Somewhere
in Paradise, there's a street named after John Prine.
Now
if that scanned better, it could almost be a line from a song.
The blend of pathos and grandeur in that image might even be
said to do justice to its subject. Thankfully, we don't have
to worry about that, because it happens to be true. In
Paradise, Kentucky, you'll find a John Prine Avenue, named by
grateful citizens after the songwriter who made the small town
famous to a few thousand record-buyers.
Loudon
Wainwright III has namechecked Prine too, in his riotous 1992
talking blues "Talking New Bob Dylan", in which he
recalled the early-'70s scramble to fill up the Bob-shaped
vacuum in the singer-songwriter firmament.
"I
got a deal and so did John Prine/Steve Forbert and Springsteen
all in a line/They were looking for you, signing up others/We
were NEW BOB DYLANS!!"
Prine
knows Wainwright's song well, and he laughs as he remembers
the New York Times article that started all the fuss. "I don't know what the exact headline was, but the idea
was, ladies and gentlemen, here's the new Dylans! And it was
Loudon, myself, Elliot Murphy, Springsteen and Keith Sykes, a
buddy of mine who lives in Memphis now. They had our pictures
there, and our bios. The article was almost like a horse race
or a lottery to see who was going to be the new Bob Dylan. And
things just took off from there."
Except
that, in Prine's case, very little actually "took
off" other than a career as a major cult figure and a
songwriter's songwriter. At his peak, he's been able to ship
350,000 copies of a record, and in 1992 won his first Grammy
Award for the album The Missing Years (though many
would argue that 1978's Bruised Orange was even more
deserving). His songs have been covered by the likes of Bette
Midler, Bonny Raitt, Tammy Wynette and John Mellencamp. But to
most of the world he's a name known only dimly, if at all.
And
yet, even though he's never scaled the dizzy heights of
stardom, Prine has managed to keep working continuously for 30
years, helped in no small part by his decision in the early
1980s to release his material on his own independent label, Oh
Boy Records. Nowadays, going the independent route is just one
of the options open to the budding musician, but back then it
was a much riskier venture. Prine, with characteristic
disregard for the consequences, only did it so that he didn't
have to deal with major record companies any more. (Despite
the "New Bob Dylan" excitement, neither Atlantic nor
Asylum Records ever allocated him a substantial promotional
budget.) But going the cottage-industry route has probably
enabled the Nashville-based Prine to live more comfortably and
securely than many high-tax-bracket rock stars. Clearly, the
grass-roots life suits him.
Trawling
through the messages left by fans on some of the websites
dedicated to Prine, you get to build up a picture of his
following: reassuringly normal folks, with reassuringly normal
jobs, bound to the singer by an immense loyalty that seems to
get stronger with age. Moments of discovery, such as dropping
in on a Prine concert because the name sounded vaguely
familiar, or stumbling across an eight-track cartridge left in
a house by its previous occupant, are recounted like special,
life-changing epiphanies.
It's
easy to see why Prine's warm drawl strikes such a chord in
people all across America. A daft bugger when he lets his hair
down, he's a man with a strong enough dose of country in his
veins to write songs for grown-ups, celebrating their moods or
comiserating with them. He's melancholy, but he's funny too,
compassionate and self-deprecating with the driest of wit. In
his book of interviews with rock's greatest songwriters, Written
In My Soul, Bill Flanagan put Prine in the section
entitled "Heartland Voices", alongside Bruce
Springsteen, Neil Young, Dylan, Chuck Berry and bluesman
Willie Dixon, a select few artists that Flanagan felt had
particular resonance for blue-collar America.
John
Prine was born in Illinois in 1946 of parents who had moved
there from Kentucky. For his father, it was either that or go
down the mine. "It was a rural area, there wasn't really
any sort of work there at that time, in the late 1930s, unless
your dad owned a store, or he had a trade and you could
inherit that. Otherwise, most of them had to work in the coal
mines. So he went up to Chicago to work in a factory, and he
always raised us as if, when he made enough money, he was
going to take us back to Kentucky. So we spent our summers
down there with our relatives and we kind of felt like we were
from both places."
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To
Prine, Kentucky was the most romantic lace maginable. "I just loved the whole idea of it. Being out in the
country, and this little town called Paradise I remember
writing a song about. It was all kind of magical to me, Walt
Disney-like."
There
can hardly have been a greater contrast with bustling, urban
Chicago, where his steelworker father, a devoted union man,
worked his way up to president of the local chapter. The
Prines were raised with the idea that "you don't have
anything if you don't have a union". Naturally, one asks
Prine if he thinks that's the secret behind the common touch
that forges such connections with audiences. "I guess
so," he says. "I guess it is the way I relate to
people when I'm up on stage."
It
was a long time before anyone saw John Prine on a stage,
though. Chicago is one of the great hotbeds of American
popular music, a powerhouse of jazz, blues, R&B and folk.
But it was country and folk that the Prine family loved most,
and when he was taught guitar by an older brother who was into
"old-timey folk-traditional things", Prine's fate
was sealed. "And as soon as I learned guitar, it occured
to me that it was easier to write a song than to learn how to
sing somebody else's. So I just gravitated naturally to that
kind of music - and I've been too lazy to change it ever
since!"
With
Hank Williams, Bob Dylan and Roger Miller as his role models,
the teenage Prine cranked out odd little songs that he thought
were too weird to play to anyone but close friends. But by the
time some friends dared him to take the floor at an amateur
night in 1969, this very reluctant performer had honed his
skills to such a level that the three songs he played stopped
the show. A gig attended by Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka
led to a deal with Atlantic Records, and there began a career
that veered between acoustic folk, country and more
rock-orientated albums, with masterpieces liberally strewn
among them. Even his 1970 debut boasted songs like "Hello
In There", about neglect of the elderly, and "Sam
Stone", a song about a drug-addicted Vietnam vet (Prine
was drafted in 1966 and spent two years in the army in
Germany) which showed up most of his songwriting
contemporaries as lightweights.
Stylistically,
he keeps his fans on their toes, not deliberately but just
because that's the way the songs come out. His current album, In
Spite Of Ourselves, is his first set of covers and
consists of country duets with a variety of female singers
including Emmylou Harris, Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams,
Trisha Yearwood and Melba Montgomery.
"I
like duets in general," he says. "I even like some
from musicals. I like the idea of the girl saying a couple of
lines, like a dialogue going back and forth, and then they
break into song together. So they were always favourites of
mine. George Jones and Melba, George Jones and Tammy Wynette,
Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn ... so I had a lot of stuff to
choose from."
As
she's doing every night on his current tour, Iris DeMent will
be joining him at Celtic Connections, reprising the songs she
sang on the album, and others besides. Since meeting and
marrying an Irishwoman, Fiona Whelan, Prine has gradually
eased his way into the Celtic circuit, though rather more in
Ireland than here.
"We
played in Glasgow last June and I really enjoyed that,"
he says. "Such an enthusiastic crowd! It was great, and
it was well worth waiting all those years to be able to come
over and do that, and we're looking forward to coming
back."
There
were worries that Prine would never play again a couple of
years ago, when a tumour appeared on his neck, but it was
successfully removed in time, and he has a clean bill of
health. But neither that experience, nor the arrival of his
two young children, has changed the working habits of the man
who once described himself as "one of the most
undisciplined people in the world", a man who "would
leave a song in a second for a hot dog".
"I
always like what I write," he says, "but I avoid
writing like crazy, I avoid it like the plague. It's something
I enjoy once I get immersed in it, but I'll do just about
anything to get out of it."
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