The Late John Garfield Blues

The late John Garfield, 1913-1952

 

(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

 

John Prine is often misunderstood — I mean the guy mumbles, and so you get the lyrics wrong. To his hard-core fans, these misunderstandings have practically become a sport and a badge of honor. The lyrics to The Late John Garfield Blues are especially tough to make out, so everybody hears a slightly different song.

I used to hear a song in which "wind-blow scarves and top-down cars all share one western tree" and in which "the men on the el [elevated train, like in Chicago] sit perfectly still." I didn't get the joke when "two men were standing upon a bridge, one jumped and screamed yoo-hoo!" Each listener generates the song's meaning anew — everybody has a hand in writing the The Late John Garfield Blues.

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Only about seven years before The Late John Garfield Blues was recorded, Bob Dylan had finally figured out how to "do" 20th-century Modernism in popular song. John Prine learned this trick from Dylan more naturally and vividly than most songwriters, so Prine was one of many who the press called "The Next Bob Dylan." (Today, of course, we know the next Bob Dylan kept turning out to be Bob Dylan, and Prine is now The First John Prine.) With The Late John Garfield Blues, Prine dives into Dylan's Modernism more completely than anywhere else in his first two albums:

The fish don't bite but once a night
By the cold light of the moon
The horses screamed, the nightmares dreamed
And the dead men all wear shoes
Cuz everybody's dancing
Those late John Garfield blues

As I see it, what Dylan realized is that making sense of a song — what's happening, who it's happening to, and why it matters — should be a job shared, to varying degrees, with the listener. A song's meaning should not be complete and somehow lying inert inside the song, but is a spontaneous event or process that happens in the space shared by the song and the listener. And my attitude is that, if it's partly our job to make the meaning of a song, isn't it right that we do it well by bringing to the job the best of what have to offer?

The Late John Garfield Blues certainly needs our participation, since the lyrics have few hints of an "occasion," no real characters, very little setting, no train of thought. The lyrics are all mood — in fact, Prine claims that he wanted little more than to capture a mood, specifically, that of a late Sunday night when there's nothing on television but an old John Garfield movie (so "late" refers to the time of night more than to Garfield). The song is "not so much" about the actor, Prine says, and more about a feeling — the actor is used, if anything, as a vehicle to get to the mood.

But I hear that particular mood evoked much more vividly at the end of The Torch Singer than here. What I hear instead is John Garfield's 1952 funeral. Garfield had been admired by all sorts of people — he was the son of poor Urkranian-Jewish immigrants, a former boxer, a movie heart-throb, and the screen's first rebel without a cause. When he died at age 39, his funeral was a mob scene the likes of which hadn't been seen since Rudolph Valentino's funeral in 1926::

Black faces pressed against the glass
Where the rain has pressed its weight
Wind-blown scarves in top-down cars
All share one western trait

Saddness leaks through tear-stained cheeks
From winos to dime-store Jews
Probly don't know they gave me
These late John Garfield blues

Garfield was a staunch liberal and became a victim of McCarthy's blacklist. Unable to find work in Hollywood and obsessed with a sense of betrayal by his own country, Garfield became unhinged, obsessively sifting through his personal papers for evidence of his innocence, and decending into substance abuse and some sort of clinical depression.

Two men were standing upon a bridge
One jumped and screamed "You lose."
Just left the odd man holding
Those late John Garfield blues

Old man sleeps with his conscience at night
Young kid sleeps with his dreams
While the mentally ill sit perfectly still
And live through lives in between
[some sources say "And live through life's in-between"]

The arrangement, too, leads me to think more directly about history and the biography of John Garfield than Prine would suggest. The first two stanzas (the first 50 seconds) of The Late John Garfield Blues is again a duet between John Prine and Steve Goodman. Prine as usual plays accoustic guitar, emphasizing with his bass strings the first beats in the meter of this country waltz and decorating the rest with his high strings.

But during those two stanzas, Steve Goodman is just strumming on an electric guitar. His solid, slow, ringing strums sound like church bells, like funeral bells. This is an old trick (or, if you prefer, this has a long tradition). Bob Dylan uses it in "Queen Jane Approximately," when nearly the identical guitar sound is used, particularly near the end of the song, to ironically emphasize the theme of marriage. I've always felt certain that Dylan (or his band) got the idea from Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1928 "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" in which Jefferson brings the song to a complete stop to imitate the sound of a funeral bell with the bass string of his guitar. The song was recorded at Blind Lemon Jefferson's last recording session and was covered by Dylan on his very first album.

Comments

[Dan]

Thanks for this insightful writeup. It's a shame the audience than can appreciate it is so small. Keep up the good work.

[zac]

enjoyed this, thanks.