Herself being at the movies with some friends, and Miss Mia Sopaipilla snoozing in her tower, I was nibbling a green chile cheeseburger with fries and checking the TV for something that wouldn’t spoil my appetite when I stumbled upon this John Prine retrospective on “Austin City Limits.”
It’s titled “The Best of John Prine,” but it isn’t, not by a long shot. You’d need a lot more than 54 minutes to cover that vast expanse of musical territory.
But I’ll take it. And don’t I wish we had 54 more years of John Prine. I’ve been listening to his stories for a half-century and I’d be delighted to stick around for an extended encore.
Mad Blog Media 
We watched it too. Good stuff, especially “Angel From Montgomery” with Bonnie Raitt. His influence on her was lasts to this day.
I picked up on Prine and Raitt about the same time, in 1974, when I quit the Sun and went back to school in Greeley. I think Emmylou Harris slipped into my musical catalog around then, too, along with Jerry Jeff Walker and the rest of the hippie-country crowd (Flying Burrito Brothers, Pure Prairie League, Poco, Firefall, et al.) My buddy Chris may have led the Prine-Raitt charge. I’m not sure who threw us the Parliament-Funkadelic curveball (“Mothership Connection”).
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band I had already seen, playing the gym in at Adams State in Alamosa, where I was big into the Allman Brothers, Leon Russell, the Stones, and early Elton John (“Tumbleweed Connection,” “17.11.70”).
Our bros The Fabulous Martinez Brothers had a kinsman, Leonard R. Dogg, who was the road manager for the Nitty Grittys, and as a consequence we got to see them a lot for free in the Before-Time, occasionally schlepping some gear for Señor Dogg by way of payback. That’s how I got to meet Prine and Jerry Jeff, briefly and drunkenly, at the NGDB’s 20th-anniversary gig at McNichols in Denver.
Fun fact: The back up singers for Steve Martin’s three minutes of silliness called King Tut were basically the nitty-gritty dirt band.
Dammit… Not back up singers… Session musicians.
Yup. They called themselves the Toot Uncommons. The NGDB and Steve Martin shared management — William E. McEuen, brother of their fiddle/banjo player, John McEuen.
You’ll see at least one of the Blues Brothers band in the King Tut skit on “SNL,” too — Blue Lou Marini on sax.
I’ll try to do this without looking it up, but the Blues Brothers included musicians from Isaac Hayes’ band, Blood Sweat and Tears, Booker T and the MGs, and of course Paul Schaefer with his SNL and maybe the World’s Most Dangerous Band connections.
I’ve got it on “tape.” Waiting for the right time…
Is there ever a wrong time? Gotta admit, I got a little damp around the eyes watching ol’ John-Boy doin’ his thang from The Way Back When.
Still miss Prine. RIP. No taped concert or show could possibly surpass a live show of his that I attended — and with Steve Goodman no less — at the Earl of Old Town in 1977. Still miss Steve too. RIP. They said it was being recorded and to “behave” but “be sure to cheer and clap loudly if ya’all aren’t too drunk at the end of each song.” I often wonder if I, or my date, are in some small way part of that record.
Oh hey, that new WordPress dialog was a bit wonky.
Glad to see you were able to make it over the concertina wire and into the bleachers, Dave.
And that’s quite a twofer — Prine and Goodman. What a pair to draw to.
Bleachers? Good one, Patrick. Small room with a 7″ riser floor for the back couple rows with about 45 chairs total, and not even good chairs. The kinda chairs Tom Waits would sit on and not even notice they were bad. At the time, we didn’t really know the both or each of them would be held in such high regard these many years later.
Actually, I was joking about the concertina wire WordPress has erected around the comments section, where the bleachers are even worser than the seats at the Earl in ’77.
That Prine-Goodman show sounds about like the one Andy Irvine and Paul Brady did at a tiny sandwich-and-pint place in Corvallis, Ore., back in the early Eighties. I knew they had been part of Planxty, but I had no idea they’d be considered giants of Irish music down the road a piece.
Another Back in the Day® concert: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band at the Adams State College gym in 1972 or ’93. This was when they still did a Fifties set a la Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids. At one point, the lads set down their instruments, and each moved clockwise one position, took up the other guy’s ax, and then resumed playing. Quite an exhibition of musical virtuosity.
This is probably more than you wanted to know. But, “they had a sound powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.” Pat O‘Brien
https://www.last.fm/music/The+Blues+Brothers+Band/+wiki