Pulse 2/92
On the Road with WOG and John Prine

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This article is from PULSE! magazine in February 1992. This issue, #101, was the premiere newsstand issue of this magazine, and featured an article about John Prine. It was written by Gil Asakawa, who is a freelance writer based in Denver. He writes for Rolling Stone and Creem also. I purchased two of the magazines when they came out, and a friend took the other.

NOT EXACTLY MISSING IN ACTION
John Prine makes a fine album, The Missing Years,
with a little help from some stellar friends

"Hey, you have to go away first to come back." That's how John Prine responds to people asking if the title of his latest recording, The Missing Years, signals a career comeback for the durable singer/songwriter. After all, he's never taken time off from his constant touring schedule, though he hasn't released a new studio album since 1986's German Afternoons. (The stop-gap John Prine Live was released in 1988.) The longest break of his recording career came between 1980 and '84.

Ironically, Prine had been thinking in the back of his mind that his new album would be the last before taking an extended break; instead of being a comeback, The Missing Years would have signaled a farewell.

Not to worry. Thanks to the creative and commercial success of The Missing Years, Prine feels rejuvenated, and intends to continue his career as vigorously as ever. "I'm crazy about it," he explains about the record, the fourth to be released on his own Oh Boy label. "I've found my producer. Not that I was displeased before, but Howie [Epstein, of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers] got me to sound more like I do live."

The recording is the first in Prine's discography that reflects the same loose energy he radiates on stage, without losing the quality control of the studio. "On some of my records, I feel I was uncomfortable, and I can hear it when I listen to them," he says. "You know, it's like a photo where you're uncomfortable and think you look weird, but people keep saying, 'Oh, but your hair looks great.' "

On the new disc, Prine looks, or more importantly, sounds, marvelous. The Missing Years is as stereo-and-radio-friendly as anything he's released since 1978's classic Bruised Orange, which was produced by Prine's late friend and mentor, Steve Goodman.

Partly, it's because Prine has written his usual assortment of wonderfully timeless observations on humanity's foibles, and partly because a motley crew of friends and admirers--from Bruce Springsteen, the Divinyls' Christine Amphlett, Bonnie Raitt, Phil Everly and Petty on vocals, to instrumentalists such as David Lindley, Albert Lee, various Heartbreakers and members of the Desert Rose Band--have lent their talents with low-key cameos.

And perhaps most importantly, Prine and Epstein both agreed to pull out the stops and spend the money to get the sound just right, especially for radio's notoriously closed-minded programmers. "We were hocking our insurance policies to pay for this. We really felt that it would sell, and it has. It's at 70,000 already, and we're getting played on rock radio for the first time in 10 years. Hell, I'll take anything. They can play me on Rush Limbaugh's talk show, if it'll help."

He may not need the help. Because of the rise of his commercial success, he's put any thoughts of retirement on the back burner. "I wasn't threatening my manager or anything like that. I feel like I've been successful, you know. But I was losing interest," Prine says. "I wanted to do something else for a while, to make me want to play my guitar again, and to write songs again. If this record hadn't done well, I probably would have quit. Now, I can't stop."

That's a relief to anyone who's followed the drawling, Chicago-born songwriter's work since his self-titled 1971 debut. That album featured two of Prine's best-known songs (thanks to renditions by dozens of other artists, including Raitt and Bette Midler), "Angel From Montgomery" and "Hello In There," along with classic songs like "Sam Stone" and "Donald And Lydia," the kind of carefully observed narratives that Nanci Griffith might gladly give away her innocent persona for. Prine quickly became a critics' favorites and a darling of the '70's singer/songwriter set, even earning the dreaded "new Dylan" tag.

Prine's talent, however, has never rested in wordy stream-of-consciousness and myth mongering. Throughout his prolific and varied career (his records have wandered through folkie, rockabilly, rattletrap rock 'n' roll and country styles with equal ease and familiarity), his artistic palette has been variations of three-chord strum-and-mumble verses and choruses with little pretention to be high art. Instead, Prine has always projected an image of the workaday Joe who happens to notice things and people around him more than his pals. Prine's best songs, whether the early, funny "Dear Abby" or the heart-wrenching "Unwed Fathers" from 1984's Aimless Love, are tinged with bittersweet bemusement. The combination, painted over Prine's rough canvas of a voice, makes for more human portraits than most artists manage in a lifetime of creative struggle. The sure sign of his adept way with a song? Not a single John Prine record has gone out of print, though he's moved from Atlantic (his early work) to Asylum (several late-70's albums) to his own Oh Boy label.

Now, he's perfectly happy being his own label magnate. To illustrate, Prine tells a story of his last brush with the majors: "A few years ago, I was all set to sign to a major label--I mean we'd signed the papers and everything. Just about when it was final, I went to a party where there was a room full of label people and a VP said, 'Welcome aboard.' And I thought to myself, 'I don't want to be on a fucking boat with this guy. I don't want or need their advice on my music. They don't have a clue.'

"The '80s, because of major labels, were like a musical purge," he continues. "It was like Stalin or something, just ridiculous, when people like Bonnie Raitt and Van Morrison were both dropped from Warners at the same time. Instead of going on some small label, though, I started my own, and during the years when there didn't appear to be any market for this kind of music, we did all right. We knew it was more fun to have our own record company, and on that level, each small sale was personally gratifying."

Prine's catalog is available primarily through Oh Boy's network of mail-order and hip retailers. The Asylum albums are now available on Oh Boy CDs, and Prine hopes he'll eventually get the rights to re-release his first Atlantic albums on CD on Oh Boy.

And fans can expect more new material in the years to come, including more sets produced by Howie Epstein. Returning to the topic of his satisfaction with The Missing Years, Prine points out that Epstein wasn't afraid to prod him to make the best album he could. It's chock-full of evocative descriptions of emotional entanglements, told as only Prine can see them. "Picture Show" veers off from the young James Dean into the soullessness of Hollywood tourism; "Take A Look At My Heart," cowritten by John Mellencamp is a guy-to-guy warning to his ex-wife's new beau; "It's A Big Old Goofy World" is Prine's stock-in-trade, a wiseacre's assessment of life even as he struggles to write a song about it all. "Jesus, The Missing Years," is the song that gives the album its title. It follows Jesus through some wild '60s-era travels, including stints hanging out with the Beatles, Rolling Stones and George Jones.

One of the best, if cryptically silly songs is "The Sins Of Memphisto," which nonsensically conjures a slew of baby-boomer icons from hula hoops to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. "This song goes to the heart of the record," says Prine. "I had 12 songs done, and I was proud of 'em. But then Howie sits down and says we need another song. I said, 'Are you crazy? I don't have another song in me--you can do an autopsy and you won't find anything.'

"So I locked myself away for a week, until I came from as far left as I could. Actually, I thought 'Memphisto' was a real word. I thought it was the city in Egypt that Memphis was named after. But it turns out that city was called Memphis. I decided I was confusing it with Mephistopheles, the devil. So I thought, 'OK, it kinda makes sense--Memphis, the blues and the devil and all."

He kept the title and the song, because it inexplicably worked, even down to the goofball line, "Exactly-odo, Quasimodo." "It's a phrase I've used for several years," he says, "and I was determined to work it into a song."

This Pulse article also contained JOHN PRINE: A SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY and had a listing of his releases up to "The Missing Years"

The Missing Years (Oh Boy, 1991)

John Prine Live (Oh Boy, 1988)

German Afternoons (Oh Boy, 1986)

Aimless Love (Oh Boy, 1984)

Storm Windows (Asylum, 1980, now Oh Boy)

Pink Cadillac (Asylum, 1979, now Oh Boy)

Bruised Orange (Asylum, 1978, now Oh Boy)

Prime Prine (Atlantic compilation, 1976)

Common Sense (Atlantic, 1975)

Sweet Revenge (Atlantic, 1973)

Diamonds In The Rough (Atlantic, 1972)

John Prine (Atlantic, 1971)

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