You won’t catch me defending the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (apart from the fun first one) much, but one moment in World’s End always stuck with me. Faced with the corpse of the last Kraken, Captains Jack Sparrow and Barbossa have the following exchange:
Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place.
Sparrow: The world’s still the same. There’s just less in it.
That’s kind of become my mantra as the world continues to sand the edges off of — or do away with — so many quirky, unique things.
“The world’s still the same. There’s just less in it.”
I don’t know how others feel, but my world just got less interesting and less full with the loss of two things: John Prine and the Shutdown Fullcast.
Prine died on April 7, 2020 of Covid-19. When it comes to John Prine, I’m still struggling for words even two weeks after his death. I’ve read tribute after tribute, but nothing quite captured what he meant to me. And I guess that’s part of what made him so great: everyone has their own John Prine. For me, it was the way you could hear the smile on his face in songs like “In Spite of Ourselves” or “Grandpa Was a Carpenter”. Or the way he dropped the sad, lonely hammer of lines like “C’mon baby, spend the night with me” in “Six O’Clock News”. My all-time favorite song of his, though, might be “Mexican Home.” I mean, just look at this:
It got so hot, last night, I swear
You couldn’t hardly breathe
Heat lightning burnt the sky like alcohol
I sat on the porch without my shoes
And I watched the cars roll by
As the headlights raced
To the corner of the kitchen wall
That’s the stuff right there. After he died, I naturally binged on his songs for a few days and they were a true comfort. I first discovered Prine in the late ‘80s, getting to see him in a small club called Goatfeathers in Columbia, SC, and I’ve been a devoted fan ever since. More than any other songwriter (with perhaps the exception of Jason Molina, which may tell you something about my mental wiring), Prine’s music felt like home.
Note: If you’re not familiar with Prine, go straight to his first live album, which does away with much of the Nashville polish of his early albums in favor of a more stripped-down approach. To me, many of the versions on this record are definitive. “Angel from Montgomery” (with Bonnie Raitt), an aching and pensive “Blue Umbrella,” “Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” it’s all there, most of it delivered with that gentle finger-picking style he came to be known for.
The Shutdown Fullcast died on April 21, 2020 of corporate stupidity. It might seem strange to eulogize a podcast that used the gateway drug of college football to lure you into what was basically just four wickedly smart and clever people who loved each other’s company, rambling on for about an hour each week about this or that irreverent and crazy thing. Who would win in a land war between the SEC East and SEC West? Which coaches and college programs can be matched to which Bible stories? What would it sound like if LSU coach Ed Orgeron read poetry? What if Buzz Aldrin had just left Neal Armstrong on the moon?
With the recent furloughs at Vox media, the Shutdown appears to be no more. Spencer Hall and Jason Kirk are gone, and while I’d pay good money just to hear Ryan Nanni and Holly Anderson do their own thing, the loss of Hall and Kirk represents a chemistry that can’t be replaced.
To a lesser degree, I’ve been in the kind of situation where the Shutdown crew now find themselves. You luck into a job with interesting and smart people, whose company you enjoy, where you actually enjoy going to work, and you ride that as long as you can. Eventually, it ends, and you spend the subsequent years trying to recapture that magic, although you rarely do. I was lucky enough to use the connections from that one great job to get jobs with some of those same people in other places, but it was never the same. Something was always different; perhaps it was unrealistic expectations on my part. At any rate, I’d been thinking about this while I was listening to the Fullcast’s final episode when Jason started talking about the joy of finding “misfit minds” like his own, and how you should hold onto that as long as you can if you ever find yourself in that situation. I can only shout a loud “amen” to this; my wife and I still lament the loss of that first “great crew,” and that was 20-25 years ago!
The Shutdown made me laugh. On the page, those folks were plenty funny and interesting at SB Nation and then Banner Society. Hall’s writing on college football, starting for me with this piece about an epic Jadeveon Clowney hit, dragged me back into enjoying college football as a sport full of not only athletic achievement but also one full of madmen, bag men, charlatans, and scandal. One of my favorite Tuesday pastimes was to roll into my favorite Mexican restaurant after work and enjoy tacos while reading gleefully niche Hatin’ Ass Spurrier columns that Hall often co-wrote with the others. And then there’s Hall’s epic piece, “Buffalo,” his kick-off to the 2016-17 season, that works its way into a discussion of CFB’s inherent violence. I’m a big fan of Nanni’s, Anderson’s, and Kirk’s writing as well (I even sent an email to Nanni once thanking him for the moral clarity with which he wrote about Baylor football), but I have to give special props to Hall. His writing, at its best, dances on the edge of being a little too much but manages to juuuuust pull back; he’s a unique and vibrant voice.
But perhaps more importantly for me, personally, the Shutdown came and existed at just the right time for me. Let’s face it: the world is a trash fire right now, and my inclination (for better or worse) has been to withdraw into the comfort and joy of my immediate family (perhaps one reason for the long-running cobwebbiness of this site), where I’m engaged in the parent’s job of raising my own crew of misfit minds. The Shutdown Fullcast was one of the few things outside of that which could reliably bring a smile, and more often, a genuine belly laugh. It’s hard to make me laugh out loud – I’m just a jaded and depressed old cuss — but good lord, this crew could make me do it. I must have listened to that Buzz Aldrin moon segment a half dozen times, and I never stopped laughing.
But nothing gold can stay, so all I can do is keep track of these folks and read/listen to whatever they produce going forward. I’m already signed up and ready for Jason Kirk’s Vacation Bible College newsletter and podcast, which promises to be a lot of fun. Who knows? Perhaps there will be more Banner Society/Shutdown Fullcast greatness in the future. In the case of the Fullcast, it sounds like maybe not. But surely Hall and Kirk will get picked up somewhere; they’re just too damned good.
And I guess if there’s a way to tie Prine and the Fullcast together, it might involve a constantly flowing stream of creativity. Prine, who started out in his 20s with an impossibly wise writer’s voice, found that throat cancer granted him the physically weathered old man’s voice to match the material, but his career and writing stayed a steady course for most of his life, and he just kept on keepin’ on. With the Banner Society gang, the demands of daily publishing resulted in output that probably was less consistent than they would have sometimes liked, but it always had that youthful, excited charge of “let’s try this crazy, stupid thing.” And as Jason Kirk put it in the final episode, stupid can be fun, and it can be good. And I’ll add that in these times, stupid is damned necessary. Besides, you can’t know if something works if you don’t try it. In my own creative output, I’ve struggled with both maintaining that steady discipline and with basking in the lively energy of following a crazy idea to its conclusion.
So in the end, I’m grateful I got to experience both Prine and the Banner Society/Fullcast gang at full strength. But I’m also just sad and pissed off. Pissed off because it didn’t have to end this way in either case, and sad that there won’t be much, if anything, in the way of new Prine or Fullcast. Sure, there will probably be at least one posthumous Prine album, and the Shutdown gang will obviously get together for this or that, or to help out with each other’s projects. But in both cases, a unique spot in time is gone, and something unique and personal is gone.
The world’s still the same. There’s just less in it.
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