Pink Cadillac

Pink Cadillac is the sixth album by American folk singer and songwriter John Prine, released in 1979. Recording Pink Cadillac was produced by Knox Phillips and Jerry Phillips. Their father, legendary Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, produced two of the album's tracks. 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. 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." Composition 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. 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". 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 features a stone country arrangement of the Floyd Tillman tearjerker "This Cold War With You".