Audio By Carbonatix
Midway through his set, John Prine began to hear the noises, too. Opening for musical soul mate Bonnie Raitt, Prine was playing solo. Dressed in a blue silk shirt and jeans, he sported what has become his post-Seventies look: well-worn cowboy boots; mid-length dark and graying hair; and a soul patch beneath his lower lip. After the first song or two, he added a cigarette. Out in the audience, static had been obvious from the first note. Coming through the PA system along with Prine’s voice and guitar was something that sounded like the play by play of a basketball game. Suddenly aware of this strange interference, Prine stopped in mid-song and listened. Excusing himself, he walked offstage. After a minute he was back, a wide grin spreading across his face.
It was the spring of 1988, and the University of Arizona Wildcats were hacking their way into the NCAA Final Four. The stage crew had been watching the game backstage on a portable TV. Somehow the TV audio had bled into the PA system.
“It’s the Wildcats by ten,” Prine said, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head in mock disgust as the audience broke into a round of applause. “I didn’t ask ’em to turn it off. I just asked ’em to turn it down.” John Prine is not the kind of guy to pull the plug on a playoff game, especially when the home team is up. A songwriter who’s labored in obscurity for 20 years, John Prine is no prima donna.
Like Bonnie Raitt, he is used to adversity. A problem with a PA is a laugh compared to some of the personal and musical hoops these two have fallen through. Friends and frequent tour mates, Prine the balladeer and Raitt the blueswoman have built careers that are nearly mirror images.
Both are singer-songwriters who have released long strings of critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful albums. Over the years, both have made their livings by staying on the road, playing to small but fiercely loyal followings. On the personal side, both have been unlucky in love. The most important similarity these days is that both have endured, and successfully fought off, the nagging demons that can turn frustration into self-destruction.
Success came to Raitt first. As anyone with a television, CD player or People magazine subscription knows, 1989 was Bonnie’s year. In a year’s span, she cut the hit album Nick of Time, cleaned up at the Grammys and found true love with actor Michael O’Keefe. Last week, John Prine released The Missing Years, a record he hopes will do some of the same things for him. Two days after it was released, Prine began a national tour opening for Raitt. His first studio recording since 1985’s German Afternoons, The Missing Years brims with the qualities that make Prine so deserving of success. Musically, the record swings along his usual folk-rock lines. Heavily influenced by Bob Dylan’s urban-country twang, Prine’s music also draws on the direct and simple melodies of bluegrass. Despite a distinguished group of back-up musicians and a couple of big production numbers, half the tunes feature Prine solo. A powerful, spontaneous live performer, Prine can also get electric when he wants to. John Mellencamp, for one, has always credited Prine as a creator of the spare, heartland rock that Mellencamp has made a career of. As memorable as some of his unadorned melodies are, Prine’s greatest skill has always been as a lyricist. He has a lot to say. On The Missing Years, his poetics range from the painful to the hilariously absurd. In “All the Best,” for instance, Prine dissects his recent divorce: “I wish you love/And happiness/I guess I wish/You all the best/I wish you don’t/Do like I do/And ever fall in love/With someone like you.” Later, in “Take a Look at My Heart,” he returns to that subject again, only with a humorous edge: “I seen my old lady’s boyfriend/He don’t look nothing like me/ ‘Cept for a bit of confusion/Same kind she laid on me.”
Prine’s most striking word play comes in the moments when his songwriter’s rhythms and iconoclast’s humor are filtered through his performer’s timing. In “The Sins of Memphisto,” one of The Missing Years’ strongest tunes, each verse hinges on a different punch-line pause. He saves the best for last: “Esmeralda and the Hunchback of Notre Dame/They humped each other like they had no shame/They paused as they posed/For a Polaroid photo/She whispered in his ear/Exactly odo . . . Quasimodo.” What ultimately makes Prine’s world view palatable is that he often turns his scathing eye on himself. In “Jesus the Missing Years,” the tune that spawned the album’s title, Prine pokes fun at his youthful impatience and naivete: “Jesus was a good guy he didn’t need this shit/So he took a pill with a Coca-Cola and he swallowed it/He discovered the Beatles/He recorded with the Stones/Once he even opened up a three-way package/For old George Jones.” The essence of Prine’s art lies in his ability to neutralize his incisive cynicism with humor.
“After all these years, I got a name for it,” Prine says, speaking from his hotel room in Gainesville, Florida, where the tour is about to play its third date. “I call it `pessimistic optimism.’ You admit everything that’s wrong in a situation so you can get a laugh out of it, or at least look at it from a better angle.”
A hot subject of music-business gossip long before its release, The Missing Years has an outstanding list of guest performers. Multi-instrumentalists John Jorgenson (Desert Rose Band), Albert Lee (Emmylou Harris, Eric Clapton) and David Lindley (Jackson Browne) join Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench on the record. A few of the instrumental highlights include Jorgenson on bassoon, Lindley on bouzouki and Lee on inspired rock ‘n’ roll piano. Most of this group also played on Heartbreaker-turned-producer Howie Epstein’s last recording project, Carlene Carter’s I Fell in Love. In terms of radio play, the background vocalists on the record are what will rattle closed doors and reach new audiences. Taking turns behind Prine’s craggy voice are Bonnie Raitt, Phil Everly, Tom Petty, Christina Amphlett of the Divinyls and Bruce Springsteen. This impressive list is a tribute both to Prine’s longevity and his songwriting skill. He has become a musician’s musician.
“Mainly, all these people are on The Missing Years because I’ve never cut a record in L.A. before,” he says, downplaying the compliment this stellar cast pays him by volunteering to play on his record. “I kinda forgot how many of them live out there. Lindley, who I’ve known for years but never worked with, drove up in a van full of 18 instruments, unpacked and stayed for a week. If I’d have made this record in Nashville, I would have had to sit down and seriously plot it out with people like him.”
The most intriguing name on The Missing Years, though, is Springsteen. Currently in Los Angeles working on his new record, “The Boss,” who has made precious few guest appearances over the course of his career, was the first piece of The Missing Years puzzle to fall into place.
“The first night I got to L.A., before I started recording, I went to my favorite Italian restaurant and I bumped into Bruce in the dark,” Prine begins. “I haven’t seen him in about four years and I can’t see without my glasses, so he goes, `It’s me, Bruce.’ I said, `Wow, what are you doin’ here?’ And he looks surprised and says, `What are you doin’ here?’ I said, `Making a record,’ and he said, `Me, too!’–like it was his first one! “Later, he gave me a bunch of phone numbers and said, `When you guys get into the record and have something to play, please invite me over. I’d just love to play guitar or harmonica or sing or whatever.'”
It’s a well-publicized fact that Springsteen is having problems with his new record. In the studio since early this year, he has scrapped innumerable takes because he’s been unhappy with the results. Trying to remain cool in the face of Springsteen’s perfectionism, jittery Sony Records tried to beat the gossip by announcing last week that the disc’s release date has been delayed until mid-1992. “Take a Look at My Heart,” the Prine/John Mellencamp tune that Bruce lends his yearning growl to, has the unmistakable twang and stomp of Born in the U.S.A.-era Springsteen. Prine swears Bruce had no hand in arranging the tune. But hearing a song so closely patterned on his own past may have given The Boss the unpleasant sensation of repeating himself. “He’s started over like four times with this record. I heard he’s got a lot of great songs, but he’s just looking for a new direction,” Prine says of Springsteen. “I don’t know this for sure, but I hear that the day after he sang for us he went back and started over again. I hope we didn’t make him shy or anything.”
Although Bruce is the biggest name on The Missing Years, the strongest presence on the record–besides Prine–is producer Howie Epstein. It’s an odd phenomenon, but all of Tom Petty’s boys have become prolific (if not always successful) major-domos in the studio. In the past two years, Heartbreaker-produced records have become almost a musical subgenre.
Working simultaneously on Petty’s Into the Great Wide Open and the Prine disc, Epstein lived nearly a year playing bass all day and producing half the night. The one advantage he had was that all of The Missing Years was recorded at his home high in the Hollywood hills. “Howie has one of those houses that looks like it’s going to fall off the cliff,” Prine says. “But it was great. All we paid for was the musicians, the tape and the engineer. I recorded most of it in a hallway. I mean a hallway–we’re talkin’ three and a half feet wide.”
Unlike German Afternoons, which was recorded and mixed in three days, the new record took nine months to complete. Epstein pushed Prine creatively, tossing out songs even while the sessions were going on and making him write what turned out to be the record’s strongest tunes. For Prine, who has a legendary aversion to studios and hates being away from his home in Nashville, The Missing Years represents a sacrifice.
But after two decades as a solo act, Prine is used to doing what it takes. Born and raised in Chicago, he was working as a mailman and spending his evenings playing the coffee-house circuit when he signed with Atlantic Records in 1971. Later that year, he burst upon the music world with his debut album John Prine. With a raggedy, nasal voice that sounded remarkably like Dylan’s, Prine was immediately dubbed “the next Dylan,” rock’s most famous kiss of death.
“Six months after I quit the post office, I’m sitting in a hotel room in New York City and Bob Dylan is playin’ me his new songs,” he says. “I didn’t even think the guy really existed until then. I thought it was a group who made great records and hired a funny-looking guy for the photos.”
Burdened by the Dylan legacy, Prine’s time in the spotlight faded quickly. Discouraged, he spent the rest of the Seventies and early Eighties cranking out a succession of well-crafted but unnoticed albums. In 1975, Prine cut Common Sense, a daring attempt at a harder-rocking electric sound. Predictably, it shocked and divided fans and critics alike. Three years later, he signed with Asylum Records and released Bruised Orange. The album has come to be universally acknowledged as his masterpiece.
Produced by Prine’s longtime friend and partner, the late Steve Goodman, Bruised Orange contains some of Prine’s best work. It was also one of his biggest commercial flops.
Prine admits now that he’d thought about quitting more than once.
“There have been a lot of dark moments. Usually the darkest were when things weren’t going right for me at home,” he says quietly.
“Before I started The Missing Years, I made up my mind that if it didn’t come out, didn’t end up representing my music well, I was going to check into something else,” he says, starting to laugh. “My first plan was to go to Germany and take acting lessons so I could be in a Wim Wenders movie.” As is the case with many songwriters who also try to perform their own material, Prine’s tunes have more often become hits for better voices. Bette Midler and Joan Baez both had hits with Prine’s “Hello in There.” In spite of the success of Nick of Time, his “Angel From Montgomery” will always be Bonnie Raitt’s signature tune. In his own performances, Prine’s most requested tune is “Dear Abby,” his pointed, punch-line-driven ode to those who look for Abigail Van Buren to solve their problems.
Convinced he could build a better mousetrap himself, Prine left Asylum in 1981 and formed his own label, L.A.-based Oh Boy Records. In 1988, Oh Boy released John Prine Live, a concert record that reclaimed a lot of the songs Atlantic would not release the rights to. Prine says one of his fondest hopes for The Missing Years is that it will prompt people to rediscover his older work.
His current tour with Raitt marks the first time in eight years Prine has toured with a band. To play standup bass, Prine has his old friend Roland Salley on loan from Chris Isaak’s band. The other members of this drummerless quartet are Phil Parlapiano and Bill Bonk, two guitar players who also sing and play keyboards. Known as the Brothers Figaro, Parlapiano and Bonk released their debut album on Geffen Records this year. According to Oh Boy, The Missing Years sold 45,000 copies last week–its first in stores. Radio play has also been promising. A commercial FM station in Boston has added eight tracks from the record to its current rotation. And there have been unexpected spin-offs. Prine has been offered his first acting role in John Mellencamp’s upcoming film Falling From Grace. So far, The Missing Years looks like the spark that could ignite a long-overdue success.
The early response to The Missing Years has Prine thinking that his timing might finally be right. Looking back, he’s having the new experience of saying it’s all worked out for the best.
“Back when my first album came out, if the general public had accepted me as readily as the critics did, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it,” he says, putting a bright spin on 20 years of neglect. “I would have ended up dead or in a loony bin somewhere.”
John Prine will perform at Desert Sky Pavilion on Tuesday, October 8, with Bonnie Raitt. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.
His first studio record since 1985, The Missing Years brims with the qualities that make Prine so deserving of success.
John Mellencamp has always credited Prine as a creator of the spare, heartland rock Mellencamp has made a career of. A hot subject of music-business gossip long before its release, The Missing Years has an outstanding list of guest performers.
Currently in L.A. working on his new record, “The Boss” has made precious few guest appearances over the course of his career.
Prine has a legendary aversion to studios and hates being away from his home in Nashville.
Born and raised in Chicago, he was working as a mailman and spending his evenings playing the coffee-house circuit.
Bruised Orange contains some of Prine’s best work. It was also one of his biggest commercial flops.
“My first plan was to go to Germany and take acting lessons so I could be in a Wim Wenders movie.
