Word: prine
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...ordinary Chicago mailbox, the kind mailmen use for stashing their extra loads while making rounds. But what were those shuffling and humming sounds coming from within? Curious or startled passers-by probably never found out, but they were made by Mailman John Prine, scrunched up inside the empty box to escape the icy wind, eating his lunch and composing his mournful songs...
That was two years ago. Since then, Prine, now 26, has quit the post office, launched into a career as a songwriter and singer, and emerged from his box, so to speak, as one of the nation's most striking new folk talents. But he is still singing the blue-collar blues. His leisurely, deceptively genial songs deal with the disillusioned fringe of Middle America, hauntingly evoking the world of fluorescent-lit truck stops, overladen knickknack shelves, gravel-dusty Army posts and lost loves. In a plangent baritone that makes him sound like a young Johnny Cash, he squeezes...
...Donald and Lydia, one of the tracks on Prine's recent Atlantic LP, Donald is a lonely Army private living in a "warehouse of strangers with 60-watt lights," and Lydia is a small-eyed fat girl reading True Romance magazines up in her room and feeling "just like Sunday or Saturday afternoon." When they make love to each other it is "from ten miles away." In Hello In There, Prine sings of an elderly couple who live together silently in the city. She stares through the back screen door, while he ponders calling up a friend...
...Prine's balladeering also includes social comment, as in Sam Stone, a song about a veteran returning from "the conflict overseas with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back." The chorus is a quasi lullaby from a child's perspective: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes . . ." Another song tells of a man killed in a car accident because he had covered his windshield with flag decals: "Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore/They're already overcrowded from your dirty little...
Several important sub-plots are obscured by Carrie's acendancy and by some determined bad acting. Jane Wingert, walking awkwardly, issuing the one un creditable accent in the show, makes Albertine Prine a sheet metal figure. Miss Hellman has given her some of the most perceptive lines in the show, but Miss Wingert delivers them in a sterile dead-pan. Bro Uttal is mis-cast as Julian Berniers. He looks and acts too young for the part of a many-time failure, even a romantic one. Hugh M. Hill, as Henry Simpson, is, on the other hand, physically perfect...