Honey, honey, honey, please call me / You don’t need no money we can do it for free / I got a friend in Phoenix with a two-way radio / All the static in my attic getting ready to blow
25 August 2024 | James Porteous | Clipper Media Blues
Pink Cadillac is the sixth studio album by the American musician John Prine, released in 1979 on Asylum Records. It most certainly could have been an FU to the lord of the manor.
Certainly not a loved or revered album. Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh deemed it “an almost unqualified disaster” and insisted that Prine “has never sung such a half-assed grab bag of songs, partly because he wrote so few of them (and is in no way a classic interpreter of any material except his own), partly because the outside stuff he chose is so thoroughly mediocre.”
But that was (and remains) typical of album reviewers, this obsession with comparing this album to the last one or the ‘best one,’ but as a standalone album, I loved this. I can’t remember how many times I play ‘Saigon.’
In the album’s liner notes Prine wrote, “What we tried to achieve here is a recording of a five-piece band with a vocalist playing and singing good honest music.” Later the singer recalled, “We ended up with something like five hundred hours of tape – and took the best of what we had, and Asylum just about had a heart attack.’
And Wiki says the album has become a fan favorite, however, with Prine revealing to David Fricke in 1993, “I get people now coming up and saying they’re sorry for not liking it then, that they’ve gone back to it and really like it now.”
An aside, I remember following its release and confusion among critics, one asked about the title of the album and Prine said that he had received a never ending supply of ‘Bruised Oranges’ following his previous release and he decided to try and take control of the situation with Pink Cadillac. No word if he was ever successful.
James Porteous | Clipper Media Blues
Lyrics
You got everything that a girl should grow
I’m so afraid to kiss you I might lose control
You can hold me tighter but turn loose of my gun
It’s a sentimental present all the way from Saigon
Honey, honey, honey, please call me
You don’t need no money we can do it for free
I got a friend in Phoenix with a two-way radio
All the static in my attic getting ready to blow
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
All the static in my attic getting ready to blow
My head is getting tighter, Lord I’m starting to squeak
I was talking to the mailman late last week
He had a letter in his sweater from Stuttering Don
He said things are getting better in
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Things are getting better back in Saigon
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Things are getting better back in Saigon
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Things are getting better back in Saigon
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Saigon, honey, honey, honey
Things are getting better back in Saigon
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: John Burns / John E. Prine / John Prine
Saigon lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Downtown Music Publishing
Personnel
- John Prine – vocals, guitar
- Tom “Pickles” Piekarski – bass
- Billy Lee Riley – guitar, backing vocals
- Angie Varias – drums
- John Burns – guitar, backing vocals
- Leo LeBlanc – guitar, steel guitar
- Howard Levy – harmonica, keyboards, saxophone
- Jerry Phillips – guitar
- Helen Duncan – backing vocals
- Phyllis Duncan – backing vocals
- Beverly White – backing vocals
- Helen Bernard – backing vocals
Recording took place at Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis between January and May 1979. The album features Prine indulging his love for early rock and roll, with the singer telling David Fricke in 1993, “I wanted to do something noisy, something like if you had a buddy with a band and you walked into his house and you could hear ’em practicing in the basement.” Although the album may have come as a surprise to some of his fans, Prine had recorded songs with rock and roll arrangements on his previous albums.
As Prine biographer Eddie Huffman observes, “For the first time in his recording career, lyrics were clearly a secondary concern; he was now focused much more on rhythm and the raw feel of the tracks.[7] Prine wrote or co-wrote only five of the ten songs on Pink Cadillac, the singer opting to include some of the classic rock and roll songs that he had loved when he was a kid growing up in Chicago. These include Arthur Gunter’s “Baby, Let’s Play House”, made famous by Elvis Presley, and Charles Underwood’s “Ubangi Stomp”.[8] Prine was one of the first artists to cover the Roly Salley classic “Killing The Blues” and duets with Billy Lee Riley on “No Name Girl”, a song Riley co-wrote with Cowboy Jack Clement. Pink Cadillac also contains a cover of the Floyd Tillman song “This Cold War With You”.[9]
In the Great Days: The John Prine Anthology liner notes, Prine recalls that “Automobile” was inspired by Elvis Presley’s first record: “I think I was playing “That’s All Right, Mama” on my guitar and putting my own words to it.” “Saigon” tells the story of a Vietnam vet who is probably suffering from PTSD and is unsuccessfully adjusting to civilian life. “Saigon” and “How Lucky” features Sam Philips producing. In the A&E Biography episode on the producer’s life Prine joked, “Sam thought my voice sounded so awful that he would stick around to see if he could maybe help fix it.” Prine added that on “Saigon”, Phillips intentionally blew the tubes out of guitarist John Burns’ amplifier so he could get the sound of “pieces of hot metal flying through the air.” In the Great Days anthology, Prine recalls that when Phillips “used the talk-back in the studio, he even had the slap-back echo on his voice. You felt like Moses talking to the burning bush.”
The release of Pink Cadillac coincided with Prine’s appearance on the PBS concert series Soundstage, where he is backed by his band performing several songs from the album, including “Automobile” (which features clips of Prine driving a 1950s-era car around the Maywood, Illinois, neighborhood where he grew up), “Ubangi Stomp”, “No Name Girl” (again featuring Riley, who also performs “Red Hot” with Prine), “Saigon” and the nostalgic “How Lucky”. Prine performs “How Lucky” on acoustic guitar with John Burns on the porch of his childhood home and offers a few thoughts on the song, asking Burns “Did you ever have a whole lotta growing pains when you got somewhere around the age of thirty? I never thought that age mattered much, I just thought that age was just something that was there every year, like Christmas…Seems like I started going back over everything I’d ever done and wondered if I wanted to do it for the next thirty or not…That’s where this kind of started.” (Wikipedia)
