How John Prine got his record contract (in his own words)...
... Kris Kristofferson played four nights at the Quiet Knight, and every night Steve Goodman tried to get Kris to come over and see John across town.
... Kris Kristofferson played four nights at the Quiet Knight, and every night Steve Goodman tried to get Kris to come over and see John across town.That Sunday night at 2 a.m., Kris showed up at John’s gig. "The chairs were on the tables, the waitresses were counting their tips, and I was waiting for my paycheck,” John recalled. “And Kris came in with two other people. We got four chairs down and I got on the stage right in front of him and sang about seven songs.
And then he bought me a beer and asked if I could get back up there and sing those seven again and anything else I wrote.”
Soon after, Kris invited John to perform a couple songs at his show at The Bitter End in NYC. In the audience was the record executive Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, who the day after the show, offered John a record deal at 10 am the next morning…his first time in NYC and was offered a record deal in less than 24 hours.
"I told my dad when I got the record contract. He was sitting on the front porch watching the cars go by and drinking his beer. And I told him they gave me $25,000 and a record contract. And he was real silent and then he looked over at me and he said, "Watch out for those F'in lawyers." I thought that was good advice.”
Mid-August, just before John’s debut album came out on Atlantic Records, his father died of a heart attack, out on the front porch in Maywood, Illinois.
The song "Paradise” off the debut album was recorded at A&R Studios in New York (with John's brother Dave and good friend Steve Goodman as sidemen) but the remaining cuts were recorded at American Sound Studios in Memphis.
In the new studio surroundings, John felt intimidated. "I was terrified. I went straight from playing by myself, still learning how to sing, to playing with Elvis Presley's rhythm section.”
The album cover of John Prine with him sitting on a bale of straw
John laughs about, "I thought they coulda had me on a bus or something, admitting he never sat on a bale of straw in his life and that the photographer probably "saw the hick in me trying to get out.”
Me & Bobbie Magee
