Three Days in Prison

It must have sounded like a spaceship landing in the next room, Paul says to no one in particular, and I wake from the sort of light sleep that comes 10 minutes at a time in the back seat of a van. The van is a 15-year-old Toyota Sienna with a front bumper held together by zip ties and a busted back door handle. To close it after getting out, you have to reach inside and give one big pull on the heavy sliding door from there, then quickly clear your forearm from the opening before it gets crushed. I do it tentatively at first, without enough force to make the door actually close, but by the end of my three-day stint in Prison, I’ve got the necessary balance of power and finesse figured out.

We’re on our way home from tour when Paul makes his remark about the spaceship, hauling seven hours through heavy rain from Pittsburgh back to New York City. Matt, the drummer and driver in Prison, is playing back a recording of the show from three nights before, at an Indianapolis dive bar with linoleum floors and $3 Coors drafts, my first gig with the band. I had gotten a call a while back about hitting the road for a long weekend at the end of tour to fill in for their regular bassist, also named Matt, who had to head home for some family stuff. (Intra-band conversations must be confusing: You could identify them by their last names, except that both are Matt L.) 

Prison’s music is largely improvised, though there are some structural elements that come up repeatedly. If you heard only a few isolated seconds, you might take them for bluesy hard rockers. A different few seconds and you might think about the sorts of Sonic Youth songs that involve stream-of-consciousness poetry muttered or declaimed over the sound of a punk band crashing into itself. No matter where you drop the needle, it’s loud and loose, prioritizing raw energy over such sophisticated concerns as “chord changes” or “keeping a steady tempo.” If you were a guest musician inclined toward snooty art-critic verbiage that the band members would not use themselves, you might describe the Prison experience as durational. They generally play for 40 minutes or so at a time without stopping, and something may happen at minute 15 or 20 that could never happen at minute one, even if the notes played were exactly the same. The music’s truest character emerges in the long stretch, deep in the illusion of a jam that may never find its final bar. It has this quality in common with Paul’s best-known work, in a band that does exactly what its name says: Endless Boogie.

At 70, Paul Major is several decades older than anyone else in Prison. He plays guitar in lyrical slashes, his tone equally reminiscent of a singing voice and a blade. Wiry, with waist-length graying hair that somehow suggests a leather jacket even when he isn’t wearing one, he looks like a tough motherfucker. And he is tough, rolling around the country in a shitty van in the name of rock’n’roll when he could be at home looking at his iPad and collecting social security. But he’s also one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met: like Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers had stories about crossing paths with Johnny Thunders in the mid ’70s and buying the first Led Zeppelin album at K-Mart when it came out. At gas station breaks, I bum him cigarettes and he shares tales like these, memories that he says are coming at him slantwise these days, when he doesn’t expect them. He does most of the singing on this tour, coming up with lyrics on the spot. Though I can’t always make them all out, I get the sense that he’s working through memories onstage, too. I try to call up the words and all I have are fragments about looking out a window or ascending into an attic. We’ve been friends for a while, but I never thought I’d be on the road with him. It’s an honor.