Label Executive Prine Doesn’t Press the Artist Prine Too Hard

John Prine is running far behind schedule with his next album, but his record company isn’t about to raise a fuss.

While Prine the artist puts off sorting through concert tapes for an upcoming live album--the first in a recording career dating back to 1971--Prine the label executive waits patiently for Oh Boy Records’ one and only act to get his act together.

“We were supposed to have it out by last Christmas, but seeing how I work, we’ll be lucky to have it out by next summer,” Prine said by phone this week from a tour stop in Houston.

The problem, Prine said, is that he is on tour so often that when he does get to take a break, the last thing he wants to do is listen to tapes of himself on tour. The three-show weekend stand that Prine begins tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano could wind up compounding his chore. Prine said it’s not definite, but he might tape the three solo concerts for potential use on his live album.

When it does emerge, the album will be the third that Prine has made as his own boss.

Prine started Oh Boy in 1981 with his longtime manager, Al Bunetta. The year before, he had split with Asylum Records, ending a major label period that brought him extensive critical praise but limited commercial success.

Coming in the midst of the commercial boomlet that materialized in the early ‘70s for folk-oriented singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, Prine’s strong debut album sold well.

But as the decade wore on, there proved to be no mass market for what he had to offer: literate-but-homespun songs, alternately humorous and heartfelt, delivered in a rough, grainy voice. Prine couched his lyrics in music derived from deep folk and country roots, with an occasional excursion into unadorned rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues.

Small, independent labels came calling after his departure from Asylum, Prine said, but he decided on complete independence instead.

Bunetta said that sales for “Aimless Love,” released at the end of 1984, and for “German Afternoons,” which came out in the summer of 1986, have proven the theory that Prine could reach his audience without a record company serving as a middleman and taking its cut of the proceeds.

What’s more, the manager said, by marketing his own albums, Prine gets to keep far more of what they earn than if someone else’s label was doing the selling.

“They’d give you a dollar a record,” Bunetta said. “This way, we make $3 and $4 and $5” depending on whether the album is sold in a store or by mail. “If we went on a major (label) we’d sell 80,000 to 100,000, and we wouldn’t make any money. We’re not making a million dollars, but we’re making money.”

Since Oh Boy is spending its own capital to make albums, rather than using a big label’s advance (essentially a loan that must be paid back from record sales before the artist can collect his share), Prine has been forced to record more quickly and efficiently. Expenses ranged from $15,000 to $30,000 for the two Oh Boy albums, Bunetta said--down from the $180,000 to $190,000 he said it cost to record each of Prine’s last two major label releases.

Like many other artists putting out well-made albums on small labels, Prine hasn’t sacrificed quality by cutting costs. The accompanying cast on “Aimless Love” and “German Afternoons” includes names like Bobby Whitlock (from Eric Clapton’s Derek & the Dominoes band), Dee Murray (Elton John’s original bassist), singer Jennifer Warnes and Sam Bush, the ace mandolin player from New Grass Revival.

It’s not surprising that Prine, who lives in Nashville, attracts willing, well-known accomplices. Bruce Springsteen, interviewed for “Written In My Soul,” a book on rock songwriters by Bill Flanagan, had this to say about Prine: “To me, he’s one of the great ones. He deserves a much bigger audience than he’s got. . . . As far as songwriters go, that guy’s one of my favorites.”

In fact, “Aimless Love” deserves mention alongside Springsteen’s more recent “Tunnel of Love” as one of the decade’s most thoroughgoing, unflinching examinations of the human tendency to let distorting flaws and fears take hold when confronted with love. (Prine ended the album with “Only Love,” a gentle, coaxing song in which he urges setting aside fears and accepting love, thereby risking the vulnerability that it brings).

“German Afternoons” was less ambitious: simply an easygoing, bluegrass-tinged album that sounds like a relaxing diversion for Prine after the probing work of “Aimless Love.”

Actually, Prine said, neither the coherent theme of “Aimless Love” nor the consistent tone of “German Afternoons” was a matter of design.

“Aimless Love” came together in piecemeal fashion over two or three years in the early ‘80s, he said. For part of the album, “we’d just go up in (studio owner) Jack Clement’s attic and play some songs, and we taped the stuff” almost as an afterthought.

“Not until we started to look at it and put it together as an album” did he realize that the songs formed a unified whole. “I don’t notice these recurring themes when I write them. I can only see them in retrospect.”

For “German Afternoons,” Prine said, “I just took a lot of my friends from the Nashville area. We play together anyway, and I wish all records could be that easy. We made it in about four different (recording) sessions. It was virtually a painless album to make.”

For the foreseeable future, Prine said, he’ll continue to make albums his own way, for his own label. The live album will draw upon past repertoire rather than introducing new songs, the idea being to give fans who have enjoyed Prine’s shows a chance, after nine original studio albums plus a best-of package, to take one of his concerts home with them.

Prine said he is “not closed to the idea” of setting aside Oh Boy Records and returning to a major label, but only if the songs he is writing “lend themselves to the kind of production that would (fit with) what’s going on on radio”--and, therefore, lend themselves to the mass marketing that has become the big labels’ prime concern.

Not that Prine, 41, is trying to gear songs toward that end. He says he isn’t even interested in the intermediary step of pitching potential chart-makers to more commercial singers in Nashville’s always-hungry country hit machine.

“I’ve got friends in Nashville who write that way, but I’m not sure if I could do it or not,” Prine said. “Unless I’ve got something to say, I don’t write at all. If I write a hit song, it’d probably be an accident.

“I feel if I’m true to myself, I’ve got a shot at communicating with somebody. When I put something in a song that’s been bothering me or eating at me, and I start singing about it, people come back and tell me it’s something they’d felt but didn’t have a way to express. Then you feel like you’re doing more than communicating. You feel like you’re making a friend.”

JOHN PRINE

Tonight, Saturday and Sunday, 8 p.m. (Harry Dean Stanton opens Sunday show only)

Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano

$22.50

Information: (714) 496-8930