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 Prineâs command performance. âI had this moment of compassion for him, thinkinâ what this kid must be thinkinâ gettinâ up in front of a couple of strangers, showinâ your stuff,â Kristofferson said in a video interview for a 2003 DVD of Goodman performances. âHe proceeded to sing âSam Stone,â âParadise,â âDonald and Lydia,â âHello in There.â Absolutely destroyed it. One after the other. âSpanish Pipedream.â It was the most incredible thing.â (As the guy who wrote âMe and Bobby McGeeâ and âSunday Morning Coming Down,â Kristofferson knew a thing or two about songwriting himself.) Anka was also impressed. âJohn Prine was something else,â he told Zoo World magazine in 1973. âThis guy, a mailman, singing those songs, with those lyrics!â After Prine finished, Kristofferson requested an encore. âI got up and sang about maybe seven songs or so, because I wasnât sure how long they wanted to be held up for,â Prine said on the Goodman DVD. âAnd I got off the stage, and Kris asked me to go back and sing the same songs, and sing anything else I got.â
Anka, an old-school crooner who had recently added a Kristofferson song to his repertoire, was looking to branch out into management. It wasnât 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. âAnka 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,â he told William Ruhlmann in an interview for a 1992 Goldmine magazine article. âI mean, once I got a job in a club, Iâd sing three nights a week and sleep all week. To me, it was the perfect job.â Prine figured he would get around to making a recording sooner or later, but he wasnât 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 âRainbow Roadâ 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 âIâm Your Puppetâ for James and Bobby Purify and âCry Like a Babyâ 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 âWhen a Man Loves a Woman,â Wilson Pickett cut âMustang Sally,â and Aretha Franklin unleashed âI Never Loved a Man.â Atlantic Records vice president Jerry Wexler, a former music journalist who produced Ray Charlesâs breakthrough hits in the mid-1950s, had gotten to know the Muscle Shoals boys through his work producing records for Pickett and Franklin.
âWe 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,â Fritts told Eric Gebhardt in a 2009 interview for the website Blues in London. âJohn 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.â Like Kristofferson and Anka before him, Wexler was blown away by Prine. âHe said, âWho the hell is this kid?ââ Fritts said. ââCause he did âSam Stoneâ and âHello in Thereâ and everybody just went crazy. So I said, âIâll introduce you to him when the showâs over.ââ 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.âs. The soul music out of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroitâs 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 ânâ 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 â71, 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 â71: A two-sided single for King, âItâs Too Lateâ backed with âI Feel the Earth Move,â and, for Taylor, the King-penned âYouâve Got a Friend.â Wexler may have seen Prine as an artist who could help Atlantic make up lost ground.
Prine sang three songs at the Bitter End. âWexler talked to me in the dressing room and asked me to come see him in the morning,â Prine told Ruhlmann. âI came over, and he offered me a $25,000 recording contract. I hadnât been to New York 24 hours.â 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. âMe and John, Billy Swan and Kris went to Paulâs penthouse,â Fritts told Gebhardt. âHe said âYâall like movies?â I said âShit, I love them!â He said âDo you want to see any thatâs out now?â I said âJohn Wayneâs new movie.â He had all the brand new movies at his houseââand a 35mm projector. Later that night, the Welsh Elvis joined the party. âIt 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,â Fritts said. âIt was just one of those weird damn nights, you know?â
Goodman, meanwhile, landed a deal with the label Anka had recently signed with, Buddah Records. âWe were there about a week, and we both got contracts together,â Prine told John Platt. âIt was like about ten years passing in front of us. It was a very strange week in New York.â 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. âHeâs sittinâ there writing,â Prine said on the Goodman DVD. âAnd I look over his shoulder, and it says, âIt was all that I could do to keep from crying / Sometimes it seems so useless to remain.â And I jumped up on the bed and I started playinâ an imaginary fiddle, and I went, âYou donât have to call me darlinâ, darlinâ, but you never even call me by my name.â And we started laughing.â Pretty soon they had a complete song, but Prine refused to take credit for it. âI was young and sensitive, and I said, âIt makes fun of country music!ââ
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. (âSuch requirements were a polite fiction by the â70s,â Ruhlmann wrote.) Wexler didnât land his catch right away. âI told him I needed a little time,â Prine told Ruhlmann. âI 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.â He admitted he and Goodman were pretty naĂŻve 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. âWe were like conquering heroes,â Prine told Lydia Hutchinson in an interview for a 1995 article in Performing Songwriter magazine. âIf they couldâve given us a tickertape parade, they would have.â Prine accepted Wexlerâs 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 didnât 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 âHello in There.â He had made a studio recording at the station the previous year, but he sounded considerably more relaxed this time around. âI donât know what to say,â Terkel said. âI think thatâs gonna be a classic. You have everything in it, donât you? The complete shutting out of old people, and the feelings they undoubtedly have that youâre able to evoke an experience. Quite remarkable.â Prine went on to sing âThe Frying Pan,â âSam Stone,â âDonald and Lydia,â and âSpanish Pipedream.â They talked about Prineâs Kentucky roots, as well as his military service and writing âSam Stone.â The singer discussed his upcoming recording session for Atlantic, with Muscle Shoals on the short list as its location. âItâs kind of a toss-up between there and New York, and I hope we end up down in Muscle Shoals,â Prine said. Before Prine closed with âFlashback Blues,â Terkel called him âthe most powerful and important songwriter in America today.â 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
Thursdayâs 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 familyâs third son, a Thursdayâs child who had far to go.
Bill, thirty-one, and Verna, twenty-six, brought Dave and Dougâs baby brother home to the unassuming two-story workerâs cottage they rented on First Avenue, which they shared with Billâs 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 familyâs 1939 DeSoto. âItâs like Iâm from there, but just wasnât actually born there,â 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. âWhen my mother was carrying meâabout eight months alongâthey came down to Kentucky and the Smokies and the Grand Ole Opry, so I was nearly born down south. Hell, Iâd already been to the Opry in 1946, before I was even born.â
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 Johnâs left arm. Doug wears suspenders over a University of Illinois T-shirt with a profile portrait of the schoolâs mascot in those days, Chief Illiniwek, in full feathered headdress. Bespectacled Dave, on Johnâs right with his left hand draped over his baby brotherâs 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: âMaywood 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 âeliteâ reputation fifty years later.â
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, âChicago,â while living in Maywood.
HOG Butcher for the World
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nationâs 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 Billâeven 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 Prineâs first concerts was a performance by Spike Jones and His City Slickers. Jones was like a Tex Avery cartoon character made flesh. âI think the whole time I was waitinâ for Johnny Puleo, the [dwarf] harmonica player, to run out and bite Spike Jones on the leg,â 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. âIf you want your freedom PDQ, divorce me C.O.D.,â Travis sang in âDivorce Me C.O.D.â The Windy Cityâs 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. Johnâs mother had a good sense of humor. âMy mom was pretty dry, but she was a real funny person,â 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. âEverybody picked me up when they came in the door and swang me around,â Prine told writer Lloyd Sachs in a 2005 interview for No Depression magazine. âIt was a really great childhood.â
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. Billâs grandfather listed his occupation on census forms as Methodist minister (as well as mechanic). Billâs 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 Johnâs seventh birthday. âI was supposed to have been the baby,â 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 toolmakerâs 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 âtake 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,â Prine told Sachs. Bill made the best of his blue-collar existence, but it wasnât the life he dreamed about. Prineâs parents had âan 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,â writer David Fricke wrote in 1993 for the liner notes to Prineâs 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, âA John Prine Christmas.â âThe model was called Kentucky Blue. And man, I saw that sittinâ under the treeâI just couldnât wait. First year or so I didnât know how to play it. Iâd just stand in front of the mirror with a string around my neck with that guitar and Iâd try and look like Elvis.â Rock ânâ 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. âIâd go in and buy a record and Iâd take it home and Iâd play it twenty times, and if by the twentieth time I wasnât as passionate about it as the first time I heard it, I would take it back and tell âem there was a flaw or defect,â Prine told Wilber. Artists who generally made the cut: Johnny Cash, Johnny Horton, Little Richard, and Bu...