(photo by Laura Fedele)

Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mindtrips 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 junky daddy and “Donald and Lydia,” where people make love from ten 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.

                                                                      —Bob Dylan, interview in The Huffington Post

Midwestern Mindtrip Murder Mystery

“Lake Marie” may be Prine’s biggest hit from the 90s. Although more of a musical murder mystery than a murder ballad per se, it nevertheless fully rings the changes on our themes. “Lake Marie” enters our genre in its last verse by painting a black and white picture of a bloody crime scene. It implicitly invites us to figure out what that scene has to do with the rest of the song. People have a lot of different answers.

Here’s the song as it originally appeared on Prine’s Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings. I’m giving it to you for context. If you only listen to this version, though, you will miss out on just about everything important.

Lyrics at The Prine Shrine.

“Lake Marie” comprises a triptych of loosely-related spoken-word vignettes, with a chorus. Prine supplies masterful touches of evocative, gently ironic songwriting–e.g. “the wind was blowing, especially through her hair.” You can find other sites that explore the song’s background and speculate on what’s really going on in the verses. I’m going to keep that to a minimum, because the real power of this song emerges from not proverbially tying its lyrics down to a chair and beating them with a rubber hose to figure out what they are about. Rather, the whole piece comes together through connections the listener forges among the parts, including the chorus and, perhaps most importantly, the instrumental breaks.

I vaguely recall Prine being interviewed about this song. In the interview, he expressed a long-frustrated wish to be a rock and roller. Prine has had, let’s say, an ambivalent relationship to rock and roll as a genre. His songwriting and musical gifts emerge more prominently in other genres, but I can resonate with that wish. Unfortunately, I can’t find the citation, but he thought of “Lake Marie” as one of his best efforts at getting there. In the same interview, he said “Lake Marie” also let him delve into a little local history and also the film noir genre, with a murder in black and white. “Lake Marie” wrapped up several songwriting goals into one package.

Whoa Wah Oh Wha Oh

Prine fully delivers on the power of this song in live performance, usually with his band. He reliably surpasses the studio version. A live version of the song was released very soon after Lost Dogs on Prine’s Live on Tour. This performance was recorded at Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage in Chicago in the mid 90s. I’m pretty sure I was there. So was Roger Ebert, the movie critic who was one of the first journalists to give Prine broader exposure in the early 70s.

Normally, the only voice of mine you “hear” on here is my writing one, but yes, that’s me you hear shouting encouragement in the middle of that raging guitar jam and cheering wildly at the end.

A while back, we discussed the difficulty of establishing a precise meaning or even a definitive reading of the events in Townes Van Zandt’s classic “Pancho and Lefty.” That song’s story comes from at least one unreliable narrator. We’ve also previously discussed the importance, even within more narrative ballads, of the “missing story” surrounding the explicit story. Although bloggers and critics have made an attempt to figure out how the verses of “Lake Marie” fit in to a coherent narrative, my position is that a wide openness to interpretation is a gift of this song as well. You can’t make literal sense of the first verse, so it would seem people should abandon hope on this front at the outset. The song has an unreliable narrator. The singer or listener has to re-connect the scenes each time through.

I also think, as Shaleane showed us with Neil Young’s “Powderfinger,“ something important is going on inside the guitar solos. I’m not precisely sure what it is for Prine, and I’m not precisely sure what it is for the listener, but it’s in there, it’s powerful, and it’s what brings the foundling story, the rocky marriage, and the grisly murder media sensation in the woods together.

In other words, the first verse contains a grain of historical truth. The second contains at least a grain of marital truth. The third contains a grain of personal truth or personal history. That guitar jam at the end, though, likely hides more truth than we can bear. “Lake Marie” provides something original, powerful, and important, and something that ties very importantly into how we process violence artistically. I can’t unfold it through the lyrics without the whole thing falling apart. Neither can Prine.

Hey Jason, what do you think murder looks like?

Here are a few more live performances from Prine across the years to help illustrate my point. The first comes from Austin City Limits in 1996. He presents the song here with his characteristic good humor.

Prine performed the song on Live from Mountain Stage in 1997. It begins in about the 40th minute of the clip found here, and wraps up the show just before an encore performance of his classic, “Paradise.” During the latter song, he turns to his guitarist Jason Wilber, and says “Hey Jason, what do you think Paradise looks like?”, before a soulful guitar solo provides the answer. Keep this in mind relative to how “Lake Marie” works. As gifted a songwriter as Prine is, recognized as such by the 13th U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, among others, he’s also a musician clear on when it’s only the music that can get us where we need to go.

Prine also performed the song in 2000 in his appearance on Sessions from West 54th Street.  Notice the difference in Prine’s affect in this performance compared to the ACL one. The song has real weight here–serious business–but you can feel the release it provides by the time it’s done.

After diagnosis and successful treatment for throat cancer in the intervening years, Prine appeared on Elvis Costello’s program Spectacle in 2010 with a retooled and poignant performance “Lake Marie.” Prine has said that he “rediscovered” many of his songs in having to adapt them to a different key to suit his altered voice.

(2/6/17 update: Unfortunately the above link has gone dead since the original post. We’ll bring it back if and when it reappears. For a similar concluding verbal riff to the one discussed below, you can listen to this performance.)

In addition to being distinctive as a solo version of this song, Prine adds some allusions at the end of the song that unfold for us a few more suggestions about how themes love, death, and lost innocence in the context of both, flow through this song.

“…standing by peaceful waters…with my brown-eyed girl…. Top of the world, Ma…. Wake up, little Susie!” 

The first and third references will likely be familiar to you, as from Van Morrison’s early hit single and from the Everly Brothers’ hit from the 1950s. The middle reference is likely to the James Cagney film noir classic, White Heat, where the mother of Cagney’s criminal protagonist Cody Jarrett often says to him “top of the world,” and Cagney as Jarrett shouts it aloud in the movie’s final scene. Spoiler alert, the clip below is the conclusion of the film.

In this context, the concluding “Wake up, little Susie” has a decidedly darker connotation.

“If God’s got a favorite songwriter, I think it’s John Prine.” 
                                                   — Kris Kristofferson

photo by Jon R. Luini

Coda: Let’s talk “murdery” in Italian

Here is the one cover of this song I’ve found, a mixed Italian and English version. Tiziano Cantatore sings the chorus in English, while providing the narration of the verses in Italian. Musically, it seems rather successful, perhaps even improving on the studio version of Prine’s original recording. I can’t weigh in on the Italian at this point.