Souvenirs

many thanks to Elvis The Fish for use of the photo

 

(This is part of an occasional series on John Prine's second album,
Diamonds in the Rough:   Everybody  The Torch Singer  Souvenirs
The Late John Garfield Blues  Sour Grapes  Billy The Bum  The Frying Pan
Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You  Take the Star Out of the Window  The Great Compromise  Clocks and Spoons  Rocky Mountain Time

 

I was a little embarrassed by Souvenirs in my 20s and much of my 30s — although, as Bob Dylan would say, I'm younger than that now.

Written when John Prine was about 25, Souvenirs is a very sentimental song about nostalgia, or rather, nostalgia as it appeared in the imagination of a young man. The young Prine imagines surveying the refuse left over from a long life of troubles — graveyards, pawnshops, dirty windows, broken toys — and finds an inexhaustible reservoir of tears and reasons to feel he's been robbed. I used to consider this to be a very improbable speculation.

I hate graveyards and old pawnshops
For they always bring me tears
I can't forgive the way they robbed me
Of my childhood souvenirs

Memories that can't be boughten
Can't be won at carnivals for free
Well it took me years to get those souvenirs
And I don't know how they slipped away from me

Today, I'm reminded of the time when, at the age of 20, I read to one of my professors (who was recently divorced and a recovering alcoholic) a poem by Robert Hass. The poem says, in part:

The child is looking in the mirror.
His head falls to one side, his shoulders slump.
He is practicing sadness.

At this point, the professor interrupted, saying — either to the child in the poem, or to me — "You'll get plenty of practice in that, kid." He made me understand these lines of poetry for the first time ... he was a good professor, it turns out. In my 40's, I've now begun to suspect that the young Prine somehow got it right after all. As the late Steve Goodman once sang, "Those old folks are wiser and sadder."

Souvenirs — both the version on Diamonds in the Rough and the one on Great Days — is a guitar duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. It's hard to think of the song as anything else. And it's a perfect example of why fans of Prine and Goodman treasure their collaboration so, why it's the focus of so much nostalgia.

The fit between their guitars is so snug that figuring out who's playing what is exceedingly difficult — thank god for stereo, which helps separate the two instruments. The core of Prine's part is his alternating between the bass notes natural to each chord and the higher strings, creating a complex version of his trademark boom-chick meter. The whole song drapes itself around this.

During his recent interview with Ted Kooser (about 27 min, 25 seconds in), Prine said Goodman "used to play the heck out of this song and sing it with me. And he had a way of doing it that always made it sound like I was playing the really good, the really fancy parts. You know, it was always him." In Souvenirs, Goodman's part is, it sounds to me, mostly bluesy flatted 3rds and 5ths that he gets using hammer-ons, slides, and bends. In this way, Goodman fills in the comparatively spacious meter Prine has set.

The overall effect is a light, frilly embroidery that would be in danger of becoming "too many notes" — monotonous and hard to follow — were it not for well-chosen moments of relief that restore a sense of anticipation: (1) Prine's resting heavily on the bass notes between the 1st and 3rd lines of every verse, (2) the simple but interesting intermissions between each verse, and (3) both Prine and Goodman simply strumming during the chorus.

Souvenirs, of course, is itself a souvenir of better times. It could just be an uncanny coincidence that this song, so indelibly rendered as an act of friendship and intimacy between Prine and Goodman, happened to be about nostalgia, loss, the robberies committed by graveyards. Then again, Goodman had already known of his leukemia for several years when the song was first recorded. In any case, when Prine performs it today as a solo, it sounds fine, but it's hard not to hear the song as a bit orphaned, as if it were a souvenir waiting on some pawnshop shelf.

Comments

[Googie]

As a guitarist from Chicago who learned the instrument by ear, laboring in my early days to replicate what I was hearing on the LPs of John Prine and Steve Goodman, I found your analysis of Prine and Goodman’s instrumental compatibility on “Souvenirs” very interesting (as well as being the first discussion of the subject I’d ever read).

When I first saw John Prine in concert (in suburban Palatine, IL, probably 1979), I’d been playing guitar for only a few years. Having begun on the banjo, my major strength as a guitarist was emerging in my finger-picking technique. Prine was, at that time, my primary influence as a finger-picker. I was amazed to see that the Prine songs I’d been playing with 4 fingers (including thumb) were being accomplished by Prine himself with only 2 (thumb and forefinger)! Employing the “drop thumb” technique well-known to clawhammer banjo players, Prine alternated these two fingers up and down pairs of strings in a busy arpeggio, providing a strong base chunk with a tinkling, even treble.

When I saw Goodman playing the same venue maybe a year later, I noted that he almost always used a pick, whether playing a ballad or a “jump tune,” as he called them. A far more deft and fluent instrumentalist, Goodman’s right-hand technique seemed centered around a rocking wrist movement. At either end of the wrist’s arc, Steve’s pick would pluck a string. Sped up, the back-and-forth motion wove together a driving base with a glittering pattern of hammer-ons, pull-offs and other trills over the chord shapes of Goodman’s left hand.

The point is that both musicians—particularly on the orchestration of “Souvenirs”—were using a binary picking system, alternating base and treble with a single plectrum. That’s what gives the track its driving rhythm as well as its unmistakable, autoharp-y sparkle.

I never got to see them play together, but I did get to see both of them play with other musicians (most notably Goodman with both mandolinist Jethro Burns and David Bromberg). What was evident in Prine, Goodman and their crew is that they loved listening to the music as much as they loved playing it. Of all the lessons I learned from these brilliant musicians, the greatest and most lasting was how to listen. Through years of familiarity and mutual admiration of one another’s gifts, they knew what *not* to play, when *not* to take the focus, when to give and when to take, musically speaking. This warmth and felicity rings loud and clear on “Souvenirs”.