When Bonnie Raitt introduced special guest John Prine on a recent "Austin City Limits" public television concert, she called her old friend "one of the great treasures."
And when it came time for Prine's solo on "Angel From Montgomery," the song he wrote and Raitt made a heart-rending standard, the audience cheered.
"When I was a young girl," Prine sang incongruously, to whoops from the crowd, "I had me a cowboy."
By the time the duo harmonized the drawn-out final line -- "To believe in this living is just a harrrrrrrd way to goooooooo" -- it was to a standing ovation.
Nobody sings his own songs -- or anybody else's, for that matter -- like Prine, who comes to Anchorage for one long-awaited show on Saturday.
Funny thing is, the man Rolling Stone magazine described as possessing "the rumpled, slightly cracked benevolence of a 19th century Dickens character" and a South Dakota reviewer once said looked "a bit like a squirrel" might never have been a musician at all. Instead, the Illinois native with the out-of-control hairdo spent six years as a Chicago mailman. Disgruntled, to hear him tell it.
"Walking the streets as a mailman is kind of like being in a library with no books," he told Rolling Stone. "You go for hours and hours without seeing anybody."
Luckily for everyone involved, in 1970 Prine wandered into open-mike night at a Chicago bar. After he complained about the talent, someone asked if he thought he could do better. Fueled by a few beers, he did, performing tunes that would later become Prine classics, like "Hello in There" and "Sam Stone." The club owner promptly signed him for more appearances.
It was at that club, The Earl of Old Town, that Prine met future best friend Steve Goodman, who'd written "The City of New Orleans," which Prine called "the best railroad song ever recorded." Both men were eventually "discovered" (Prine after Goodman brought Kris Kristofferson to the club to hear him) and signed to record labels. Goodman died of leukemia in 1984.
In 1995, Prine told National Public Radio's Scott Simon about an early gig at the Bitter End, when Bob Dylan came onstage to jam.
"It was (intimidating)," Prine told Simon. "Actually, at the time, it was intimidating for me to sing my songs for anybody."
Over the next three decades, Prine recorded numerous solo and collaborative albums, eventually playing in all 50 states. "It took me 56 years to do it," he told a South Dakota audience earlier this year.
Among the memorable tunes he penned over the years were the coy "Illegal Smile," "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" and the pseudo-plaintive "Dear Abby."
Prine has said he wrote the latter song in Rome, where he found the ubiquitous columnist to be the only relief in a newspaper filled with "all the tragic news in the world crammed into six pages."
According to a Web site devoted to Prine, somebody took a verse of the song -- changed enough so it no longer rhymed -- and sent it to Abby herself. The song version goes:
"Dear Abby, Dear Abby, you won't believe this/ But my stomach makes noises whenever I kiss/
"My girlfriend tells me it's all in my head/ But my stomach just tells me to write you instead/
"Signed, Noise-maker."
In the song, the columnist advised: "Noise-maker, Noise-maker, you have no complaint/ You are what you are and you ain't what you ain't/ So listen up buster and listen up good/ Stop wishin' for bad luck and knockin' on wood."
The Web site reports that in this case, when the real Abby answered the bogus
letter in her column, she suggested the writer seek professional help.
While few can match Prine's way with a poetic lyric, he's also been known to ruffle feathers. A prime example is 1994's "Jesus, the Missing Years":
"It was raining. It was cold/ West Bethlehem was no place for a 12-year-old," the song begins as it chronicles Jesus' imaginary travels through Europe as he danced, watched movies ("Rebel Without a Cause"), married unhappily, discovered the Beatles, recorded with the Stones and eventually opened for "old George Jones."
"So Jesus went to Heaven and he went there awful quick/ All them people killed him and he wasn't even sick," Prine noted in the final verse.
He told Rolling Stone that one unhappy listener sent him that particular CD broken in half. "I thought it was kind of hard to break a CD."
After previous nominations, Prine finally received a Grammy -- for best contemporary folk recording -- for 1991's "The Missing Years." He told Rolling Stone that winning was "pretty darn neat."
Prine had a health scare a few years back, undergoing surgery for throat cancer. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the surgeon was concerned about saving Prine's singing voice.
"I told him, 'Doc, apparently you haven't heard me sing before. You'd know that should be the least of your concerns.' "
JOHN PRINE plays in Atwood Concert Hall at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26. The concert is sold out.
