I Bought the Rights to the Inside Fights

The death of John Prine compels me to divulge an anecdote I’ve kept entirely to myself for 38 years.  I never had much in common with my friend A.  Jimmy Buffet’s Volcano was his favorite new album when we met in 1979.  I was obsessed with Off the Wall.  A. loved marijuana.  I’ve always detested the drug.  He wore Hawaiian shirts.  I prefer black clothing.  Yet we bonded over our mutual love of John Prine.

It was only natural we found ourselves at a nightclub’s peculiar double bill of Prine and the Righteous Brothers in 1982.  The young women we met after Prine’s opening set danced with us during renditions of the classic slow jams “Unchained Melody” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”  I once thought making out with one of the strangers on the dance floor was the highlight of the night.  Only now do I fully appreciate the inestimable value of seeing Prine in the company of A.  He died in a car accident a few weeks later.  He was 19.

I rarely thought of A. when my work as a sales rep for independent record labels brought me into the tumultuous orbit of Prine’s in-house record label.  To put it mildly, I had a rocky relationship with the business manager of Oh Boy Records.  (My antagonist died in 2015.)

The bitter conflicts never diminished my passion for Prine’s work.  “Illegal Smile,” the first track on Prine’s 1971 debut album, was among A.’s favorite songs.  Yet it’s three lines from “Flashback Blues,” the album’s closing selection, that contain particular resonance today: Cloudy skies and dead fruit flies/Waving goodbye with tears in my eyes/Well, sure I made it, but you know it was a hell of a trip.


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I decry the indifferent reception of Rock Chalk Suite among Jayhawk fans at Plastic Sax.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)