anyone who might have a notion how, doing his wife Rosanne Cash for the cover of Coconut Grove’s alt-weekly Grapevine, having had multiple publicists from the high cred Network Ink intercede for me with their assistant, it was to be. There wasn’t a record to tie it to, but having been a fan of his writing, it was a chance to unpack bruised romanticism, life as Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band wingman, a producer on the rise and a maverick talent who’d signed a poster from his last Warner Bros. record to me after I sent a copy of my review from Rollins College’s paper to the publicist at his label,
The interview was incredible. Crowell is a good and easy talker. He drank a gallon of water, unraveling stories of growing up in the “white trash” part of Houston, the road with Harris, writing pop and country hits for the Dirt Band, living in California and moving to Nashville. Leaving there, I was levitating.

When I got back to my friend Ben’s house, there was a note with a number. I called, asked and was put through to the room. A suddenly formal voice said, “Uhm, may I take you to dinner?”

“Well, yes,” I said, still afterglowing from a great interview. Suddenly awkward, “But, uhm, one thing...”

“Okay. I mean, I was thinking we could go somewhere kind of nice.”

“I interviewed Rodney Crowell, and I really don’t want to change out of these clothes,” I hedged.

“Okay, that’s fine.”

“Well, I’m in a yellow sort of sweat shirt and sweat pants,” I explained. “I was, uhm, thinking we could go to... Krystal?”

“KRYSTAL?”

“Is that okay?”
“I was thinking I could take you to a nice dinner...”
“I know, but I would really like to just go to Krystal.”

There was silence.

“If you don’t mind. I mean, it’s really nice that you want to do that.”

“I have John’s credit card. He said to go use it.”

“You don’t have to tell him...” I hedged. He laughed.

And Krystal it was. For a handful of teeny double cheeseburgers. Three hours of talking over fountain cokes. What about? Who knew? Where we’d been. What we thought, or figured. We only stopped to pick-up my friend Ben Payne at the airport, whom we dropped off, and rode around for another hour talking.

I left the next day. When I got home, there was a message on the machine to call Dan and let him know I’d made it back safely.. It was a different number. When I called, John Prine answered, said, “Hey, Holly...,” then called out, “Daaaaaaannnnnnn, it’s a girl.”

And so it began. 

Unbeknownst to me, the man who wrote “Donald & Lydia” and “Paradise” was our Cupid, finding ways to throw us together. Telling Dan to take me to the Grammys a few weeks later, “if she’s a reporter, she’ll love that. She can file for that little paper.” Hiring me to write the bio for German Afternoons, so they could fly me to Washington, DC for Prine’s sold-out Wolf Trap show. The second Farm Aid, where it was brutally cold in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the dressing rooms were masking taped sections of the fieldhouse floor. Making Dan come to do settlement when they had Florida shows, then taking me out on the run with them.

Funny thing is: it didn’t take much. Anyone who talked with Dan, fell in love with him. So smart, so many ideas of how to make things work that one couldn’t figure out. From him, I learned the idea of your friend is my friend. Cathy Hendrix in Atlanta, running a small label. Mike Leonard outside Chicago, doing stories for NBC’s “Today.” Marina Chavez, their once receptionist, who would become one of roots music’s pre-eminent photographers. So many names; all they ever had to say was “Dan told me to give you a call...”

And it worked that way the other way, too. The Illinois Entertainer. David Gans at MIX. Cowboy Jack Clement, the legendary producer and Sun Records’ creative spark. Steve Berlin when Los Lobos was on tour for Will The Wolf Survive. Always, “Hello” and “What do you need?”

That was Dan’s heart, and he brought it out in others. Just as the somewhat shy, often unwilling to let you know how really accomplished he was man kept making impossible strides and creating magic and unthinkable things.

By the very next Grammys, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas had two of the five nominations in the inaugural Best Contemporary Grammy category. Tribute to Steve Goodman, with all those loving performances from the Chicago folk community and a few famous friends, and German Afternoons showed that artists who didn’t fit the system could make a mark making music on their terms.

When I saw the nominations, I screamed. Dan, being Dan, said, “Well, I guess this mean it’s working.”

Working? The mail order business, with the comment cards. The occasional catalogues to tempt people into other albums. The one-by-one accounts. Slowly, purposefully, building to something that almost paralleled what the big labels did on a far smaller scale.

“We have to do something special,” I remember on a late night phone call, trying to come up with some way to mark this moment. Whether he knew the significance or not, as a reporter, I recognized what they’d done out of three sunlit rooms in a slightly worndown building built for Marion Davies by William Randolph Hearst.

Having made many trips to see my boyfriend and eventual fiancée, I had found a street fashionable boutique on Melrose where they made clothing out of very old kimonos patched together to give the beautiful fabric new life. Claudia Grau and her staff would visit with Dan and I when we would go to Melrose, talking about local music gossip, people on the scene and life as an indie label.

When I asked if she’d consider making me a dress, the answer was yes. When we were in the store discussing it, they asked Dan to try on a pair of pants they were thinking of making as a unisex option. Laughing about trying them on the “girls dressing room,” he came out – and they looked at each other smiling.

Were they really thinking about genderless clothing in the later ‘80s? Hard to say.

But when Dan picked up my dress and bolero to bring back to Silver Lake, he was aghast. 

“BooBoo, what’s wrong?” I asked, not sure why he was so thrown.

“They... uhm...”

“Yes.”

“They made me... a cumber bund and a bow tie. They...”

“Is there something wrong?”

“They wouldn’t let me pay them for it. They said to wear it for good luck.”

“Is it ugly?”

“No, no... It’s...”

He reached into the bag, where it had been lovingly wrapped in tissue paper. Pieces of kimono in rich, deep tones had been sewn into what a man wears with a tux. Judging from the size, it would fit perfectly. I smiled. Those women wanted to give him so love in exactly they way they knew how.

“It’s beautiful, Dan. I think you should put it on. I think we need to leave soon. It’s pre-telecast and it’s LA... and we have to valet.”

At the Shrine Auditorium, back in the smaller more community music industry days, people were glad-handing, waiting for the doors to open to begin the awards to small for network television. We sat down hear the front; John, me, Dan, Al Bunetta and his wife Dawn watching the winners be elated and thank the people who mattered to them. The Winans, a gospel group with family members in seemingly every category, were so euphoric we decided we had to go hear their music.

And then it was Best Contemporary Folk... and the winner is... Tribute to Steve Goodman. Dan hesitated more than a beat. Prine reached over, with a big smile, and said to his friends, “You better go get it.”

It was a blur. What they said, what happened next. If the year before, Dan had found me a pay phone to file from – because as a date, I wasn’t in the press room – then kept people away from me, while trying to make the connection work with the remote transmitter, this year, he was a big winner.

“I can’t believe this,” he whispered when he got back from the press gauntlet. “How did we do this?”

“Well, you booked a theater... you called Stevie’s friends,” I joked. He looked at me with tears in his eyes. 

“You understand this mean’s Stevie’s not forgotten,” he said. “And all those people who loved him, they’re not going to be forgotten either. Those songs now maybe live on...”
“Yes, Dan, I do. Because that’s what you do. You make sure people aren’t lost, or overlooked, or forgotten.”

He squeezed my hand. “Maybe. And when this is over, we’re going to get Chinese food. Or the Pantry. Or Astro. Or something.”

“Hey, can we just be here right now?”

Being here now could mean so many things, because Dan’s ability to love and be curious went so many places just in LA. The San Diego Zoo. The train to San Juan Capistrano. Pacific Coast Highway north until we decided to come home. The tea room at I. Magnin, “because who would ever believe people lived this way? And we can still pretend.” The carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. Shows everywhere where he knew everyone.

When The Palm Beach Post fired me – alleging things that couldn’t be further from reality or the truth – Dan was on a plane the next day. “Don’t worry,” he said when I called him in tears. “We’re going to figure this out.”

Picking him up in Miami, as I’d done so many times, he announced, “I think what you should do is move to LA... and become the world class rock critic you are. Screw small town papers. If The Herald doesn’t have room, then come to LA.”

“But Dan, a freelancer can’t afford those bills...”

“They can if they move in with me. Tell you what: you pay your phone bill, and I’ve got the rent. Can you do that?”

Speechless, I nodded. Then in three days, we packed up on apartment, setting most of it in storage, the things coming in my car in a pile by the door; things that were precious were in a suitcase he took with him.

As we worked to clean up the apartment, I used dishwashing liquid in the dishwasher. He emerged from the back bedroom to a living room engulfed in suds and bubbles; the howling laughter pulled me from deep cleaning the grout.

“Ohhhhhhh, Luuuuuuuceeeeeeeeee...,” he said through giggles, “you’re home.”

I burst into tears. He hugged me. “THIS is funny. We will laugh about this always. Please stop crying. Please, please. Only you, and that’s why this is so perfect. I’ve already scuba’d in, stopped the dishwasher. We’re going to have to get this cleared out, but let’s laugh and jump around in the bubbles.”

Let’s laugh and jump around in the bubbles. And we did. Eventually opening the patio door, taking armfuls and boxes of soap suds out into the bushes. It looked a bit like a snow drift when we were done, but we were laughing and finding an ironic joy in the shattered disappointment of being treated so poorly by people who had no idea what they had.

Before I turned in my key, I’d sold a story on Jackson Browne to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner for a Chrystic Institute Benefit he was doing. I would arrive – after a week at Fan Fair, where he would meet me for the drive to California  – a published Los Angeles-based writer.
When he told Prine what happened, John said, “Well, then you two kids should come to England and Belgium with me. It’ll be just the thing! Have some fun. See the world. Screw that stupid paper.”

We could barely see out the back window of my teeny Nissan Pulsar, but away we went. Telling stories about the towns we drove through, looking up stuff on the map. Sometimes we’d try a truck stop, other times we’d just roll into a grocery store and grab an apple or some yogurt. Somewhere in Oklahoma, a stock boy bagging up water for us saw my advance cassette of Motley Crue’s next album; he came a little unglued.

Dan winked at the teen, and went, “Magic is real. Sometimes these things escape – and if you’re lucky, you catch them.”

“Whoa, man,” the kid replied. “But that’s THE CRUE....”

“And it F’ing rocks!” Dan affirmed, laughing. “You’re gonna love this record. It’s sooooo good.”

Never mind he was wearing enormous glasses, had a tiny pony talk and a well-groomed beard. He looked nothing like an Okie headbanger, and yet. The kid nodded solemnly, and Dan nodded back.

Coming into Tucumcari, New Mexico, Dan had started singing Little Feat’s “Willin’,” the Lowell George truckin’ song Linda Rondstadt had mainstreamed. We both loved Little Feat and the Band, so it seemed like ironic soundtracking at its finest. Nosing the car off Rte. 66, we landed in the parking lot of a low to the ground turquoise building wearing a sombrero. 

“Some of the best Mexican food in the world,” he offered smiling. “I thought a little adventure and a surprise would do you good.” 

It was delicious. Unexpected. Soul-sustaining as well as stomach-filling. We decided to drink some coffee over our plates of cheese enchiladas, to just keep going as far as we possibly could. What had started as a retreat in defeat was truly becoming the beginning of something else. I didn’t know, but this person believed, so I did, too.

Back when the first wave of women rock critics had mostly faded away, I wanted to do something that wasn’t really being done. White men, often with Ivy League degrees, had taken over – and even having been on the road with Neil Young as a college student, having written a Tower Pulse cover story on Johnny Cash/Waylon Jennings/Kris Kristofferson/Wille Nelson’s Highwaymen configuration, as well as the Trio with Linda Ronstadt/Emmylou Harris/Dolly Parton – I was often the only woman in the room. Taken seriously? Yeah. Sorta.

When a record company person would want to take me to lunch, Dan would patiently explain to his wildly dyslexic girlfriend how to get where she was going; occasionally telling me what to order to prevent a dining disaster with the more exotic – to me – cuisines. He would explain why surface streets were better; implore me not to give homeless people money “as the mental hospitals have been cleaned out, dumped into the streets and you never know which paranoid schizophrenic might have a box cutter.”

Musician turned to BAM. The Los Angeles Times started using me, as did Music Sound Output, Home Studio Recording, FRETS, CD Review. YM came calling. Dan was right: I was a national level music critic, only my location suggested anything else.

Rolling Stone fell open when I got a call about talking to Joe Isgro, the independent record promoter who spoke to no one. When I called with the news, squealing and not bothering with spaces between words, he just said, “Get dressed.”

Not too long later, he showed up with that proud smile. “You hungry?”

I was still squealing. Rolling Stone in the ‘80s was a tough nut to crack; two issues a month, the space was finite – and freelancers were rarely used. But I had my CP Shades matching oversized top and skirt, my grey with black wingtip Tony Llamas on. 

“Where are we going?” I asked. 

“Surprise,” he said, as the car nosed down the Duane Street hill, through Silver Lake and onto the surface streets that would eventually put us on Sunset Boulevard. Passing the Comedy Store, I figured we’d either head towards Dan Tana’s – one of Prine’s favorite spots – or go to the fancy Hamburger Heaven just off Sunset. 

But we turned just before Tower Records, nosed up the hill behind the car rental place we used and into a lot outside a low all white building. The valet opened our doors, and I blinked.

“SPAGO?” It was the outpost of stars in movie magazines, glitterati like Cher and Pacino.

“You only get in Rolling Stone the first time once,” he said. We could barely afford it. When we got engaged, we didn’t even bother with the ring, because “we’d rather eat it than have me, a girl who doesn’t care about jewelry, walking around with it on my left hand.”

One of the Bangles was two tables over. We were against the far wall, near a window. Dan let me have the seat facing the wall. We had champagne and pizza, and we laughed like this was a dream and we would wake up. Only we didn’t. We had desert.

And then I saw her. Lauren Bacall. Even more beautiful in person. Stunning. 

“What?” Dan asked, unused to my being overcome. 

“I, I can’t... even,” I stammered. The impossibly discreet restaurant didn’t cotton to gaping at the other diners.

Just as I was about to be busted, I rose, walked over to the iconic actress, and went for the compliment to save – I hoped – our bacon. I could see Dan getting nervous, trying to conjure a Plan B and C.

“Miss Bacall,” I said, as the manager stood by, not wanting to make more of a deal. “You are so very beautiful and elegant, and you embody even more completely in person everything I was raised to believe a lady should be. It’s staggering, and I just wanted to tell you how truly incredible you are – and thank you for the example you’ve been my whole life.”
The manager was staring. Bacall looked up at the man, looked at me, smiled, then said, “MY darling, how incredibly charming you are. Thank you so much for coming over... and letting me known. Your mother must be so proud.”

I just smiled and nodded, started backing away. “Yes, ma’am, and thank you. I just thought it was important for you to know...”

“Well, you’re the sweetest.”

Back at the table, Dan let out a low whistle. Without ever chiding, he said, “I was trying to figure out if I had enough money to just leave the cash on the table, so we could just make a run for it... I can’t believe you pulled that off.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“I haven’t decided,” he said, shaking his head. “Somehow you pull this stuff off, and everyone loves you. But God, Holly, sometimes you scare me to death.”

That was Dan. He’d never clip anyone’s wings, or tell them how to live. When things were good, he would throw open the window in case you could fly, and put out a net, in case you couldn’t. It didn’t matter what or how, just that it was something wonderful.

And when it wasn’t so wonderful, he knew what to do, too. Shortly after arriving, at a Roger Waters concert, we landed in the dressing room after the show. Being taken to meet Jackson Browne, who refused to believe I’d interviewed him – and the back and forth escalating with me moving from horror at the misunderstanding to anger at being betrayed by a socially conscious artist who’d opened up how I’d seen the world, Dan quietly walked over, put his fingers into the waist band of my jeans and gently pulled me back and away.
Outside the dressing room, I collapsed into a pile of tears. How could Jackson Browne think I’d made that up? Why would I? He’s only talked to me and a reporter from Newsweek in four or five years? How does one forget that? Why would he not try to understand?
“ShhhhSHHHHHShhhhhhhshhhhhhhhh...” he whispered, petting my back, telling me it didn’t matter. “Shhhhhhhhhh...”

As the sobbing turned to sniffles, he held me at arm’s length, looked into my eyes and said – perhaps – one of the most important things anyone’s ever said to me. It endures.

“Holly, you have to make a very important decision,” he began. “Jackson’s behavior was atrocious, and we don’t know what’s going on... but you have loved those records, those songs, how he chooses to use his fame for good for so long. Are you going to let the fact that he just acted like an ass take that from you? OR are you going to chalk it up to he’s mortal, and that music is a part of your life?”

He paused to let the question sink in. Then he smiled as I looked at him, slightly dazed. “Because as much as I would love to come home and not have to hear Late for the Sky or For Everyman set on 11, I also know what those records mean to you. I wouldn’t hand something so precious over because a human being made them...”

And so, to separate the art from the mortal, the artist from the flawed being. He was right. He was, honestly, always right. 

And he always knew just where to be. When South By Southwest started, we were there. When “Austin City Limits” was more for country singers, they sent John Prine to Terry Lickona and his wonderful weekly show any time they asked. The New Music Seminar – leaning to hip hop and dance, punk and new wave – was his regular stomping grounds. 

Duke’s at the Tropicana, where Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits used to hand out. McCabe’s Instruments in Santa Monica, where small shows happened in the back room. The Palomino Club in North Hollywood, a once old school country room co-opted by the punks and Ronnie Mack’s Tuesday night BarnDance with Jim Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams, James Inveldt and so many more; Buddy Miller on the bandstand with Duane Jarvis, Pete Anderson by the cigarette machine and Manuel, the heir to famous rhinestone tailor Nudie Cohen, at the bar.

Characters, colorful people. Chuck E. Weiss. Howie Epstein, who would ultimately produce Prine’s (finally) Grammy-winning Missing Years and Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings. The Heffernan Brothers, who’d produce the Irish series “Sessions” to cross-pollinate Irish and British roots artists with American and the occasional Mexican. Jac Holzman, who founded Elektra Records under the aegis of Warner Brothers, took me to lunch to explain how they did it, to give me even more insight into how herculean what Dan had built with Red Pajamas and Oh Boy.

Formosa Café. The Apple Pan. The Cheesecake Factory in Marina Del Ray to meet his sister. The Mandarette. Border Grille when it was a tiny little nook on Melrose. Dan Tana’s and Pacific Dining Car when Prine was in town. Netty’s takeaway on Silver Lake Boulevard, eating there on the picnic tables. Searching the tables at Lucy’s El Abode, me asking which one Jerry (Brown) met Linda (Ronstadt) so many years ago.

Always Intermetzo, the little house on Melrose where you could sit at the counter front and watch them make California-fresh French or the lovely tented patio out back. Even when they were busy, they’d find a table for Dan – and we’d eat fettucine with goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes, fresh herbs and walnuts. 

Those small things thirty years later, you can still close your eyes and see, feel, taste. The way the light cast caramel tinges or the hyperblue of early morning, the Raymond Chandler dingy overhead pulp fiction light of Kate Mantilini on Wilshire where dinner could be had extra late – or the blaring brightness of Ben Frank’s on Sunset Plaza if quicker was more in order after the Comedy Store or the Roxy.

We grew up together, became fully formed people together. He a brilliant young executive who could pave a way that hadn’t existed before. Me, a lady rock critic with a strong roots-bend who was a confidante for Keith Whitley, Sam Kinison, Patty Loveless and Nicolette Larson. We co-existed, sparkled in each other’s universes and made the other more. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and that’s how it was.

But even something perfect, sometimes, it’s not the “what it should be,” or the “happily ever after.” Yes, Dan could laugh off my father’s first real question being, “So, Dan, what do you think about Jews for Jesus?” after surviving Easter mass at the Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida... and certainly, I could explain to his stepmother Lynn if it was so important to the family and Dan would make sure they were raised in faith, “of course we could raise the children Jewish; they just need to have faith in a God who loves us.”

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me. Dan’s happily ever after was somewhere else, and so, I let go. Moving out was tricky; Dan kept coming to vet my potential new apartments and neighborhoods. Finally, West Hollywood, right near the Mayfair Market, I found a quiet executive studio and signed the lease.

No tears, only the admonishment. “Wherever she is, I don’t want you to miss the one.”
Friday night buzzer rings, tales of dating disasters. I’d protest, “I’m writing,” he’d counter, “I have Fruzen Gladje.” Always, I would buzz him up.
We stayed friends, good friends. Shared meals at Barney’s Beanery and Hugo’s, both walking distance from my house. When I got sent to Nashville by HITS, he once again helped me pack up and move; drove me to the airport when I’d come back for business.

He took a Chinese cooking class at some point, called me several weeks into it he thought he’d found her. The lump in my throat was joy. BooBoo, the man who once gave me pink bunny slippers we immediately named Chuck and Di, was finally, hopefully getting the love he so truly, deeply deserved.

Loving people isn’t about possession, but wanting what’s best for them, the things that will make them happy. Thissounded like everything I believed when I pulled the chord on the parachute.

When Al Bunetta Management moved operations to Nashville, closer to Prine, but also a creative community fomenting into a place like Austin or Athens, maybe a rootsier Minneapolis or Hoboken. Dan came first, to get settled and figure out what life might look like.

We ate some meals, had some laughs, talked a lot about life. He was so happy. Everything I’d seen was turning out, he maybe didn’t know it, but he knew my Black Irish heart. When it makes up its mind, there’s no drama, but there’s also no going back.

They bought a place. Ellen started high end food styling for tv, film and magazine shoots. Dan continued doing what he ‘d always done – signing acts, helping people realize their dreams. If he’d co-managed the Rave-Ups in LA, now there was Todd Snider, the folkie championed by Keith Sykes, Prine and signed to Jimmy Buffett’s lablel. 

Blue Plate, formed to spread the gospel of West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage syndicated series, was expanding. Oh Boy Classics mined the (Sony) Tree Publishing vaults for recordings by Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Conway Twitty and more. Oh Boy signed the roots/rock Bis*Quits with Tommy Womack, Will Kimbrough and Grimey’s co-owner Michael Grimes, as well as Donnie Fritts, Janis Ian and Kris Kristofferson.

What had begun when they were in California with Epstein making Prine’s sound rockier and more muscular continued. The Missing Years and Lost Dogs ushered in a renaissance. After John’s cancer battle, Dan helped usher in a shinier way of polishing dreams. Beyond the Billy Bob Thornton movie “Daddy and Them,” which featured “In Spite of Ourselves,” Dan helped co-ordinate an album of the same name with duets on country classics with women singers Prine admired from Connie Smith to Delores Keane, Emmylou Harris to Trisha Yearwood, Melba Montgomery to Patty Loveless. Longtime tourmate Iris DeMent was on several; she would later sing it on “Sessions at W. 54th” with Prine. 

Watching his second friend battle cancer moved Dan tremendously. He would look at what was created, the things that mattered and the way life can flow away from you while you weren’t looking. He loved his wife. He loved what they shared. He’d done everything you could do on the indie side, and he wondered, “What else?”

Twenty years ago, he did the unthinkable: he walked away from show business. Started a bakery in East Nashville, when East Nashville was still more scary than hip. He pioneered the concept of creating something for his community, a place that gave back and gave refuge. He knew how small things changed lives, so he figured he and Ellen could create somewhere that offered that to people in a way anyone could partake.

Sweet 16th Bakery was born. A building that was demolished and rebuilt. A bunch of recipes from their families, and a few from friends. A breakfast sandwich – “one to go” – that’s been hailed by Gourmet, Southern Living and been named one of Food + Wine’s Top 10 Breakast Sandwiches in America.

The sweets are legendary, having won the Nashville Scene’s Best Cupcake so many times, they’re not even in competition any more. Elvis Cupcakes. Brookies. Scones. Coffee Crack Cookies. Myriad flavor coffeecakes, hand pies and danish. 
Even more than the food – they do meatless soups, grain-based salads, Dos Papas Burritos, quiches and lasagnas – is the comfort. Everyone who goes there works on the “friend of Dan’s (and Ellen’s)” principle. Conversations are had, friendships cemented.
There are dog treats for the pups, cookies snuck to the children. Dan leaning over the counter, smile and eyes glittering, are a sight countless young Nashvillian’s have grown up on. To them, he is “Dan, Dan the Muffin Man” with good reason.

On horrible days, Dan could feel it. He’d come around the counter, sweep someone up in a hug. When a friend’s husband left her, he went to the guy and told him what a mistake he was making – and made sure, man-to-man, he understood the impact of his capriciousness. 
For me, he was always my rabbi, my compass, my human. No matter was hanging over me, pushing me into a corner or creating a particularly nasty vector around me, he’d have the wisdom to know what to do. Always.
And he was always so generous with his insight and his time. Having been cradle babies together, we understood each other in ways most people can’t. If you didn’t live through it, there’s no prism to explain or make clear. We didn’t need it, we lived through it.

A few months ago, Dan was back from the rehab hospital where he’d been getting his strength back from surgery. We were talking in a corner of the bakery, sharing thoughts on the state of everything, when he paused. “You know, you need to start figuring out an exit plan,” he began. “We were gonna do that this year, before the surgery, now we want to get me well, then figure it out, because there’s a great big world out there – and we’ve all worked long enough and hard enough to deserve to experience it without all the responsibility of what we do.”

“Really, Dan?” I asked, because work was just part of not being independently wealthy.

“Yes, find someone to look at where you are, figure out what you need. Promise me.”

It had been two years of COVID, real financial uncertainty. Scrambling to make my bills, to try to put money up for retirement. What I believed was solid wasn’t necessarily what I believed. And here was Dan speaking truth to me about the reality of life post-pandemic.
Promise me.

Promise me.

As Dan has bounced back and forth with rehab hospitals and infections, he’s been the guide to an anthology for Chicago Review Press called Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters. Between us, we unlocked so many missing pieces in those pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia world where AllMusic.com is cited as it’s a real time source. In this pre-digitized morgue world, so many stories have been lost; but thanks to having been there, they’re not found.

The week before he took ill, we talked for two and a half hours from his hospital bed. He was so clear, so sharp – and so ready to get well. Weighing all of it, the ground broken, the music made, the achievements, he got incredibly serious.

“Did any of it matter?” he asked, truly contemplating. 

Twelve minutes of my monologue later, he laughed. 

“I don’t know, Bunny Girl,” he said. “You look at what people value now, you wonder. You look at how all they care about is what they think and not what happened, you realize: the days of paying attention or really feeling stuff may be over.”

“Only if we accept that, Dan,” I countered. “Only if we decide that we aren’t willing to raise our hands, make the points, show people what they can’t see.”

“You might be right,” he laughed. “This book is going to blow people’s minds. There’s always so much more than people see, so many things you can show them. Maybe that’s the deal...”

“Yeah, Dan, that’s the deal. Look at all the things – high and low – you showed me. And you still are. Always will. It’s what you do...”

“Aren’t you going to say ‘and why you matter?’” he teased, knowing I like to complete the circle when I talk. 

“No, because everyone knows why you matter, and I don’t have to say it. Everything about how you live, what you do, the way you treat people: it’s all a lesson in what matters. I know. I’ve been watching you for years.”
16 January 2022. **.**** www.hollygleason.com

Nanci Griffith Catches Some Sweet Blackbird's Wings

Nanci Griffith & That Sweet Blue Bonnet Spring, Catch Some Blackbird’s Wing Down at the Five + Dime

A yellow dress covered in pink and red cabbage roses, mint and emerald green leaves seemingly holding them to the fabric. She had mousy brown hair, bangs that descended like staggered drapes around her elongated heart-shaped valentine of a face with eyes so sparkling and alive they glittered into the cameras/

Her speaking voice sounded like a small child’s, matching her diction. Her words bathed with wonder at it all – street light halos, Woolworth stores, trinkets and hope, she lit up as she shared what she knew or saw or felt.
Under the covers in a too cold house my much older fiancée didn’t own in Coral Gables, he’d left to go do errands. I could draw close to the oversized television on the table at the end of the bed, sheets pulled up around me as I stared at this anti-Barbie singing smart such smart songs. Miami’s PBS station ran “Austin City Limits” at an early hour, and in the black-out-curtained window, it felt like a Girl Scout meeting gone a little long.

“Austin City Limits” was once truly a Texas texture, as Guy Clark would sing in “Rita Ballou.” Every now and then, they’d pick a few local writer/artists or bands, given them a show. Nanci Griffith, whose name I didn’t know, had just released Once In A Very Blue Moon on small indie Philo Records – and this was a showcase for those brilliantly turned sketches, almost scrimshaw miniatures of small town life.

Her voice, when she sang, was deeper, throaty, had that Stevie Nicks’ vibrato – or a pure, soaring crystalline quality. It melted over the kind of acoustic music that exists in the fertile delta between country and folk, where the violin is more fluid, the steel guitar more diamonds sprinkled across still water. It didn’t straddle the genres, as much as float back and forth like sheets on a breeze when they’re hung outside to dry in the sun.

She was obviously older than me, but was so young seeming, she was the grown-up answer to my far older than my own 12 year old appearance while slinging bylines for The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tower Pulse and Southern Magazine. There was a place for us kid-looking people with hearts older and more erudite than our looks suggested. And, her melodies were sweet but salty; the loves and adventures were pure and sized for an actual life someone could inhabit.

By the time Jason returned, I was out of mind about this woman I’d seen in the yellow dress like Helen, my extra grandma by choice instead of blood, wore while playing a guitar almost as big as she herself was. She had an upright bass and a cellist and a licorice whip thin guy who sang, so minimal chic but with this hair, and and and...

Full grown, exfiancee #2 glazed over. But he knew when I got on a tear, it didn’t stop. We got in the car, drove down to Spec’s, the South Florida record chain, and walked in. Me blabbering, him trying to figure out how to decode this problem. Turns out one of the clerks had had “ACL” on, saw the same thing I did – and walked us back to the folk section.

Once In A Very Blue Moon was in a bin for the taking. We did.

Walking out pleased with the purchase, I excused myself from any further conjugal duties and went back to my dorm room. I sliced into the shrink wrap, drew out the disc and put on side one. “Ghosts In the Music,” indeed.

It all poured out, puddled on the cold linoleum tiled floor of a room mostly packed up towards semester’s end. Endearing, charming, unselfconscious, it was small stories, big truths, moments you might not notice – but that might just define you.

It had been recorded at something called the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa with the same producer of John Prine’s Aimless Love. I couldn’t know so many of the players – Roy Huskey, Jr on upright bass, Mark O’Connor on fiddle, Phillip Donnelly on guitar – would become figures in my own story, nor that the background singer Lyle Lovett would be one of the singular voices of Nashville’s progressive traditionalist moment.

It was just magical, and perfect. Like a Truman Capote or Willa Cather novel, moments seemed pressed between pages and saved for the ages.

The obsession was such that I called Rounder, raved about this woman from Texas I’d never heard of – writing for The Herald enough I knew lots of record company people in those days before MTV, let alone internets and instant gratification – and asked them to please keep me posted. That I didn’t know what story or who for, but I wanted to write about her, absolutely.

My exfiancee thought I’d fallen into toxic shock from my obsession with Southern and Dust Bowl fiction. He just couldn’t... so we started taking separate cars as the candy-coated voice unfurled these sweet stories. Pulling up, banging what Griffith came to call “folkabilly,” on the cheap aftermarket cassette player attenuating the cassette I’d bought, her voice sounded a bit like a muppet gone tipsy.

Rounder didn’t forget my lunatic raving. They sent me an advance cassette of Last of the True Believers, an even more accomplished and confident album that still did the Currier & Ives meets Norman Rockwell vistas. Her sound had solidified; Rooney’s always tasteful production was at its greatest elevation. Each instrument was its own sparkling diamond around Griffith’s at times guttural, at others shimmering or tender velvet vocals.

Tower Records’ Pulse bit. My first conversation with Griffith via phone was delight; her Texas twang rolled down the line with girlish giggles for punctuation. She conjured a instant friend intimacy that suggested the same kind of friendship that made the innocence of “There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, Mary Margaret” such a covetous thing for a young woman starting to make her way in the real world.

We talked Larry McMurtry, O. Henry, steel guitar as a mood-setter, John Prine, dime store treasures, the journey. She’d had two albums I’d never heard of (again, it was world before the internet made everything instantly accessible), with dreams of having music take her around the world.

She was exotic as peacocks on the front lawn, as familiar as homemade bread or a well-washed linen shirt with a slightly frayed collar. Twee as some found it, she could bite into the world, too. Whether the reeling fiddle of “More Than A Whisper” was a grown-up love’s complicated nature and need for true manifestation, or the rushed and rushing bawdy declaration of life from a whore waiting on a trick “Lookin’ for the Time (Workin’ Girl)” with its profession “This sidewalk ice is cold as steel/ and I ain’t Dorothy, I can’t click my heels...” and the utterly business forward “If you ain’t got money, I ain’t got the time for you.”

Authoritative. Straight to the heart, the gut, the throat. It was a money shot, and she – the little folkabilly goddess in the white anklets and Hooverette house dress – didn’t flinch or waver. To say I loved it would be like saying Chanel is expensive.

Around that time, Tony Brown rolled into Florida to meet up with Steve Wariner, an artist he’d produced at RCA Records and had just signed to MCA Nashville. The Chet Atkins protégé was that same kind of wide-eyed kid as Griffith’s persona suggested. Driving Brown back to the Howard Johnson’s by the , urnpike after a night of hanging out and closing down a Palm Beach restaurant/boite, I pulled out my advance of the album – and threw it in my cassette player.

I’d made a speech about how I didn’t know whether it could work at country radio, if it made sense for a major Nashville record company, but this was special. He needed to listen. That voice poured out of the speakers of the little tin mosquito Nissan Pulsar I was driving, bounced around the car and lit the piano-playing A&R man up like a pinball machine.

“Can I keep it?” he asked. I let him have it, let him bounce out of my car into the mildew-scented hotel in the grove of sagging palm trees. The next day, his head most likely throbbing, he got in my car, so I could take him to where Wariner was sound-checking. He went on and on about how much he liked it, the writing, the voice, the person singing it.

Said in some ways, she reminded him of Wariner, who he was doing pre-production with. Someone who didn’t want to be more than they were, each sang about a life that was the right perspective for the room. Wariner – beyond the crushing guitar skills and sweet voice – truly was a small-town Indiana kid; Griffith, though, a product the local Texas songwriter rooms dreamed of larger worlds and other places.

The legend is Lyle Lovett turned Tony Brown onto Nanci Griffith. But that day in the sun-parched parking lot outside a strip mall honky tonk, the Elvis and Hot Band veteran witnessed like a new convert. We were two people talking over each other about how incredible this artist was; me saying I was so glad I hadn’t overstepped my bounds, Brown saying he needed to figure it out, but was going to..

At the same time, Steve Popovich, a rock & roll student of all music and the head of Polygram’s Nashville operation, heard “Love at the Five & Dime” – and told Kathy Mattea it was her next single. The West Virginia songstress with the dusky eiderdown voice that curried the folk out of mainstream country product smiled. She’d not followed up “Soft Place To Fall” with a hit, and she needed to breakthrough before it all fell apart.

Driving north on I-95 a few weeks later, “Love at the Five & Dime” came pouring out of the speakers – and it wasn’t Griffith’s version. It felt like a hit, slightly folkie, very homespun and charming in the way it told the story of Eddie and Rita, waltzing the aisles of a Woolworth store. Suddenly, Mattea’s sweet spot was colonized – and Nanci Griffith was a hit songwriter.

Momentum and dominos both move fast. Suddenly, Griffith’s record deal came through at MCA Nashville. She was touring Europe, becoming the queen of Ireland, a nascent then full-on friendship with dean of Nashville songwriters Harlan Howard.  “Letterman” and “The Tonight Show,” Rolling Stone, back when it was every two weeks and excruciatingly hard to get into. Was it Liz Thiels, the publicist? David Wild, the reviews editor, who adored roots music? Was it just how intriguing her special mix of elements was?

Did it matter? Even if country radio found her voice too bracing, Mattea had another #1 with “Going, Gone,” while the touring life saw Griffith become a full-on headliner around the world – and a theater-sized draw in the States, where she also headlined folk festivals.

Free to explore the lives of characters who intrigued her, able to make a good living making music she believed in, it was fluid. She moved to MCA Pop, then Elektras Records, worked with producers Glyn Johns, Pete Buck, Rod Argent, Don Gehman, Peter Collins, Ray Kennedy and served as a comrade and peer to Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Tom Russell, Townes Van Zandt.

Championing Julie Gold, Griffith’s “From A Distance” so transfixed anyone who heard it, it wasn’t long until Bette Midler recorded it. Midler’s version defined ubiquity for many years, reminding people we are all small and equal, that “God is watching us” not as an enjoinder, but a comfort in our hard times.

Like a good folkie, she lifted people up in song. A later album, The Loving Kind, boasted a title track inspired by the obituary of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case overturned laws banning interracial marriage, and the capital punishment indicting “Not Innocent Enough.” Earlier, Storms’ “It’s A Hard Life Wherever You Go” considered kids without chances in Northern Ireland, impaled racists in Chicago and measured the hope of America’s ‘60s idealism with a chorus that implores, “It’s a hard life, a hard life, a very hard life/ and if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know/ and there ain’t no place in this world for these kids to go...”

“Trouble in the Fields” from Lone Star State of Mind lamented the plight of family farmer, while the dobro-drenched, accordion-basted “Love Wore A Halo (Back Before the War)” from Little Love Affairs measured the outlaw lives of number runners, a Jersey hotel and perhaps some comfort paid for by the hour. Unlikely people, missed or stumbled over, they rose up under Griffith’s sense of detail and zeal.

She would do a pair of covers projects, this woman who’d generously covered everyone from Tom Russell to Robert Earl Keen to ex-husband Eric Taylor, that celebrated her influences. Other Voices, Other Rooms gathered up 17 songs from Bob Dylan, Kate Wolf, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Jeff Walker, Woody Guthrie, Janis Ian, Buddy Mondlock and Harry Belafonte with Carolyn Hester, Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement, Arlo Guthrie, longtime collaborator James Hooker and Linda Solomon’s “Wimoweh” boasting Odetta, the Indigo Girls, Kennedy Rose, Holly & Barry Tashian, John Gorka, David Mallett, her father and Jim Rooney.

A supple versatility, a fluid sense of folk made the project seamless – and earned her her first Grammy Award. Best Contemporary Folk Album, an honor that matched the present to the past and the future. Other Voices measured how much veneration she brought to the art of songwriting, the ones who came before. Raising a light for the generations to come, she shone on – and fans flocked to the light.

But Voices’ Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”-evoking video for “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” duet featuring the song’s writer John Prine that nailed the way reverence, searching, kindness and the echo of emptiness converge. Black and white, grainy, urban, Griffith in white and Prine in black, they are angels living in our world as supernatural forces and mortal beings. Beyond the whimsy, there was a sense of truth matching the reality of being a star in the musical sense.

Just as important as her O. Henry character sketches and embrace of the postcards and polaroids that make up a life, the woman with a mouth like a bow conjured a tenderness that permeated her songs. Love was sometimes perfect and attained; occasionally flawed and wild. But as often, it was failed and someone – usually the woman – was leaving, frustrated, sad, but never beaten by what had transpired.

As a music critic carving a path when there weren’t really women covering music, as a female working her way through six engagements and many suitors always trying to be reasonable as I left, as a girl raised on books and dreams and hopes and songs, Griffith seemed a chimera before me, radiant and resplendent as Our Lady of Bookworms or the Patron Saint of Coffeehouse Angels. Could she really be real?

Any single woman with a career or a drive to find their place in the world – in those days before Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rickenbacker-downstroked suburban tales – found a richly-colored construction paper fortunecatcher every time Griffith released an album. Those stories of old couples we hoped we’d turn into like True Believer’s “One of These Days,” but also the unflinching make it happen drive of “Ford Econoline” that allows for self-propulsion, for dreams that required some form of screw it.

There was the romance of it all. No matter which album you landed on, that romance of life, the sweet nectar of somebody’s smile or a flick of a wrist taking a cigarette to their lips, it was all spark and igniting properties. Wherever, however, drink it in, swallow it down – and let whatever it was rush to your head. Don’t lose your senses, but go ahead and enjoy every last tingle.

That was the thing about the bookish, kindergarten teacher-looking songwriter: she could smoke’em if you had ‘em and drink’em down with the best. She would show up half kewpie doll, half brainiac and leave the room in ashes, all hearts splayed. Who wouldn’t wanna do that?

Many, many years ago, dressed in a pink and white gingham dress with buttons down the front and pale pink Buster Brown shoes, I went to UCLA to see Nanci and Guy at some hushed concert hall. I made the decision to dress for her people out of respect, but also to honor the way she’d lit my way coming into my own as a writer.

After slipping backstage between their sets to say my hellos, I had to slink out halfway through Griffith’s performance, drive into West Hollywood and make my way to the Whiskey A-Go-Go where I looked beamed in from another galaxy. Security guards a 100 yards from the door couldn’t believe someone looking like this could be on the guest list, nor could the guy at the Will Call window where the show was about to go on. Of course, I didn’t care that at the height of spandex, slashed tshirts and Aquanet, I was a giant neon goody two shoes. I was on the list, and they were ushering me in.

As the Nasty Habits took their positions in the world’s smallest nurse uniforms, I made my way through the snickering throng. Sam Kinison bounded onstage to introduce Motley Crue, who were kicking off their Girls! Girls! Girls! album en fuego. Riling the crowd up, the band came on like a jet engine hitting prime thrust -- the crowd reacted accordingly.

“What the hell do you have on?” asked my surly comic friend when he got back to us. “God, Holly...”

I explained where I’d been, what I’d seen, screaming over Nikki Sixx’s throb and Mick Mars’ squealing guitar. He took me in, started to laugh, shook his head. Dressed like a pirate, with a rag tied diagonally across his overprocessed hair, he pulled me close and hugged me, whispering, “Well, okay, respect.”

Respect. More than anything that’s what Nanci brought the world: respect. She smoked. She drank. She recorded other people’s songs to make sure people heard them, shared duets with everyone from the BoDeans to Mac MacAnally, Tanita Tikaram to Darius Rucker.

She loved Loretta Lynn, could talk about her for hours long before Jack White made her a hipster madonna, and Carolyn Hester, a folk goddess almost nobody today remembers. She never played the ingenue, nor did she throw sex around like a hipcheck in ice hockey.

She may’ve veered towards country radio, or closer to adult alternative at times, but she was always utterly herself. She knew how to be true to her literary influences in her songwriting, yet never lose the thread of who she was most of all.

Now she isn’t. Slipped through a crack in time, just – POOF! – and gone.

A couple years ago, her manager sent me to the house to do some interviews for a possible memoir. She was so happy to see me, remembered times I’d interviewed her, places I’d seen her play and so many friends we had in common. It was sweet and fun, like running into an old friend in an unlikely airport.

She treasured her memories, the people she’d met, all the twists along the way. Talking she’d light up, clearly delighted by the memory. But somehow, she wasn’t ready to tack down her past. Yes, it had all happened. She’d had a miraculous life, done amazing things, seen the world many times over, shared stages with incredible musicians.

But to talk about it, you could feel it weighing her down. If she was measuring her past this way, what else was left? She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t know. Not that we ever talked about that in those terms. Sometimes you just know people who look back too much run the risk of turning to salt and blowing away.

Not Nanci Griffith. She was one who held her own course, made her own journey. Of course, she would quietly slip away while no one was looking, just like one of the girls in her songs. She knew where she was going, knew Guy and Townes and Prine and Cowboy Jack and Steve Popovich and Phillip Donnelly and so many more were waiting.

When you’re headed to that, why would you stay? Long ago, she wrote “Gulf Coast Highway” with two friends, a song about love and death and spring in Texas, parsing the way progress siphons off the delicious parts and places of life. The melody feels like steam rising from a blue line on an old map in that kind of swelter only Southern towns near water can muster, the chords moving slowly like a cloud of melancholy.

Yet, “Gulfstream Highway” is a song of triumph and a letting go. When I heard the news, it was the third or fourth thing I played, because the joy in life’s fading is perhaps the thing -- after all the cultural dissonance, all the lives lost -- we need most.

As she sings towards the song’s end:

“Highway 90, the jobs are gone
We tend our garden, we set the sun
This is the only place on Earth blue bonnets grow
And once a year they come and go
At this old house here by the road

And when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away to heaven
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring...”

www.hollygleason.com

Down on the Beach the Sand Man Sleeps: Sweet Dreams, John Prine, Sweet Dreams

John Prine stepped over the monitor at the Carefree Theater on Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, looked down, winked, said, “Hi, Holly!” and proceeded to laugh. He was power-strumming “LuLu Walls,” and he was fired up. Something about that song got him bashing hard, a noted contrast to the ruminative sketches of the human condition that had pulled me to him as a barely teenager.
Having just taken full-time job at the Palm Beach Post, my interview for the Miami Herald hadn’t run. He hated interviews, I’d been told, but we’d ended up talking a couple hours about life, old school Nashville, listening to WSM-AM, Midwestern values and Mr. Peabody’s Coal Train. He had a big sense of humor about being “John Prine,” an object of obsession for enough to keep his lifestyle afloat, but not exactly a household name.
After the show in that old movie theater, we sat on a couch, where he made the pitch for A Tribute to Steve Goodman, a Chicago-folkie-grounded tribute to his best friend, who’d died. Willie Nelson’d just had a #1 with “City of New Orleans” to help make sure the three Goodman girls got their college education paid for; Prine was doing his part to maintain the legacy of his running buddy.

That was the thing about John: he was never really in it for himself. Over the years, he’d be in all kinds of places, doing all kinds of things, but mostly, he liked to stand back and grin, watching people and taking in all that joy.

Wasn’t long before John got a great idea. His younger manager was an overly serious, somewhat awkward type. Maybe he’d play a little cupid, do what had to be done. Our first date could’ve been funded by John’s American Express card, except I wanted to go to Krystal. “Keep her,” he advised when he heard where we’d had dinner.

And so, barely much more than a kid, I started spending so much time on the road with the dark headed songwriter, Garry Fish, his Sancho Panza tour manager, and Dan Einstein, my soon-to-be third ex-fiancee, Fish joked, “We saw you more than our wives those years.”
It was Wolf Trap in the spring when the heat soaked through John’s jacket and left him in a clinging soggy tank top. You could literally wring the night air out.
There to write the bio for German Afternoons, I was standing in the wings, watching the zealous fans pressing into the stage, reaching up for him like the masses in “Tommy.” I was terrified. Turning to Fish, I half-squeaked, “Do something! They’re going to hurt him.”
“Hurt him? They love him,” came the response. “Look...”
They did. The sold out crowd rocked gently as they leaned over the front the stage, singing the songs softly when it was a ballad like “Sam Stone” or “Hello In There,” more raucous for “Blow Up Your TV” or “Illegal Smile.” It was a revival, but also a moment to reconnect with who they were. That was the magic: who you were, as you are. Enough, plenty, seen for the cracks and broken places and loved almost more for them.

Still, John wasn’t pious. He’d take over the Bridal Suite at the Peabody Hotel and have three and four day poker parties, breaking only to have cocktails and watch the ducks march in the lobby. One night, flown in from LA on a record company junket, I turned up super-late, thinking they’d still be rocking, only to be met by a sleepy-eyed Prine in striped pajamas, hair akimbo, just shaking his head. Scanning my companions, he chuckled, admonishing, “Choose wisely” as he shut the door.
When I got fired from The Palm Beach Post – accused of being on the take from Southern Pacific and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as sleeping with Sam Kinison – John decided Dan and I needed to go to Europe. Passport packed, we embarked on a whirlwind tour of folk festivals across England and Belgium; touring the country in a vintage Daimler, we took in the countryside, realized how loneliness, emotional scars, alienation and indignation wrapped in humor were universal.
It was a magical trip, except for the part where my eyes wouldn’t stop leaking. Standing in baggage claim in Belgium, John first brought chocolate only to receive more tears; then flowers and more tears; finally, a little stewardess doll, and yes, even more tears. The tour was renamed the Pack, Unpack & Cry Tour.

But that was John: he’d never get mad.  He knew none of what was said was true – “my God,” he teased, “the alimony alone, they couldn’t have afforded you!” – but he hated seeing the pain. Whatever it took, he was my Huckleberry. And I wasn’t alone.
There was nothing like being charged with taking John to Dan Tana’s for dinner. Old Hollywood kind of hang, white linen pasta and all sorts of characters hanging around. Tucked into the elbow of Santa Monica Boulevard, he loved the thick darkness that almost swallowed the candlelight whole. Laughing, we’d talk about records, gossip about people we knew, sometimes wait for Dan to get off work. Occasionally run into someone he knew.
You never knew who, only realize when you saw legs that weren’t attached to a waiter at the edge of your table. It was that thing he had that pulled people to him. Twice I looked up, and – oh, crap! – it’s Bob Dylan, who would sit down, and just start talking. All very normal, except of course it wasn’t, and it was.
Part of what made John so precious was his ability to love all without bias. People were good or not his kind. When Dan and I were getting to the end, we made the trip to Dublin for a merging of musical worlds tv taping called “Sessions.” Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Marty Stuart, the O’Kanes, Rosie Flores, Flaco Jimenez and Guy Clark were part of the American contingent – and it was a week of entirely too much everything.
Dan had promised not to work, and immediately forgot the promise. To make it up to me, I was asked if I wanted to visit Windmill Studios with John.
Prine being friends with Cowboy Jack Clement had entre with U2’s people. Windmill was their studio. I said, “Yes, of course,” and got to be there when John saw Fiona for the first time.
It’s funny how life works. John was trying to coax back Rachel Peer, his then-wife who’d taken off and had surfaced in Dublin, actually playing bass for his taping. I hated the idea. The pretty dark haired studio manager with the great laugh seemed to be so much more right. Two nights later in the deepest hours, I spied them tucked into a banquette at the bar holding hands.
Dan and I wouldn’t make it, but John and Fiona somehow managed to transcend an ocean, the road and his idiosyncratic life.
But in the inbetween, there are so many polaroids of still life with John. Tracking up in the hills above Sunset with Howie Epstein, pushing himself to really deliver a record that pressed into the rock undertow, scraped away the hurt of a busted marriage and opened up the scared hope of new love. The Missing Years was amazing in the generosity of “All The Best,” that hung like so many little white lights across a brutal tableau of being crushed, the humanity consuming fame of “Picture Show,” the jaunty new love shuffle of “I Want To Be With You Always.”
The first run-in after the break-up at Roseland during the annual CMJ Convention.
Having run down to the winidy hall for soundcheck to make sure I could get in to see him open for Johnny Cash, the stage hands hadn’t known what to make of me; but didn’t want to make a mistake and leave some kid out in the cold. When John got there, they pointed to make sure he knew me, and when he came over, it was another gentle admonishment. “There were more Holly Gleason sightings than Elvis sightings during CMA Week, and you never called,” he said, looking me dead in the eye. “And I just want to remind you: I was your friend first. Without me, Dan would’ve never been able...”
I was red in the face. Hot, embarrassed, devastated. Even then, he couldn’t hold my feet to the fire. Putting his hand under my chin, he smiled, “Never ever come back to Nashville and not call.”

Kind of like “Summer’s End.” That lulling chorus, “Come on home... come on home...” It’s an invitation, and a prayer; it’s a lullabye and a meditation on having a place in the world where you just are. Welcome, safe, at ease, protected, loved.

It was a world that could expand as needed. Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings wasn’t just a snappy title. He knew how to bring people in, wrap his arms around them, see what was beautiful about their spirit, and it was never the big stuff, either.

I can see him, another crazy late night during a three day stand at the CoachHouse in San Juan, Capistrano. A massive table surrounded by people, Harry Dean Stanton in a sombrero crooning Mexican folks songs, as the assembled drank tequila and reveled in the moment. And there was John with that Cheshire grin, smiling at the euphoria bubbling around him instead of eating his enchiladas.
I can see him at a ‘40s feeling local hall outside Sarasota, Florida, surrounded by the people he loved. Music, food, streamers for his 60th birthday. When the band wound down, and the Brothers Prine had played “Paradise,” leading us through the final number, we adjourned to a pier. Standing there, in a cloud of friendship and love, fireworks lit up the sky as John and Fiona embraced.
I can see him, walking down the narrow stairs at some old British theater ahead of me. He’s got some stuff bundled up in his arms, cowboy boots poking up, a bottle of Aqua Velva sticking out of the one boot shafts. It was such a classic moment of manliness, unforced, just real.
I can see him, walking up to me at Baja Burrito with hs tray, asking me if it would be okay to set down and have a late lunch with him. “Of course, silly,” I said. “It’s always good to see you. Any time, any place, any where.”
I can see him at another CMJ, years later, standing on the stairs in his black top coat and jeans. He’s ready to go, and can’t figure out where I’ve gotten off to. I’d been talking to a new guy friends from Cleveland had turned me onto, who’d recorded his first album at their studio. The guy wasn’t much impressed with me, but when Trent Reznor saw John waving me to come on, he almost fell out of his chair. “You know him?” “He’s like my uncle...”
I can see him, in that kitchen on Lindawood, with the not quite yellow wallpaper with the pineapples, candlesticks lining either side of a small table-sized bowling alley, laughing and rolling strikes. When the people started leaving, he showed me a perfect vintage Wurlitzer jukebox, stocked with the best classic singles.
“You know how I got this?” he asked. “Stevie.”
Then he started telling a tale about touring in the South, AM car radios and old school hillbilly stations. The two friends got so high on the classic country by the time they hit New York, they decided to write the perfect country song. Only they did it trading lines in Sharpie on the wall of the fancy hotel they were staying in.

When the boozy haze cleared, John told his friend if he’d take the fall, he could have the song. The jukebox was his publishing money. Every time I’d hear David Allen Coe kick off the redneck national anthem of “You don’t have to call me darlin, darlin’...,” I’d smile at the secrets I know. Sometimes I’d look at John and he’d wink.

I can’t remember the day many years later Dan Einstein called. “I don’t want you to hear this from someone else. John has cancer.”
My heart stopped. “Don’t worry. We have the best people at MD Anderson. They’re on it. John’s on it.”
“I’ll pray.”
Somehow I knew. Having finally found Fiona, having two darling sons – Irish twins born 10 months apart, plus young Jody Whelan, Fiona’s little boy – and an even larger family in Ireland  to love, he would fight with everything he had. Scrappy Chicago mailman, former Army mechanic, son of a ward healer. My money was on John: things were going his way, he wasn’t going anywhere soon.

I would get updates; I would do laps on my rosary. I would squeeze my eyes shut, and beg God not to take him. And God heard me.

One day Dan showed up at my house, rang the bell. “Come on out, let’s talk.”
My heart sank.
“John’s made a record. Duets with country girl singers. He wants you to do the press.”
“Al will never go for it.” Al Bunetta didn’t believe in publicists, John was a critics’ darling.

“John’s already taken care of it.”
And so after a career of Patty Loveless, Rodney Crowell, Lee Ann Womack, Asleep at the Wheel, Tim McGraw, Emmylou Harris’ Spyboy and Matraca Berg’s Sunday Morning To Saturday Night, we dug in for In Spite of Ourselves, an album of deep vintage country with one new original sing with Iris Dement known for the line, “I caught him once, he was sniffin’ my undies.”

It was, for the most part, heaven. When I asked John, “Why a record of duets instead of your own songs?,” his eyes sparkled. He told a central truth: “I like singing with girls. I can sing with me any time.”
He did tv. He did interviews. He did too many interviews. He got mad at me.

“I feel like a piece of meat,” he barked on the New York sidewalk as early crush of rush hour people parted like the Red Sea around us. “I don’t like it.”

“But it’s good! People are going to know this record is out...”
“No, I feel like meat. MEAT! Do you get it?”
“Yes,” I said emphatically, knowing the USA Today photographer was set up in the bar of the Edison Hotel, waiting to get the picture for the cover story that was booked. I needed to break the momentum, and I needed to get John back into the cocktail lounge.

“I get it. You feel like meat, like you’re being pimped, and you know what? You’re right! You... are... right. But you know,” I paused for some tension,  “I may be a whore, but I’m your whore.”
Black Irish rising, my voice kept getting louder. His eyes kept getting wider. When I dropped the coup de grace, he couldn’t believe I went there. Busting out laughing, he grabbed me in a hug, and went, “Good Lord.”

We were in McSorley’s in no time, the shooter snapping and popping the flash as the bartender poured John a cocktail. It was quick work, happy hour was coming on. We all had places to be, and I had calls to return.

It wasn’t long ‘til I got a call. “We’re downtown in an Indian restaurant. We’re gonna go see Willie at the Bottomline. C’mon out, Cinderella, and have some fun. You work too much.”
They ordered some Tikka Masala, waited while I ate – and off we went. The Bottomline with John is probably a lot like the Vatican with the Pope. We watched Shelby Lynn, went out to Willie’s bus, where I was once again gently admonished, “Whatever you do, don’t smoke Willie’s weed.”
“John, I don’t smoke pot.”
“Well, people get excited around Willie.”
Watching the two masters visit, I was silent. The love and respect, the courtesy and grace with both men was astounding. They laughed some, talked about Kristofferson a little. Then it was time for Willie to hit the stage.

Getting off the bus, John whistled low. “Wow,” he said. “I’ve never seen you that quiet ever.”

The little details never escaped him, moments cracked open and revealed the tiniest truths that only he saw. It was incredible to watch the way he painted what everyone else missed.

Dan called me last weekend. “I don’t want you hearing this from anyone but me. It’s bad. He’s been intubated. With all the cancer that hit his lungs, this is a beast.”

I started to cry. When I was a kid, a baby rock critic working so hard at getting it right, John figured out how to help me get to the other side. I grew up on the road, traveling the world as part of his ragtag bunch of gypsies. I got Al Bunetta to admit he was wrong about publicists after we blew up In Spite of Ourselves, or maybe Fair & Square.

None of that really matters right now. As a stray, there are very few people who see all the way into your heart, who love the wild, the fierce and the formidable – who delight in your intellect, celebrate your wins and share their best moments with you.
John had done that for me my entire adult life, not because he liked how I held the mirror for him, nor because I could swim laps in songs like “Storm Windows,” “Unwed Fathers,” “You Got Gold,” “Christmas In Prison,” “Long Monday.” Just because was plenty.

At the end of The Tree of Forgiveness, the droll “When I Get To Heaven” opens with John talking his way through his first moments with God. It’s a jolly ole number that’s part Dixieland, part whimsy and 100% pure fun. Listening to him revel through the high-spirited folly – singing of kissing a pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl, smoking a cigarette that’s 9 miles long and getting a vodka and ginger ale – it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Turning sweetly serious, he confesses, “I’m gonna go find my mom and dad/ I wanna see all my mommas sisters/ cause that’s where all the love starts/I miss’em all like crazy, bless their little hearts...”
It’s so dear, so small town kid returning to the roost. And that little kid who’d shoot with his pistol, but empty pop bottles was all he would kill, that little boy  also rears his head, confessing, “And I always will remember, what my father said, ‘Buddy when you’re dead, you’re a dead peckerhead...I hope to prove him wrong, that is when I get to heaven”
Hearing John romping it up, heaven seems like a ball. Then again, John made everywhere a ball. Chewing that gum, stomping while he strummed, easing into hypocrisy with a level gaze and a few funny bon mots that left you nowhere to turn.

Dan didn’t call tonight. I got a text from an editor at HITS. All it said was, “Sorry,” and I started to cry. Funny how even in the carnage, in the many people who’re being taken from this earth, somehow it just didn’t seem like John would be one of the ones called home.
All those songs, all those stories, all those faces to okay for. Each and every one so very precious. Whether you ever shook his hand, shared a meal or just marveled from the cheap seats, he knew you were there – and he touched you in a way you didn’t even know you could feel.

I can see him now. My 17-year old cocker spaniel, my little child, had died, and I couldn’t get on a plane to Pittsburgh where I had work. Washed out, I ended up in DC where he and Steve Earle were sharing a sold out bill. Standing in the wings a couple decades later, the lights defused an almost halo around him as he exhaled those songs everyone knew by heart – and then after everyone was gone, I went down to say good-night.

He took me in, considered my pain, gave me a hug that said he knew. It was that simple, but it was that complete. Heading into the parking lot, he called after us, “You drive careful... You’ve got things to do, and you’re very precious cargo.”
That’s what I want to tell the angels right now. The ones from Montgomery, and California, Wolf Trap and the Ohio Theater, the Memphis/Muscle Shoals deep south contingent, the Austin and other Lone Star angels, as well as anyone who thinks they can fly.

I can close my eyes, see John in a single spotlight, half-braying, “Down on the beach, the sand man sleeps/ Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps/ and a country band who plays for keeps/play it so slow, singing, ‘Don’t let your baby down...’”

Whoever you are, wherever you are, pay heed. Today’s country bands don’t play for keeps, but John Prine comes from a place where those things are incontrovertible. All you have to do is close your eyes, wrap your arms around your soul and listen.