Dylan walked up to John singing the words to the songs on that first album, which shocked Prine in the moment. He used to tell a story – and it’s in one of the interviews – about Dylan coming up to him at someone’s apartment in New York when he’d been out of sight after the motorcycle wreck. John was the original “next Bob Dylan.” His self-titled first album came out in 1971 when Dylan was laying low, so people were looking for someone digging deeper into life, writing with profound metaphors and allusions - and there John was with “Sam Stone,” “Hello in There,” “6 O’Clock News,” “Donald & Lydia,” “Paradise,” “Spanish Pipedream,” “Illegal Smile,” “Angel From Montgomery”… pretty much the entire album. Beyond how personal it was, it really provides a sense of how much some of the biggest rock and pop forces of the last half century loved him.ĭid journalists see him as a “next Bob Dylan” in those earliest years, the way singer-songwriters of the ‘70s were sometimes tagged? I’m also partial to John Mellencamp’s speech from the PEN Awards presentation. I used to beg John for the recipe he’d just grin, saying, “Nope! You want a pork roast, you call me and I’ll make it.” I’m a little prejudiced: Ronni Lundy’s contributions from her brilliant Southern heritage cookbook “Shuck Beans, Stack Cake & Honest Fried Chicken,” because it contains the world’s greatest pork roast recipe. What is your favorite interview that you included in the book? Although if it got too serious, he’d find a way to make you laugh to make a point. But mostly in conversation, I think, he was very true to the nature of the question. John loved to make people laugh, and he was funny without cracking jokes. He loved that.ĭid he want to make people laugh in conversation, the way he often did in song? But the idea of “being John Prine” became something easier, then turned into something that allowed him to make other people happy. He was always just John, someone who thought the hoopla was goofy and had really high standards of writing. Second, over time, he got more comfortable with the fame part. First, his honesty and truth never wavered… It’s why there’s some repetition, but his story never shifts, is never exploited for the moment – or to create some “sense” of who the media might’ve wanted him to be. Two things struck me putting this together. Plus the context of who he was in each of these moments, it’s a fascinating social history of an artist and a lot of social movements and attitudes.Ĭan you sense anything changing for him over the 50 years, in the way he conducts the interviews – softening or toughening up, getting more wary or more open, changing the kind of language he uses in talking with journalists? Digging through materials that sometimes never made it online, she’s included seminal Prine encounters with Cameron Crowe, Studs Terkel and the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn, on up through some of the wealth of press he attracted in his last years (including a short Variety piece about an abortion-rights charity single) and the final extensive interview he ever gave.Īnd for people to understand the hayseed kinda kid from outside Chicago, who was in the Army, delivered mail who became the first “new Dylan” – and how he navigated a business based on a jacked-up kind of momentum? It’s a gift to see someone willing to walk away from the big music business game and create a wholly functioning record label almost out of nothing with Oh Boy Records, then stay true to it. Gleason grew up on him before she became a close observer as a bicoastal music journalist and confidante as a Tennessee friend (and, in passing at a key point, his publicist). Five decades’ worth of stories about and conversations with the artist have been collected by Holly Gleason in “Prine on Prine: Interviews and Encounters With John Prine,” newly out as a 360-page trade paperback from Chicago Review Press. There’s a fresh way to revisit Prine apart from the catalog of records he left behind. But “John Prine” as a lingering presence, as a brand and as an aspiration isn’t going to slip away in the culture any year soon. 10, and the phrase “would have” isn’t just a figure of speech here for all his health issues over the years, his being cut down by COVID at the beginning of that epidemic felt like seeing an oak unfairly felled in its prime. The singer-songwriter had a 50-year career trajectory that went the full distance from being part of the “next Dylan” brigade in the early ’70s to inspiring Next-John-Prines by the thousands before his death in April 2020. For the millions who loved him, John Prine was an angel from Illinois.
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