Word: prine
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...years ago Jimmy Buffett was up to his eyeballs in a new style, known generally as progressive country, or more correctly, up-country. His comrade pickers'n' grinners were also his best friends, people like John Prine, Steve Goodman, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Like Buffett, they all added their own carbonations to the flat brew of country music: Prine his Appalachian hillbilly twang, Goodman his Chicago blues, Walker just all-out Texas boozing. What they did was blow out the earnest country cliches with fond parodies ("You Don't Have to Call Me Darlin', Darlin', But You Never Even Call...
...DIDN'T LAST, this mainline no-cholesterol shoot-up in the hardening arteries of country music. Steve Goodman has paunched down into Chicago's home-grown favorite, writing witty little ditties without much punch. Jerry Jeff is falling prey to cirrhosis of the brain. John Prine's upcoming album offers the only hope in the bunch for a bucktooth overbite country record. And Jimmy Buffett, well, he said it four years ago in "A Brand New Country Star": "He's a hot roman candle from the Texas panhandle he can either go country...
...PRINE ALSO pays homage to Dear Abby. "Well I never thought me and my girl friend would ever get caught, we was sittin' in the back seat, just shootin' the breeze, with her hair up in curlers and her jeans to her knees. Signed, Just Married." Remember, this is the Bible Belt. Then there's "Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregarde," about everybody's friend who's become a Moonie...
...most touching song is "Sam Stone," about a Vietnam vet who comes back a heroin addict. The gravel-voiced Prine is the man's child, singing: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes," and the effect is chilling...
...used to wonder what made me stand at the Elkview Bridge with a drunken chill along the base of my spine and start those two boys at that cliff, and what made them want to try it in the first place. But I think John Prine would know. It was the strangling to death in a claustrophobic small town, the desperation of it--and not some quiet desperation, either. It was as real and loud as the shout from Elvin Anderson's yelping GT-60 8.20s as he went slip-sliding into that stationwagon. But home...