Music Arcades: John Prine: John Prine

Sometimes you buy an album by someone, and then you buy several more, but none of them are as good as that first one you heard. Other times, it's only the second or third album where things finally click, and send you back to the first one where you hear things you missed the first time around. Van der Graaf Generator and Robyn Hitchcock are examples of the former; The Clientele and John Prine of the latter. (I was thinking how the first kind are much more common in my experience, when it dawned on my that there's a very obvious reason for that: if I wasn't so keen on the first album I got, the chances of me ever getting a second were bound to be smaller.)

I must have heard John Prine on record and in session on Andy Kershaw's radio programme in the eighties (and he was on The Tape With No Name), but the first time I really took notice was when visiting friends of friends in North Devon in 2001. I think it was this album; and even then it was five months or so before I got my own copy.

And I only half liked it. It was a further three and a half years until the scale-falling-from-eyes experience of seeing JP live that led me to re-engage.

It annoys me when some people cover all astonished that JP was 'discovered' by Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka, as though KK was in a different, lower league. I like them both. The CD booklet has a testimonial from Kristofferson — taken from the back cover of the original LP? He tells a story of hearing Prine for the first time in a bar after closing time, playing just for him and a friend, with tables stacked on the tables all around them. "One of those rare, great times when it all seems worth it, like when the Vision would rise upon Blake's 'weary eyes, Even in this dungeon, & this Iron Mill," writes the Rhodes Scholar, not noted for his understatement.

Kristofferson's representations to the record label probably helped get a top name producer, Arif Mardin. John Prine doesn't sound over-produced, but I still wonder if it might have benefitted from a more artless approach, like just recording that audition in a near-empty bar.

If I get another John Prine album, I think I'll get a live one. That kind of gives me an excuse to include this video of my favourite JP song, the same one I went on about last time, even though it's not on that album either. But it's magical.

As year follows year, more of the songs on John Prine are greeting me like old friends. I may just have to get another album, you know.