I had a very strange feeling when a John Prine video I uploaded on YouTube years ago suddenly got flooded with new comments. Bad omen. Feelings are strange, especially when they come true... This one is really hard to take.
Rest easy, John Prine. Enjoy your rock band, cocktail party and 9-mile long cigarette up there.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

John Prine
"Live at American University 1979"
Woods-Brown Amphitheatre, Washington, D.C.
1979-04-21

Lineage: Shure Mics > 1st Gen Sony Stereo Cassette > ??? > Track Splitting > FLAC Level 8

Setlist:

01. Spanish Pipedream
02. Often Is a Word I Seldom Use
03. Fish and Whistle
04. Angel From Montgomery
05. Crooked Piece of Time
06. Illegal Smile
07. Grandpa Was a Carpenter
08. Paradise
09. Dear Abby
10. Sam Stone
11. That's the Way That the World Goes 'Round
12. There She Goes
13. I Had a Dream
14. Chinatown
15. Iron Ore Betty
16. Pretty Good
17. Down by the Side of the Road
18. Hello in There
19. Please Don't Bury Me
20. Onomatopoeia
21. Saigon
22. Sweet Revenge
23. Sailin' Around
24. Mexican Home
25. Everybody
26. Storm Windows
27. Saddle in the Rain

Total Duration: 116 minutes and 14 seconds

Band:

John Prine - guitar, vocals
Howard Levy - piano, organ, harmonica, pennywhistle, flute, saxophone, mandolin
Johnny Burns - lead guitar
Tommy "Pickles" Piekarski - bass
Angelo Varias - drums

Notes:

Coincidentally, lots of John Prine's best sounding shows are from his "Chicago band" era in the late-70's. This one is the only audience recording among them - amazing quality for a 70's audience recording. Plus John Prine's 1979 recordings are extremely rare, so this is a real gem to have. Johnny Burns, who led Prine's band at the time, has been sharing a lot of John Prine memories on Facebook recently.

This concert featured the earliest known recordings of "Down by the Side of the Road" and "Storm Windows", both unreleased at the time. It also gave us the only known full-band recording of "Everybody", as well as an epic 12-minute "Mexican Home".

Seahorse, from whom I got this show, said that this recording is believed to be uncirculated so far.

Do not sell this recording.
Enjoy and feel free to share it anywhere.
Support the artists by purchasing their official releases and going to their live shows.
If you're tired of physical CDs, you can go to Prine's Bandcamp website and purchase his albums in FLAC/ALAC/WAV lossless format: http://johnprine.bandcamp.com/
John McCutcheon wrote a very touching tribute song to Prine, so good that it moved me to tears. You can hear it at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=691194858300006.