The theme of the fourth annual John Prine Night in the backyard of the only grocery store in Marathon, Texas, is “Blow Up Your TV.” It’s not just a reference to a Prine lyric; the boys running this show are actually about to blow up a television.
Perched on a metal garbage can is a vintage TV from back when TVs were the size of an entire room. Streamers and sparklers decorate its edges and, just for clarification, white tape spells out “TV” across its screen. The evening’s MC, Michael Walker, stalks around with a giant sledgehammer, cowboy hat on his head and big red heart painted on his shirt, as three men rush to light as many sparklers as they can. One of those men, with long hair and the deep tan of someone who lives in the desert, is the grocery store’s owner and a 35-year-old maniac (compliment), Sam Stavinoha.
When a critical mass of sparklers are lit, Walker swings back the sledgehammer and then: jaws drop, grown men flinch, dogs have no understanding of what the hell is happening. The sledgehammer makes impact, and a cloud of smoke and debris billows up. There’s a massive boom, loud, beyond-the-laws-of-physics loud. An explosion that can only be attributed to the power of friendship and John Prine. Blow up your TV indeed.
Marathon might be big enough for an annual John Prine Night, but it’s too small for streetlights. The 386 people who live here—a mix of, Stavinoha says, multigenerational locals, retirees, millennial weirdos, and “part-timers” who seem to always be renting their houses on Airbnb—are surrounded by the mountains and sun-assaulted desert and not much else. It’s the kind of town most notable for its distance from other places: It’s a 40-minute drive from Big Bend National Park and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest airport serviced by commercial airlines. It’s also 30 minutes away from a major grocery store.
So thank God for the French Company Grocer, a four-aisle Mary Poppins bag of a store that sells produce and pantry staples, baked goods and breakfast burritos, river gear and cigarettes, and nondairy ice cream sandwiches. Miraculously, the store sells whatever you’re looking for and accepts food stamps. But make no mistake: it’s not a French grocer.
The name, rather, is a nod to Lucille French, who ran the town’s grocery store (in a previous location) from 1919 until 1975. When her business closed, a local opened a new grocery in what had been a feed store. Marci Roberts, a Marathon transplant, bought the joint in the early 2000s and chose its present-day name.
In July 2019, Roberts was at a local art gallery when Sam Stavinoha passed through Marathon on a hiking trip. At the time, Stavinoha was working as a software engineer and living hours away in the Texas Hill Country. He told Roberts about previous (failed) plans to move to West Texas and a future (possible) goal of opening a café in San Antonio. Roberts responded, in Stavinoha’s words, “Or you could just buy my grocery store.”
All of a sudden, Stavinoha started sobbing. “I felt like someone else’s soul had taken up residence in my body,” he recalls. “All I could say is that I knew that everything was about to change.”
Up until that moment, his life had just kind of happened to him; on the porch of the Evans Gallery, Stavinoha realized he could live a life he chose. On November 16, he took over the store.
John Prine Night 4: Blow Up Your TV has properly started, and people—locals and random visitors from Austin who signed up in advance—begin to perform. String lights zigzag over a growing audience of men in cowboy boots and women in long dresses, people of all genders in hats. First to play is a group of older gentlemen calling themselves the Old Bloods. They take the stage, Ray, Don, and Bob, playing a fiddle, a guitar, and an accordion. There’s a pack of children playing tug-of-war one minute and then lassoing a steer head the next. A kid who is apparently a baby entrepreneur approaches one adult after another, trying to find angel investors to fund his sno-cone business idea.
“Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,” the band is singing onstage. “Go to the country, build you a home.”
I meet a couple visiting from Austin specifically to attend what they call “John Prine Night with all the coolest freaks in Texas.” They know about the event, and Marathon, through their friends Cole and Mary Beth, who live in town. I ask Cole how often he comes to the French Co. “Almost every day. There’s nowhere else to go.”
Jumping into running a grocery store was hard. It was a little bit easier knowing, as Stavinoha knew from his mindfulness practice, that he wasn’t the thing he did all day. When he tells me this, I nod. Of course! Later I realize, If he isn’t the thing he does all day, I have no idea what he is. Stavinoha explains: “I’m just a person who is pretty certain that heartfelt connection with other persons is the only thing that creates something durable and lasting within us.” Seems like as good a place as any from which to sell pantry items.
Stavinoha started stocking things he himself wanted. Just inside the entrance are bottles and bottles of natural wine under a little sign that says “I WOULD RATHER HAVE A BOTTLE IN FRONT OF ME THAN A FRONTAL LOBOTOMY —Tom Waits.” At the end of aisle one is a lot of hardy produce like potatoes and onions—plus some brave avocados. Aisle four of this four-aisle grocery store doesn’t even have groceries; instead, it’s stocked with polarized sunglasses, French Co.–branded crop tops, and plushies resembling the javelinas and skunks that run around the Chihuahuan Desert.
But four months after Stavinoha took over the French Co., COVID-19 hit. As an essential business, it was one of the few places in town allowed to remain open. In those early days when no one knew much of anything but everyone was stressed out of their goddamn gourds, customers on both sides of the political spectrum were critical of the store. Says Stavinoha, some felt, “Oh, you’re wearing masks? Fuck you guys,” while others felt, “All you’re doing is wearing masks? That’s not enough. Fuck you guys.” He recalls thinking, “Wow. We’re getting ‘fuck you’s from everybody.”
With indoor gatherings banned, Stavinoha began to hang out with a few regulars behind the store. The lot was full of weeds and junk, but it was also outside, right next to the food and beer inside. Using produce that was about to go bad, Stavinoha would cook tacos in a cowboy wok over a firepit. Customers who could see him from the checkout line would wander out back, ask what he was doing, and grab a taco themselves.
The backyard might have remained an informal meeting place, a.k.a., in Stavinoha’s words, “a junkyard,” if it wasn’t for the death of John Prine from COVID on April 7, 2020. Stavinoha and his brother, Scott, living with him at the time, took the news hard. They sat in the French Co. backyard processing, drinking beers, and—like they’d been doing since they were teens—playing Prine songs on guitar. “He had been a part of our life and folk-lyrical internal culture for nearly two decades,” Stavinoha wrote later on Instagram. “In the abyss of 2020, Lake Marie became my anthem and sometimes, somehow a lullaby.” That night, the boys decided they wanted to celebrate Prine’s life with other people, specifically their six friends who also loved Prine. They decided to do something on his birthday, October 10.
Originally, they planned to weed the backyard and to drag some picnic tables over from the front porch, swap some songs, then maybe do a river trip. They had never organized a concert before, and they weren’t trying to do that now. But as they told their friends about the idea, things escalated. Most West Texans knew Prine’s music and were grieving his death, but they were also grieving the ability to gather, to congregate in a meaningful way. And so locals and friends from other places offered ideas, labor, whatever they could to make the event happen. On October 10, 2020, some 120 folks showed up for the first annual John Prine Night.
From all the engagement with the idea, Stavinoha knew that a lot of people would be coming. But the size of the turnout (a third of Marathon’s total population) shocked him. The store ran out of burgers and had to improvise. Stavinoha took more magic mushrooms than he meant to and ended up onstage with giant pupils, chewing gummy bears into the microphone until finally he said, “Welcome to the new French Co.” It was magic. “Prine would have loved it,” Walker, Stavinoha’s friend of 15 years and JP MC, told me.
Stavinoha and Walker decided to do it again the next year. And again the year after that. (They’ll do it one more time in the same backyard in October 2024, before moving a block away after Stavinoha’s lease on the current building ends.) As Stavinoha wrote before JP3, “All you really need to know is that you should pick a Prine song, preferably an obscure one, and start practicing. Lake Marie is taken. Bring friends.”
A couple of hours into JP4, Scott Stavinoha takes the stage and launches into “Please Don’t Bury Me.” In the audience, the child entrepreneur is still at it, telling a potential investor that if an employee sells enough sno-cones, they get a bug-catching vacuum. It’s a way for kids to have fun, he says. See some bugs.
Now Christian Wallace is onstage, a writer and a childhood friend of Stavinoha’s and a friend of mine, too. He dedicates his first song to his grandfathers, talking earnestly about them as a rapt silence falls over the crowd. Making it all the easier to hear, behind the last row of chairs, a local named Patches loudly addressing the pack of children: “You know what happens when you put gasoline on a fire? Y’all wanna see?” The children shriek. “Y’all get way back.” As Wallace’s tender song begins, Patches sprays the bonfire with gasoline, and the kids go wild. Satisfied, Patches sits down, takes his hat off, smiles, and points his phone at the stage.
Wallace’s wife, Lauren, is onstage with him now singing “Paradise,” and by this point people in the audience are bundled up. One woman drapes her shawl around her male companion, another wraps her coat around her dog. I tell Walker that a former French Co. employee loaned me a jacket. Walker nods. “This is the kind of place where people will lend you a jacket,” he says, which is true, but also, everywhere’s the kind of place where people will lend you a jacket if they’re flirting. Bob from the Old Bloods gets up onstage and starts playing harmonica accompaniment to the Wallaces’ song, and it’s clear they weren’t expecting an impromptu harmonica part. In fact, they don’t even know this guy, but, in a way, everyone knows everyone in Marathon.
Just before the last act of the show, Walker valiantly returns for emergency MC duty as Stavinoha searches for his guitar pick in a sea of gravel. Walker asks audience members where they’re from: West Texas? Other parts of Texas? He points at a man in the audience who keeps raising his hand: “This guy’s from everywhere.”
Back onstage, Stavinoha asks, “Any biblical scholars in the house?” I assume he’s on mushrooms. Actually, he’s introducing his performance of “Jesus the Missing Years.” A dog I’ve started calling Rave Dog (owing to its blinking neon collar) gets up on a platform behind the stage and walks around Stavinoha as he plays.
Walker joins Stavinoha at the microphones. They begin: “We were standing / Standing by peaceful waters.” “Lake Marie” is the last number of the night—or at least the part of the night before the event turns into an open mic. And maybe it can’t be true that everyone in the audience knows the song’s importance to Stavinoha, but it sure does seem that way. The audience stands up and sways. Walker’s cowboy hat is off now, his bare head exposed to the desert night, and Stavinoha’s looking out at an audience that includes his entire family. The audience sings along. Someone yells, “Nobody knows the words!”•
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of the books How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?
