Word: prine
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...JOHN PRINE (Atlantic). Blue-collar blues from an ex-mailman who may be the closest thing yet to the old Bob Dylan...
...Prine's most yearning songs is Paradise, which is not about heaven but a place named Paradise, Ky. "Until I was 15 I didn't know that the word paradise meant anything other than the town in Kentucky where all my relatives came from," explains Prine. The relatives migrated to the Chicago area where John was born, raised (with summers back in Kentucky) and given a high school education of sorts. "But we never took much to the city," says Prine, whose twangy accent, parted-in-the-middle haircut and beltless blue jeans mark him as a Chicago...
From his grandfather and older brother, Prine had learned to play a $28.95 mail-order guitar. Later he moved up to a $217 model purchased with money he earned working as a pew duster in an Episcopal church on Saturday nights. At 14 he began writing songs modeled after Hank Williams' why-don't-you-listen-while-I-tell-you-this-tale-of-woe style. At 24 he walked into one of the coffeehouses in Chicago's Old Town district and sang in public for the first time. "People were very responsive," he recalls. "If they hadn...
...Town club a year ago that Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka heard Prine and decided that he was ready for national exposure. Their joint boost has brought him not only his recording contract but also a string of packed-house appearances at such folk meccas as Manhattan's Bitter End and Los Angeles' Troubadour...
...Still, Prine is not about to let success coax him away from the physical and emotional neighborhood that has nurtured him and his music. He and his wife continue to live in the same apartment they had when he was a $90-a-week mailman. He has lost his mailman's feet only to develop a case of ulcers. And he is still writing lyrics like Rocky Mountain Time...