When you are subjected to a lockdown, as Sydney is now, what you want, if you are like me, is entertainment that takes the ennui, anxiety, alienation from others and just general all-persuasive sense of melancholy and massively amplifies it. That's what I call living.
That is why it was a tragic irony that COVID-19 killed the great US country singer-songwriter John Prine, coz his whole output seems designed to be a humanist, compassionate and empathetic summing up the strange emptiness and background sense of unease that comes with very limited options.
So here are the 6 songs that seem to capture all that and SURE these songs are generally about other things, whatever the similarities, but that's coz a lockdown is just the reality for many people in the "rich world" under late monopoly capitalism just exaggerated a bit.
Anyway, and I'm sure I don't have to say this but just in case, this is "whiskey-drinking" music. By all means substitute with your intoxicant of choice (as per the final song on this list) but for god's sake do not attempt sobriety at a time like this. Just don't.
You can listen to all 6 as a playlist or I lst them below coz that's the kinda shit I do. I'm thoughtful.
Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more She sits and stares through the back door screen And all the news just repeats itself Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen Someday I'll go and call up Rudy We worked together at the factory But what could I say if he asks "What's new?" "Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do"
Things got rough Things got tough Things got harder than hard We were just trying to make a livin' In our back yard
We were born too late died to soon Anxiety's a terrible crime If you don't come now don't come at all 'Cause it's a crooked piece of time.
It's a crooked piece of time that we live in...
Yesterday morning an ill wind came Blew your picture Right out of the picture frame Even blew the candle out From underneath the flame Yesterday morning an ill wind came.
Well, tonight I'll throw a party And I know who I'll invite There's a strange and lonely person With whom I'll spend this night There'll be no old sad memories To haunt me till I die In that room there'll be a bottle And me, myself and I...
When I woke up this morning, things were lookin' bad Seem like total silence was the only friend I had Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down, and won And it was twelve o'clock before I realized I was havin' no fun Ah, but fortunately I have the key to escape reality...
They say never read the comments, but there are exceptions.
For instance, if you read the comments under any random Youtube clip of John Prine, who died from COVID in April 2020, you'llread a flood of heartfelt emotion about the US country singer who died from COVID-19 back in April. It is no wonder. He sung stories of ordinary people's lives and struggles with with and humanity in equal measure.
Yet this year's Country Music Awards, a notoriously corporatised event for country establishment which have also been criticised for lack of inclusieness over the years, did not see fit to even mention his name.
Nor did the CMAs make any mention of Jerry Jeff Walker or Billy Joe Shaver, who were essential figures in the vibrant, deeply creative Texas country scene that arose around Austin in the early 1970s.
In what I am sure is pure coincidence, the Texas scene personified independence from the country music establishment and Austin became an alternative to Nashville -- the base of that establishment that is personified in the CMAs.
Prine, on the otherhand, was a mailman from Chicago who played country but was closer in origin and spirit to the folk scene that emerged from cofee shops and bars in the 60s. It's hard not to see the left-leaning politics and social concerns being a factor in the snubbing.
The snubbings caused a predictable outcry. Singer-songwriter couple Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires -- both huge fans as well as close friends of Prine's -- handed back their CMA memberships in disgust.
Representatives of a succeful brand of what is sometimes seen as "more authentic" singer-songwriters in country, Sturgil Simpson and Margo Price, also voiced their disgust with the CMAs.
The snubbings acted more as a final straw. Shires had previously worn a t-shirt to the CMAs criticising the country music industry's exclusion of women, while Price had already refused to attend on grounds of CMA's exclusionary approach and "plastic" nature (she'd already used her debut Grand Ole Opre show this year to support Black Lives Matter and slam the country music industry for its racist history).
As for Simpson, a hugely succesful independent country artist, he pointedly busked on the street in front of the venue instead of attend,
Neither Prine, Walker or Shaver had the sort of sustained commercial success the CMAs thrive on. They have a reputation as "songwriter's songwriters", and while that is true (Bob Dylan called Prine his favourite songwriter), it's not the full story.
But in many ways, for the CMAs to actually recognise Prine, Walker and Shaver after their deaths would be an act of hypocrisy after snubbing them while alive. It would never have been acknolwegment the counted.
The best tribute to Prine comes from those who loved him.
The contrast between the CMA sub and the love expressed "from below" is deeply symbolic. And you can get a taste through a spin through random Prine clips on Youtube -- the passion turning to grief in comments posted post April 7, 2020.
One example:
"I was heartbroken before he ever sang a word. I was one of those with a 'hole in his arm where all the money goes'. I carried Prine around in a stolen walkman player with a beat up cassette over-due from a library loaned in another state. He spoke pictures of life folks lived like he knew us personally. Like he lived it himself and had the words that connected with the feelings. But i won’t miss him, too much, I’ve got the legacy he’s left us. I wish i could tell him 'thanks'."
'Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.'
A random scroll through other clips produced a flood of tributes, a few examples I'll put below. "God, I wept over my dinner listening to his music... I hate that he's gone."
"His songs can move me to tears, and I really don't care if the whole world knows."
"His music and words resonate with me like few others can. His music helped me through some dark days. Actually he’s still helping me get through some difficult times."
"I have had tears over the loss of 3 people in my life ,my mother,my sister and now John Prine .Im 73 and my heart is broken over the loss of one of the sweetest souls on earth.R.I.P. John "
"John Prine could bring a tear to a glass eye. I am overcome with emotion every time I hear this song."
"John wrote songs that captured the genuine, broken beauty of humanity. Leonard Cohen once noted that the cracks in everything are how the lights get in. John Prine was the light."
"No musical artist has ever affected me as deeply as John Prine."
"If you love John Prine, you are a friend of mine."
"If John Prine needed a kidney and mine worked, I would give it to him."
"John Prine sings from the heart - and his songs tell the truth ... The working man's Mozart."
"Tonight I am an old woman, and a mail carrier from Chicago, and Dear Abbie and a guy just trying to save his marriage while cooking sausages, and the one who wants people to quit hollerin at me. The kid wearing other peoples clothes, I am America, I am the underdog, the under served, the helpless. I am Prine."
"John Prine is not dead. Until the last person who ever heard his songs dies, he will never die."
"Makes me cry every time. 'Hello in there, hello'. Be kind. That is all."
'Some humans ain't human, some people ain't kind'
Now I'm not saying John Prine wrote that aove song for the pricks from the CMAs, but I'm not not saying that either.
John Prine, at a gig that wasn't the one I was at, but at which I also didn't cry.
I saw the legendary American country/folk singer John Prine on the weekend at the State Theatre in Sydney and I didn't cry. Why would I? Who said I did?
What sort of freak would cry at the likes of Prine, who was discovered and championed by Kris Kristofferson (who said Prine's songs were so good "we'll gave to break his thumbs") and who, when singing 'Sam Stone', one of the first songs he ever wrote while working as a mail man about five decades ago about a Vietnam vet suffering PTSD who dies from a heroin overdose, offers up lines like "good songs don't last long on broken radios"?
I didn't cry.
I didn't cry when his opening act, young Kentucky country singer Tyler Childers, ended his set by singing "Lady May", a beautiful love song to his wife. I don't know who has been telling you what, but my eyes were dry!
I was bemused, I'll admit, when Childers first appeared coz he was wearing a nice suit and was clean shaven with a short, neat haircut whereas the clips I've seen of him he had his long, wild red hair pulled back with an unruly beard and his dress sense was more... well about up to my standards of slovenly care.
How I had been lead to believe Tyler Childers would look.
But then he started singing and his hoarse, but emotively powerful voice rang out through the State Theatre and that was him alright, singing his stories of a heartbroken preacher succumbing to alcoholism or of a quiet night where he "only had a couple of drinks" and "a few good hits from an antler pipe" and he "must admit I had a couple of white lines' and then the next thing he knows he awakes to the noon light with a pounding head and a black eye and it "feels like fierce abandon", you just like everyone else's Tuesday night too, this guy is singing our lives!
I may have have been enthralled in his stories, sure, but I never cried when a simple story of love like "Lady May", sung as the best country songs are, from the bottom, from a man who has "held my weight in shame".
Now I ain't the toughest hickory that your ax has ever felled, but I'm a hickory just as well. I'm a hickory all the same...
I think it is his use of rural imagery that enables me to relate, being a renowned outback type myself.
Prine!
Now I will admit I felt like crying, sure, at only being able to see a truncated opening set by Childers, without his full band. And at the fact that, early on especially, he had to play while many in the audience were still taking their seats. Sure. I felt like crying. But the point is I didn't, whatever tales may have been spread by my enemies.
Then John Prine came on and he at least had the decency to look exactly as expected -- small, hunched over, old and absolutely nothing like any kind of popular music star, let alone icon. Until he sings his tale of wit, love and loneliness, but, and I don't know who has been telling you what, but even when he went for the heart I didn't cry.
I didn't cry when John Prine sung "Hello In There", from his 1971 self-tiled debut album, about the loneliness of growing old. I didn't cry when the narrator, recalling his growing list of dead friends, notes, "We lost Davy in the Korean war. And I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore." Anyone who says I did is a straight up liar.
I didn't cry when John Prine sung "Summer's End", a melancholic song tinged with a gentle sense of grief from his latest album, which was released with a video tying it to the US's devastating opioid overdose crisis, now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. Of course I didn't.
I didn't cry when he played "Angel from Montgomery" from his first album that was later a hit for Bonnie Raitt, or at the endearing sweetness of "I Have Met My Love Today" from his latest. All these accusations are getting ridiculous.
I may have laughed.
I may have laughed when he sung a one-person duet of "In Spite of Ourselves", his tale of lovers who bug each other, first recorded with Iris DeMent. (He "drinks his beer like its oxygen", she "thinks crossing her legs is funny").
And when he sung "Jesus The Missing Years", where he speculates about what the Son of God might have gotten up to in those years the Bible doesn't mention (such as recording with The Stones). And at "When I get To Heaven", from his latest album details the vices he is keen to restart.
I definitely smiled an illegal smile during "Illegal Smile", also off his debut and which offers an energetic defence of consuming cannabis. Mine came courtesy of the baking efforts of a friend staying with me, but judging from the enthusiasm of those who joined in the chorus, I was not alone in wearing a grin still banned in this godforsaken country.
Hell, I probably should have cried when he played "Paradise", one of popular music's first ecological songs that describes the environmental destruction wrought on the town he grew up in by a coal company, seeing as that describes the goings on in this godforsaken country all too well.
But at no point, and I can't stress this enough, did I shed any tears. Nor were my eyes even moist. It is absurd that I have to answer this campaign of fake news, but these are the times we live in.
I'll admit one thing: I still feel like crying when I think of how expensive the tickets were. Mine was in the cheapest stalls and was still just shy of three figures. The profiteering gentrification of live music seems to gall more with the case of someone like John Prine who has dedicated his career to singing stories of ordinary people only for the type of characters who fill his songs to be priced out of seeing him play them.
But I didn't cry, and I hope that is the end of it.
'You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? Shadows...' John Prine also played this literary tale that jumps from a pre-European colonisation creation tale to a disintegrating marriage to two random, unexplained murders.
If you have finished your journey, fear not! For you have only just begun another.
I hope this inspires you. Here is a totally unrelated song about someone going from journey to journey in this society by John Prine, the legendary country singer-songwriter I have the insane pleasure of seeing this weekend in Sydney.
I got hired Monday morning Downsized that afternoon Overcome with grief that evening Now I'm crazy as a loon
So George HW Bush has suffered an untimely death. Untimely coz the goddamn war criminal and one-time CIA director, who was US president from 1988-92, died at the disturbingly old age of 94.
Why do these bastards live so long? (Rhetorical question: obviously his health care was of a far higher quality for the vast majority of those he ruled can afford.)
Now, as we live in the disturbing world where a barely literate, semi-functional-on-a-good-day Orange Freak is in the White House, explicitly encouraging open White Supremacists and neo-Nazis, it can be easy to look back on the glory days when those who oversaw unspeakable mass murder and destruction of entire countries could at least string a sentence together.
But while Donald Trump may be living proof that things can always get worse, Bush Sr was still a war criminal and bigot, whose administration was responsible for suffering on a scale almost impossible to comprehend.
The brutal legacy of the first Iraq War (which featured devastating use of depleted uranium by the US military) and the US invasion of Panama are enough to make the point, followed by his administration's refusal to act on the AIDS crisis so that the loved ones of those who died from the disease once threw their ashes on the White House lawn in a desperate protest.
Perspective is everything. No doubt Bush Sr was more "civilised" to his opponents within the US political class.
But nothing was civilised about his administration's wholesale destruction of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, which featured the large scale, horrific slaughter of civilians as well as retreated Iraqi soldiers.
This was one-side butchering simply because dictator Saddam Hussein (a former US ally) had upset US oil interests by invading Kuwait (which Saddam believed he had the US green light to carry out).
Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties ... U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills...
The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.
By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants.
So 158,00 Iraqis killed. For scale, that is more than 50 times the death toll from 9/11.
Still, as retreating Iraqi solider conscripts were blown to smithereens by smart bombs, at least their final thought could have been "at least the uncivilised brute who ordered this isn't also issuing nonsensical tweets that are an embarrassing daily reminder of the likely irreversible decline in US imperial power".
Or they could have thought that if they knew what the fuck Twitter was, which obviously they didn't, being too blown apart to have caught the 2006 launch of the social media platform..
Even before Iraq, there was another case of military slaughter for US interests under Bush Sr -- the 1989 US invasion of Panama. This war was aimed at removing Panama dictator Manuel Noriego, using his various human rights abuses and alleged involvement in the drugs trade as an excuse.
But like Saddam, who the US happily sold weapons to in '80s while he massacred Iraq's Kurdish population, Noriega had been a US ally until the US decides its interests were better served without him.
US soldiers during the 1989 invasion of Panama.
The death toll of the US invasion, in which the US air force bombed Panama City's poor neighbourhoods, is contested, but ex-US attorney general Ramsey Clark estimated it about 3000. Human Rights Watch noted:
[Panama's civilian deaths] reveal that the "surgical operation" by American forces inflicted a toll in civilian lives that was at least four-and-a-half times higher than military casualties in the enemy, and twelve or thirteen times higher than the casualties suffered by U.S. troops.
There, though, a lot more than just war crimes when it comes to Bush Sr's legacy, from his racist policies to deadly AIDS denialism. He also oversaw tax cuts that shifted ore wealth to his corporate mates while devastating ordinary people. He also imfamously ramped up racism as a Republican electoral weapon.
All the fake #Resistance tweeters eulogizing George HW Bush should be reminded that Bush’s disgusting, racist and effective Willie Horton ad was the blueprint for all of Trump’s overt racism. Yes, the genteel Bush brought race baiting back into the open https://t.co/LtlzE13Sbv
But asides from all the butchery and bigotry, what were his personal qualities?
Well I guess no one should ever expect much from their war criminal corporate elite overlords, so maybe it is just in keeping with his life's calling that he has also been accused of being a serial sexual harasser.
After all, it is not much of a defence to have someone say: "Sure he may have destroyed the lives of countless thousands on multiple continents, but at least he never touched any inappropriately!"
Then again, this is hardly a problem for just the extremely powerful. We have ample, almost ceaseless, evidence that you don't need to be a war criminal to be responsibly for serial sexual misconduct. You appear, mostly, to just need to be a man socialised in this society.
All up, it seems that the very best that can be said for George HW Bush is he "isn't Donald Trump". This is a low bar almost all of humanity manage to leap, except for Donald Trump, who probably accuses the bar of being a "Mexican rapist" anyway.
So here are three songs that apply perfectly well to the deceased ex-president-- personally or in terms of the impact of his polices and those of his class on the world -- who is now as dead as the many thousands he helped kill.
Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library Line up to the mind cemetery now What we don't know keeps the contracts alive an moving They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells Rally round the family, pockets full of shells
So you say It's not okay to be gay Well, I think you're just evil You're just some racist who can't tie my laces Your point of view is medieval Fuck you... fuck you very, very much
A bitter wind blows through the country A hard rain falls on the sea If terror comes without a warning There must be something we don't see What fire begets this fire Like torches thrown into the straw? If no one asks, then no one answers: That's how every empire falls
Well, earlier this month, unable to stop listening to John Prine and Emmylou Harris's cover of Guy Clark's classic country folk song "Magnolia Wind", I chucked it up on this very blog and opined: "If there is anything more beautifully moving than Emmylou Harris and John Prine singing Guy Clark, I don't think I want to know."
Well, little did I know that Hayes Carll, whom I may have mentioned before on this blog once or twice, was going to step up and release a special cover of the track less than two weeks after my post.
Now, I don't want to suggest the reason for this was my post. I am not saying Hayes Carll religiously reads my blog and took my comments as a challenge. Obviously, i cannot prove this.
But he did once "like" a blog post of mine on Facebook defending him from Steve Earle's stupid insult, when I tagged him in it. So, you draw your own conclusions, that is all I am saying. I am just presenting the circumstantial, some might may say damning, evidence.
The key point is Hayes Carll has just released a cover of "Magnolia Wind", which is awesome news. "Magnolia Wind" is a really amazing song, as so many of Clark's songs are. Tender, poetic and heartrendingly beautiful. And Hayes Carll has a voice raw and broken enough to invoke its tension between melancholy and wonder, a song about love and its inevitable end.
Below is Hayes Carll's version recorded live on Youtube, and you can also do the decent thing and purchase it on iTunes.
You can hear John Prine and Emmylou Harris's cover and Guy Clark's original All three versions are incredible, but I stand by my original view that the Prine/Harris duet is pretty unbeatable. Hayes, if you are reading this as no doubt you are because I am not deluded at all, I still love your version and grateful you recorded it! Keep up the awesome work!
I'd rather sleep in a box like a bum on the street Than a fine feather bed without your little ol' cold feet I'd rather be deaf, dumb, and stone blind Than to know that your mornings will never be mine
I'd rather die young than to live without you I'd rather go hungry than eat lonesome stew It's once in a lifetime and it won't come again It's here and it's gone on a magnolia wind
I'd rather not walk through the garden again If I can't catch your scent on a magnolia wind
If it ever comes time that it comes time to go Sis just pack up your fiddle Sis pack up your bow If I can't dance with you then I won't dance at all I'll just sit this one out with my back to the wall
I'd rather not hear pretty music again If I can't hear your fiddle on a magnolia wind BONUS:
I'd rather sleep in a box like a bum on the street Than a fine feather bed without your little ol' cold feet I'd rather be deaf, dumb, and stone blind Than to know that your mornings will never be mine
I'd rather die young than to live without you I'd rather go hungry than eat lonesome stew It's once in a lifetime and it won't come again It's here and it's gone on a magnolia wind
I'd rather not walk through the garden again If I can't catch your scent on a magnolia wind
If it ever comes time that it comes time to go Sis just pack up your fiddle Sis pack up your bow If I can't dance with you then I won't dance at all I'll just sit this one out with my back to the wall
I'd rather not hear pretty music again If I can't hear your fiddle on a magnolia wind
There is a lot wrong with this world, but there are some compensations, at least, for the seemingly never-ending horror show. Emmylou Harris and John Prine singing this beautiful song by Guy Clark is one of the best.
Clark's original is great, but this version —from a Guy Clark tribute album — raises it to new heights. The song works brilliantly as a duet, with the melodic voice of Harris contrasting with Prine's soft gruff-yet-breaking voice, which is close in its effect to Clark's original vocal. This contrast draws out the interplay between the sweet romance and melancholy at the song's heart — where the beauty of a genuine love is contrasted with the prospect of its inevitable end.
Country music can get a bad wrap, but it is a serious form and, like all genres of popular music, it can be done well, badly and everything in between. The likes of Clark (who died last year aged 74), Harris and Prine are, without question, among its finest exponents.
From the same generation (Harris and Prine are both 70), all three were leading figures in the serious and artistic wing of country music, operating in the grey area between general "folk" music and country, committed to the craft of storytelling.
And if any of the three were to start their careers now, they would no doubt be labelled, not as "country", but "alt-country" or the ever-vague "americana". And maybe that doesn't really matter — labels are just words and can never capture any artists contribution, and does more the box them in than anything,.
But still... I cannot help feel sad that so much unspeakable shit gets to take the label of "country" these days, when the stuff that comes from the heart, from the roots, gets shunted off to some other, sidelined genre or subgenre.
BONUS TRACK: Clark's friend and talented country singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell, on the same tribute album, sings Clark's extraordinarily poetic song "Old time Feeling".
And that old time feelin' goes sneakin' down the hall, Like an old gray cat in winter, keepin' close to the wall. And that old time feelin' comes stumblin' up the street, Like an old salesman kickin' the papers from his feet. And that old time feelin' draws circles around the block, Like old women with no children, holdin' hands with the clock. And that old time feelin' fall on it's face in the park, Like and old wino prayin' he can make it 'till it's dark. And that old time feelin' comes and goes in the rain, Like an old man with his checkers, dyin' to find a game. And that old time feelin' plays for beer in bars, Like and old blues-time picker who don't recall who you are. And that old time feelin' limps through the night on a crutch, Like an old soldier wonderin' if he's paid too much. And that old time feelin' rocks and spits and cries, Like and old lover rememberin' the girl with the clear blue eyes. And that old time feelin' goes sneakin' down the hall, Like an old gray cat in winter, keepin' close to the wall. And that old time feelin' comes stumblin' up the street, Like an old salesman kickin' the papers from his feet.
It's like Christmas all over again. All the fun from a mass consumer frenzy aimed at propping up a tottering late monopoly capitalism in a death spin is taken away by politically correct libtard elitist cucks doing the bidding of ISIS.
For instance, I used to love hot cross buns until all of a sudden supermarkets would only sell those Halal ones with the cross replaced by "DEATH TO ALL INFIDELS" written in Arabic.
But some people still think the whole idea of a “War on Easter” as part of a general assault on Western Judeo-Christian traditions is a farce, because what the Hell has Jesus got to do with a rabbit or eggs, what has a rabbit got to do with Jesus or eggs, and what do eggs have to do with fucking chocolate?
Too few people know the real story, due to unfortunate editing out of the New Testament, but below is the actual truth.
***
One day, Jesus of Nazareth was walking home from Damascus, having drunken a little too much of His own Water-Into-Wine Homebrew(™) and eateth too little of His Own Brand of Freshly Baked Bread(™) in order to line His stomach, like Judas, who frankly spent most of his time trying to sort out the Son of God’s shit, kept saying He should.
As Jesus Christ Our Lord staggered down the dirt path, He fell into the mud on the side. And there lay Our Saviour until a humble rabbit just happened to hop by.
The rabbit watched the poor man flailing pathetically in the mud, not realising He was Our Saviour. Hopping up, he kindly asked the King of the Jews whether He needed any help?
Looking up, Jesus saw an honest soul and said simply: “I could murder a kebab!”
The rabbit knew the nearest kebab store still open at that time of night was all the way in Byzantium. But having only just been introduced to the historic Palestine region by the Romans, he also knew where to get the best ones in that city known today as Istanbul.
And so, taking pity on the Lord and remembering the state he was in himself just last weekend, the rabbit hopped all the way there and back with Jesus’s order of a lamb kebab with garlic and chili sauce.
“Oh that was awesome!”, a much-repaired Jesus said as he took his last bite and wiped some garlic sauce off His chin. “Thanks heaps!”
And then Jesus Christ Our Lord said unto the rabbit: “What can I give you to repay your kindness? For I am the Son of God and I can do miracles and shit.”
The rabbit thought carefully for some time. This was Our Lord and Saviour, so it had to be worthy. He definitely did not want to fuck it up and ask for something embarrassing or weird.
Finally, the rabbit spoke. “I have always envied the hen,” he began.
“Where the Hell is this going,” thought Jesus, but he said nothing for He was always polite, even after He’d had a few.
“And, well,” the rabbit continued, “look… tell me if you think this is a bit weird or anything, but I guess I’ve always… well fantasised is probably the right word. Yes. I’ve always fantasised about laying eggs.”
“What the FUCK?” exclaimed the King of the Jews.
The rabbit added quickly: “Yeah, and like, make them chocolate!”
“Mate,” said the Lord, sadly shaking his head, “it’s your wish, but fucking Hell, you should maybe see a psych or something.”
And with that, Jesus granted the rabbit the capacity to lay chocolate eggs. And the rabbit, whose name was Frank, laid many. Day in and day out, Frank laid chocolate egg after egg, eating his own products in a disturbing act of sweet self-cannibalism.
Jesus, meanwhile, soon found himself in even greater trouble. The pigs were after him for some property damage suffered by some very important bankers during one of His more out-of-control binges. By this time, Judas had had it and was not cleaning up after any more of Jesus’s messes, no matter how fucking Holy the Lord was. And so he gave Our Lord up to the cops.
Having attacked the authority of Rome, the wealth of the local financial elite and sold dodgy home-brewed wine that made a 4-litre cask of goon for $10 taste like the finest Champagne, Jesus was always gonna swing.
But this was not, as we know, the end of the story.
Jesus was crucified and then rose again after three days. Which was actually better than managed by many of the consumers of his Finest Fish Products (™).
History records that it was Jesus’s “friend” Mary Magdalene who arrived at His tomb on Easter Sunday and discovered His Holiness alive and well. But this is the full tale.
For three days, Jesus was kept company by Frank. The rabbit did not abandon his magical mate, but stayed with him, laying chocolate eggs for His sustenance until He rose to His Eternal Kingdom in Heaven.
Frank tried to tell people that Jesus had been alive the whole three days, and even had some very important messages to pass on to humanity, mostly about how awesome chocolate eggs were.
But people were not willing to listen to some rabbit, especially not one with a sick chocolate egg-laying fetish. Like, sure, the Roman occupiers were into some fucked up shit, but even they drew a line somewhere.
Jesus, however, did not forget the rabbit’s final act of kindness. He granted the rabbit Eternal Life and said unto him, “go forth and lay chocolate eggs then hide them for children on Easter Sunday, but not before fully stocking supermarkets for months in advance.”
And Frank the rabbit was happy. For he really, really loved laying chocolate eggs. Like, TBH, maybe a bit too much.
So please, ignore the Islamist conspiracy to destroy Easter by removing the word “Easter” from Easter eggs. Our Lord made it Frank’s Holy Mission to lay those eggs to be sold at marked up prices in the days before Our Saviour’s crucifixion and resurrection, and dramatically marked down in the days afterwards.
'He went to France, he went to Spain...' Country singer John Prine offers a different version of Jesus's story, yet fails to mention Frank the Easter Bunny.
