Prine Goes Electric

John Prine’s rock and roll records

Surprise, surprise, the record company didn’t know how to market John Prine at first. For that first album, they sat him on some bales of straw, which gives the impression of country music I guess?

And yes, there are elements of country in a lot of Prine’s songs. And maybe it has to do with his distinctive Kentucky drawl, picked up from family, no doubt, as opposed to the residents of Maywood, IL, the Chicago suburb he grew up in. But regardless, for an A+ masterpiece of an album, it’s a weird C- album cover.

John Prine songs are mostly what you would call folk songs, but really, they are just songs. Just Prine songs. It’s a category unto itself.

Diamonds in the Rough, Prine’s second album is akin to his self-titled debut. The songs take center stage and it’s mostly John and his guitar on classics like, “Souvenirs”, “The Great Compromise”, and “The Late John Garfield Blues”. There’s depth, humor, sorrow, joy, and everything you got from the first album.

But here’s where it gets super interesting. Let’s call it his Johnny B. Prine phase. John goes electric!

Now, apparently people did call him the “new Dylan” at a time when it seemed like every new songwriter with a little buzz was given the impossible-to-live-up-to label. And the world lost their mind when Dylan went electric. So what would they do when new Dylan goes electric?

But 1973 was far different a time for folk singers than 1965 was. And despite Prine’s acclaim in many circles by then, he wasn’t the household name with the rabid folkie purist fans that Dylan had to contend with just eight years prior.

And Sweet Revenge isn’t completely rock and roll. But there are more rock and roll elements, especially on the title track. Prine is playing with a full band and electric guitars. And there he is with his first A+ cover! Aviator sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his mouth, boot heels turned up, John sprawls out in the front seat of a convertible looking like a certified badass.

I met someone once who told me they became a fan of John’s when they were crate digging at a record store and saw the cover and was too intrigued not to buy it. He said it wasn’t what he expected, but fell in love with it nonetheless and became a lifelong fan.

It’s kind of the equivalent of Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home. You could sense the direction he was headed, but he still remained true to his earlier records too.

For every barroom band track like “Mexican Home” or “Nine Pound Hammer”, the thread of the first two albums is easily spotted in songs like, “Dear Abby”, “Christmas in Prison”, “Blue Umbrella”, and “Please Don’t Bury Me”.

Sweet Revenge very well might be my favorite John Prine album. Few people realize that he had a rock and roll heart and spirit to him and it’s fun to hear him interact with a band. I love how worn his voice sounds on the folk standard, “Nine Pound Hammer”, which he and the band turn into a tavern stomp.

And the songs are just so good. I look through the track list and I can tell you multiple reasons why I love every song on it. All killer, no filler, as it’s been said. For anyone else, “Blue Umbrella” would probably be the greatest song they could hope to aspire to. But this was the man who already wrote “Sam Stone” and “Angel from Montgomery”! Unreal.

John’s next album is sort of the Blonde on Blonde turn he makes if we want to continue the Dylan analogies. It’s definitely guided more by the band and production than his first three albums. There are rock drums, electric guitars, backup singers, horns, and piano imprinted over the entire album.

In fact it might be a bit too much production. One of my favorite songs on here is, “Saddle in the Rain”. There’s a lot of forward momentum on this song and it’s catchy and rollicking. But man is it busy! I’m fairly certain I’ve heard a version of it that was more stripped down and it just seemed to work a bit better.

It’s a fun album, but I don’t think they are his strongest batch of songs, so maybe the Blonde on Blonde comparison doesn’t quite hold up. The songs that work the best are the ones that show the most restraint, particularly, “He Was in Heaven Before He Died.”

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, though. This album goes by fast, I’m a good way, and it’s interesting to hear Prine fronting a rock band¹. Particularly delicious is the last track of the album, a cover of Chuck Berry’s, “You Never Can Tell”. It sounds like everyone is having a ton of fun and John’s voice suits the song perfectly.

And though I wouldn’t call Common Sense one of his best, I still love it for one of the reasons I love almost all of his albums—it seems like he and the musicians are having a great time making this music.

We’ve gone through a variety of moments in rock and roll’s history where it wasn’t cool to look like you’re having fun. In the early ‘90s you had to be downright miserable!

And I love a lot of that music. We need the heaviness because being alive can be heavy.

But John Prine always had a way of reminding us, we also are allowed to have fun. It’s okay to smile and laugh. John Prine wrote one of the most heartbreakingly sad and, topic-wise, heavy songs, with, “Sam Stone”. But the same guy wrote a song called, “Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard”. We contain multitudes.

John just wrote songs. I read somewhere about him traveling with, maybe it was Amanda Shire…I don’t quite remember…and they were going through customs and he wrote his occupation as, “songwriter”, and he got such a kick out of it. He didn’t need to be a country songwriter, or a folk songwriter, or a rock and roll songwriter, he just wanted to write whatever songs came to him. So he wrote John Prine songs. And he smiled, laughed, and was driven by empathy and the spirit of having a good time with other people who also enjoyed singing, dancing, occasionally being silly, and occasionally needing a good cry together.

I listen to an album like Common Sense and it makes me think that had he been born a generation earlier, he would have been a rockabilly star. And by the sounds of it, he would have been great at it.

But instead, he took his love for a lot of types of music and his mastery of language, wit, and storytelling and made songs that fit into a genre that he became a master of: humanity.

Next up during John Prine Week, we’ll take a deep dive into Prine’s phenomenal fifth album, Bruised Orange. Take care and thanks for reading!

1. Maybe it would be more accurate to say a “country rock band”. It’s more Little Feat than it is Led Zeppelin