John Prine

In Spite of Himself

Eddie Huffman

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781477325957
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

"An excellent new biography" of the influential songwriter that showcases his renowned humor and musical genius ( The Telegraph ). With a range that spans the lyrical, heartfelt songs "Angel from Montgomery, " "Sam Stone, " and "Paradise" to the classic country music parody "You Never Even Called Me by My Name, " John Prine is a songwriter's songwriter. Across five decades, he's created critically acclaimed albums— John Prine (one of Rolling Stone 's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time), Bruised Orange, The Missing Years —and earned two Grammy Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting from the Americana Music Association, and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His songs have been covered by scores of artists, from Johnny Cash and Miranda Lambert to Bette Midler and 10, 000 Maniacs, and influenced everyone from Roger McGuinn to Kacey Musgraves. Hailed in his early years as the "new Dylan, " Prine still counts Bob Dylan among his most enthusiastic fans. In John Prine, Eddie Huffman traces the long arc of Prine's musical career, beginning with his early, seemingly effortless successes, which led paradoxically not to stardom but to a rich and varied career writing songs that other people have made famous. He recounts the stories, many of them humorous, behind Prine's best-known songs and discusses all of Prine's albums as he explores the brilliant records and the ill-advised side trips, the underappreciated gems and the hard-earned comebacks that led Prine to found his own successful record label, Oh Boy Records. This thorough, entertaining treatment gives John Prine his due as one of the most influential songwriters of his generation.

CHAPTER 1

Special Delivery

The Earl of Old Town had closed for the night, and John Prine was snoozing in a booth after his performance, waiting to get paid. He woke up to a call from his friend Steve Goodman, another Chicago singer-songwriter. Goodman was on his way across town with Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka, and he had convinced them to give Prine a listen.

The chairs were already up on the tables so the floors could be cleaned, but a few were pulled down for Prine’s command performance. “I had this moment of compassion for him, thinkin’ what this kid must be thinkin’ gettin’ up in front of a couple of strangers, showin’ your stuff,” Kristofferson said in a video interview for a 2003 DVD of Goodman performances. “He proceeded to sing ‘Sam Stone,’ ‘Paradise,’ ‘Donald and Lydia,’ ‘Hello in There.’ Absolutely destroyed it. One after the other. ‘Spanish Pipedream.’ It was the most incredible thing.” (As the guy who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Kristofferson knew a thing or two about songwriting himself.) Anka was also impressed. “John Prine was something else,” he told Zoo World magazine in 1973. “This guy, a mailman, singing those songs, with those lyrics!” After Prine finished, Kristofferson requested an encore. “I got up and sang about maybe seven songs or so, because I wasn’t sure how long they wanted to be held up for,” Prine said on the Goodman DVD. “And I got off the stage, and Kris asked me to go back and sing the same songs, and sing anything else I got.”

Anka, an old-school crooner who had recently added a Kristofferson song to his repertoire, was looking to branch out into management. It wasn’t long before he followed up with Goodman, suggesting he and Prine go to New York to cut demos and try to get a record deal. For Goodman it was a no-brainer, but Prine took some convincing. “Anka came to town and met with Stevie and me, and I was still basically undecided because I was kind of bewildered by the whole thing,” he told William Ruhlmann in an interview for a 1992 Goldmine magazine article. “I mean, once I got a job in a club, I’d sing three nights a week and sleep all week. To me, it was the perfect job.” Prine figured he would get around to making a recording sooner or later, but he wasn’t in any particular hurry. True to form, his friend refused to take no for an answer.

Goodman already knew his way around the city from a stint four years earlier at the Cafe Wha? They flew into LaGuardia and headed to Greenwich Village. Kristofferson happened to be playing at the Bitter End. Alabama native Donnie Fritts had worked with Kristofferson in Nashville and now played keyboards in his band, which would prove fortuitous for Prine. Fritts had written “Rainbow Road” for Arthur Alexander with another Alabama songwriter, Dan Penn, and collaborated with others to write songs recorded by the Box Tops and Dusty Springfield. Penn and another keyboard player, Spooner Oldham, had cowritten several rock and soul classics, such as “I’m Your Puppet” for James and Bobby Purify and “Cry Like a Baby” for the Box Tops. Fritts, Penn, and Oldham had all emerged from the scene that coalesced into FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which for the previous few years had competed with Stax in Memphis as the capital of funky Southern soul. FAME was the studio where Percy Sledge recorded “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Wilson Pickett cut “Mustang Sally,” and Aretha Franklin unleashed “I Never Loved a Man.” Atlantic Records vice president Jerry Wexler, a former music journalist who produced Ray Charles’s breakthrough hits in the mid-1950s, had gotten to know the Muscle Shoals boys through his work producing records for Pickett and Franklin.

“We were there playing the Bitter End and it just so happened, I kept begging Jerry to come meet Kris and he wanted to meet Kris, so he comes to the show,” Fritts told Eric Gebhardt in a 2009 interview for the website Blues in London. “John and Stevie come in to the second show and Kris gets John up to do a couple songs and I go out to sit with Jerry.” Like Kristofferson and Anka before him, Wexler was blown away by Prine. “He said, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’” Fritts said. “’Cause he did ‘Sam Stone’ and ‘Hello in There’ and everybody just went crazy. So I said, ‘I’ll introduce you to him when the show’s over.’” Some musicians spend a lifetime angling for a break; for Prine, the breaks just kept jumping right in the boat.

Through the late sixties Atlantic had been best known as the home of hard soul music, from the classic records made in New York by Charles and Franklin to the partnership with Stax/Volt in Memphis that produced records by Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s. The soul music out of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit’s Motown label leaned toward the melodic, radio-friendly end of the spectrum, while Southern soul had more grit and funk, with deeper roots in gospel. (There were plenty of exceptions in both directions, of course.) By the beginning of the seventies, Atlantic had fully embraced rock ’n’ roll. The label had directly signed Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young), Boz Scaggs, Mott the Hoople, and Yes, and worked out a distribution deal with the Rolling Stones.

Its roster was short on singer-songwriters, however. Loudon Wainwright III had released critically acclaimed albums on Atlantic in 1970 and ’71, but neither album had sold much and he would soon jump ship to Columbia. For other labels the genre was hitting its commercial peak in 1971. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon recorded for Columbia; James Taylor and Arlo Guthrie for Warner Brothers; Carole King for Ode; and Cat Stevens for A&M. Reprise had cornered the market on the Canadian contingent: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot all recorded for the label Sinatra founded in 1960. Atlantic did have a distribution deal with a brand-new singer-songwriter-oriented label, Asylum Records, founded by a couple of former agents with the William Morris Agency, David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, but it was still in its formative stages. King and Taylor both had No. 1 hits in the summer of ’71: A two-sided single for King, “It’s Too Late” backed with “I Feel the Earth Move,” and, for Taylor, the King-penned “You’ve Got a Friend.” Wexler may have seen Prine as an artist who could help Atlantic make up lost ground.

Prine sang three songs at the Bitter End. “Wexler talked to me in the dressing room and asked me to come see him in the morning,” Prine told Ruhlmann. “I came over, and he offered me a $25,000 recording contract. I hadn’t been to New York 24 hours.” The average annual salary in the United States in 1971 was about $10,000. That night Anka gave the guys from Chicago a taste of life at the top of the music-biz food chain. “Me and John, Billy Swan and Kris went to Paul’s penthouse,” Fritts told Gebhardt. “He said ‘Y’all like movies?’ I said ‘Shit, I love them!’ He said ‘Do you want to see any that’s out now?’ I said ‘John Wayne’s new movie.’ He had all the brand new movies at his house”—and a 35mm projector. Later that night, the Welsh Elvis joined the party. “It was like four in the morning and somebody knocks on the door so me and Billy go to the door and Tom Jones is there with a couple of his bodyguards and some gorgeous gal,” Fritts said. “It was just one of those weird damn nights, you know?”

Goodman, meanwhile, landed a deal with the label Anka had recently signed with, Buddah Records. “We were there about a week, and we both got contracts together,” Prine told John Platt. “It was like about ten years passing in front of us. It was a very strange week in New York.” On a subsequent trip to New York, he and Goodman were sharing a room at the Hotel Roosevelt. When Prine came back from hearing some music in the Village, he found Goodman hard at work. “He’s sittin’ there writing,” Prine said on the Goodman DVD. “And I look over his shoulder, and it says, ‘It was all that I could do to keep from crying / Sometimes it seems so useless to remain.’ And I jumped up on the bed and I started playin’ an imaginary fiddle, and I went, ‘You don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’, but you never even call me by my name.’ And we started laughing.” Pretty soon they had a complete song, but Prine refused to take credit for it. “I was young and sensitive, and I said, ‘It makes fun of country music!’”

The offer from Atlantic called for Prine to record ten albums over the next five years, a common pace in the sixties, when artists routinely released multiple records in a single year. (“Such requirements were a polite fiction by the ’70s,” Ruhlmann wrote.) Wexler didn’t land his catch right away. “I told him I needed a little time,” Prine told Ruhlmann. “I wanted to go home and talk to my father about it. I wanted somebody to look at the contract. I went over and I saw Anka before I went back home, to see what his involvement in this was, because he bought me the plane ticket.” He admitted he and Goodman were pretty naïve at this point. Since Anka had paid for their plane tickets to New York, Prine said, they made him their manager.

The return to Chicago was triumphant. “We were like conquering heroes,” Prine told Lydia Hutchinson in an interview for a 1995 article in Performing Songwriter magazine. “If they could’ve given us a tickertape parade, they would have.” Prine accepted Wexler’s offer and began making plans to record his debut album, which he discussed on The Studs Terkel Program on 98.7 FM, WFMT, the home of the folk radio show The Midnight Special. Terkel, born in New York in 1912, had lived in Chicago since he was eight years old. A regular at the Chicago Folk Festival, he served as master of ceremonies for local folksinger Bonnie Koloc at the record-signing party for her debut album. He was a longtime radio personality who had broadcast on WFMT since 1952, as well as an oral historian who had published three books by 1971: Giants of Jazz, Division Street: America, and Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.

Terkel didn’t so much interview Prine as offer effusive words of praise and then wait while Prine awkwardly fumbled around for a response. Prine opened the show by singing “Hello in There.” He had made a studio recording at the station the previous year, but he sounded considerably more relaxed this time around. “I don’t know what to say,” Terkel said. “I think that’s gonna be a classic. You have everything in it, don’t you? The complete shutting out of old people, and the feelings they undoubtedly have that you’re able to evoke an experience. Quite remarkable.” Prine went on to sing “The Frying Pan,” “Sam Stone,” “Donald and Lydia,” and “Spanish Pipedream.” They talked about Prine’s Kentucky roots, as well as his military service and writing “Sam Stone.” The singer discussed his upcoming recording session for Atlantic, with Muscle Shoals on the short list as its location. “It’s kind of a toss-up between there and New York, and I hope we end up down in Muscle Shoals,” Prine said. Before Prine closed with “Flashback Blues,” Terkel called him “the most powerful and important songwriter in America today.” Heady words for a twenty-four-year-old kid from Maywood who had only quit his Post Office job a few months before.

CHAPTER 2

Thursday’s Child

John Edward Prine, conceived in the depths of a Midwestern winter, was born 10 October 1946 at Westlake Hospital in Maywood, ten miles west of downtown Chicago. He was the family’s third son, a Thursday’s child who had far to go.

Bill, thirty-one, and Verna, twenty-six, brought Dave and Doug’s baby brother home to the unassuming two-story worker’s cottage they rented on First Avenue, which they shared with Bill’s parents. Prine may have been born up north, but the family had deep roots in Kentucky. They took him on a prenatal tour of his ancestral home in the family’s 1939 DeSoto. “It’s like I’m from there, but just wasn’t actually born there,” he told Ronni Lundy in an interview for the 1991 book Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens. “When my mother was carrying me—about eight months along—they came down to Kentucky and the Smokies and the Grand Ole Opry, so I was nearly born down south. Hell, I’d already been to the Opry in 1946, before I was even born.”

A black-and-white family photo from the late forties shows an instantly recognizable, toddler-sized John standing between his brothers in a sun-dappled clearing at the edge of a patch of woods. Doug, a goofy grin on his face and a shock of dark hair cascading over his forehead, clutches John’s left arm. Doug wears suspenders over a University of Illinois T-shirt with a profile portrait of the school’s mascot in those days, Chief Illiniwek, in full feathered headdress. Bespectacled Dave, on John’s right with his left hand draped over his baby brother’s shoulder, sticks his tongue out at the camera. John has an unfamiliar crop of fine blond hair on his head but he looks off into the middle distance with a familiar expression: thoughtful, preoccupied, a little sad.

Dave had come along first, in November 1937, less than a year after sixteen-year-old Verna married Bill in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and returned with him to Maywood. The village, founded in 1869 on three square miles of prairie along the western banks of the Des Plaines River, had 25,829 people in the 1930 census. An academic paper describes the village during the Depression, when the Prines arrived: “Maywood may not have had the reputation of being wealthy as did nearby Oak Park or Elmhurst, but it was a comfortable suburb. Indeed, the planning done by Colonel Nichols in the 1870s still gave the town something of an ‘elite’ reputation fifty years later.”

Oak Park, just east of Maywood toward downtown Chicago and Lake Michigan, was the hometown of literary titan Ernest Hemingway and the home base and proving ground for pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Maywood had its own celebrity claims to fame: Charles Lindbergh flew a mail route out of the village a year before he flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, and, a decade before that, poet Carl Sandburg sired two of his three daughters and one of his most famous poems, “Chicago,” while living in Maywood.

HOG Butcher for the World

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders

Blue-collar Maywood was considerably huskier and more brawling than tony, leafy Oak Park, if no less flat. Bill, son of a carpenter, had moved up from the Kentucky coalfields to the plains of Illinois to become a toolmaker. He worked at the American Can Company, where the beer can was born in 1935. He served as president or vice president of the union for about thirty years.

Music also meant a lot to Bill—even if he lacked the gift himself. The family owned records by artists from across the musical spectrum: Duke Ellington, Spike Jones, and Roy Acuff. They went to a lot of concerts at the Oriental and Chicago Theatres, including shows by Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, and Johnny Cash. One of Prine’s first concerts was a performance by Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Jones was like a Tex Avery cartoon character made flesh. “I think the whole time I was waitin’ for Johnny Puleo, the [dwarf] harmonica player, to run out and bite Spike Jones on the leg,” Prine told his longtime guitarist, Jason Wilber, in a 2011 radio interview.

A bouncy song by a Kentucky homeboy, Muhlenberg County native Merle Travis, began a fourteen-week run at the top of the country charts the week after Prine was born. “If you want your freedom PDQ, divorce me C.O.D.,” Travis sang in “Divorce Me C.O.D.” The Windy City’s big country radio station, WJJD, delivered the accents and stories of home to the Prines and families like them who followed the hillbilly highway north in pursuit of jobs and opportunity. Most evenings Bill would sit in the kitchen, put the radio in the window to improve the reception, and drink beer while listening to songs by Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, and Webb Pierce. John’s mother had a good sense of humor. “My mom was pretty dry, but she was a real funny person,” Prine told Nick Spitzer in a 2008 interview for American Routes Radio, broadcast on WWNO in New Orleans. He felt loved and cared for growing up. “Everybody picked me up when they came in the door and swang me around,” Prine told writer Lloyd Sachs in a 2005 interview for No Depression magazine. “It was a really great childhood.”

His grandmother, Idell, taught her daughter-in-law a lot about cooking, such as how to whip up a plate of hash. Other Verna specialties included chili, fried potatoes, pot roast, steak and gravy, biscuits and gravy, roast turkey and mashed potatoes, and fried chicken. The family traveled down to Muhlenberg County every summer. Prine recalled fishing trips far and near, to the White River hundreds of miles south in the Ozark Mountains of rural Arkansas, or to a lake just outside Maywood. The Prines were mainstream Protestants in a sea of Cook County Catholics, Methodists from way back. Bill’s grandfather listed his occupation on census forms as Methodist minister (as well as mechanic). Bill’s father, Empson Scobie Prine, served as a steward at First Methodist Church in Maywood. He died at home at age sixty-four on 18 July 1953, and the family took him home to Muhlenberg County to bury him in Central City.

That same year the fourth Prine boy, Billy, was born. Billy came along three weeks before John’s seventh birthday. “I was supposed to have been the baby,” Prine told Meg Griffin in a 2005 interview on Sirius satellite radio. Dave graduated from high school and headed downstate to attend the University of Illinois at Champaign. He got married not long afterward. A photo from the wedding shows Bill, forty-one, staring confidently into the camera, his meaty toolmaker’s hand resting on his left knee, the proud patriarch surrounded by his family. On workdays, after his shift had ended at American Can, Bill would come home and drink a quart of Old Style on the front porch, stashing an extra on reserve in the freezer. Sometimes he would take his sons to bars with him. Bill would “take us with him to hillbilly bars, set me up, order an orange pop for me, go play the jukebox, and give me money for the pinball machine,” Prine told Sachs. Bill made the best of his blue-collar existence, but it wasn’t the life he dreamed about. Prine’s parents had “an unqualified love of the land and an elemental pride in a job well done; a painful awareness of the toll hard work and shoestring budgets can take on love and family; [and they appreciated] the simple pleasures that make the big hurts a little more bearable,” writer David Fricke wrote in 1993 for the liner notes to Prine’s Great Days collection.

One year Prine got a guitar for Christmas, an aqua blue department store Silvertone, he said in a 1993 spoken-word recording, “A John Prine Christmas.” “The model was called Kentucky Blue. And man, I saw that sittin’ under the tree—I just couldn’t wait. First year or so I didn’t know how to play it. I’d just stand in front of the mirror with a string around my neck with that guitar and I’d try and look like Elvis.” Rock ’n’ roll cast a shadow as long as the tailfins on a Cadillac, and Prine got caught up in the excitement like millions of other kids. He bought 45s at the local hardware store and appliance fix-it shop. “I’d go in and buy a record and I’d take it home and I’d play it twenty times, and if by the twentieth time I wasn’t as passionate about it as the first time I heard it, I would take it back and tell ’em there was a flaw or defect,” Prine told Wilber. Artists who generally made the cut: Johnny Cash, Johnny Horton, Little Richard, and Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Special Delivery
• 2. Thursday’s Child
• 3. Call of Duty
• 4. Open-Mike Night
• 5. In the King’s Footsteps
• 6. Singers and Songwriters
• Interlude: Talking New Bob Dylan
• 7. Scattered, Smothered, and Covered
• 8. Tangled Up in Blue
• 9. Seeking Asylum
• 10. Oh Boy
• 11. Tunnel of Love
• 12. Into the Great Wide Open
• 13. A Close Shave
• 14. Your Flag Decal Still Won’t Get You into Heaven
• 15. Next to the Last True Romantic
• Acknowledgments
• Select Discography
• Select Bibliography