Legendary Prine to play Indy

Sam Stone will come home to Indianapolis Friday with shattered nerves and a little shrapnel in his knee.\nWell, not exactly.\nBut John Prine, the prolific song writer who first sung the story of "Sam Stone" 30 years ago will be coming at 8 p.m. Friday to Indianapolis' Murat Theater, 510 N. New Jersey. Tickets range from $30-$51.50.\nIn those 30 years Prine has released 18 albums. The twangy folk singer's first album, self-titled, was released in 1971 during the height of the Vietnam war and the high times of American hippydom. "Illegal Smile", the first track on Prine's first album, was a rebellious, smart-assed jab at "the man" and a thinly veiled protest to legalize marijuana.\n"...And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile\nIt don\'t cost very much, but it lasts a long while\nWon\'t you please tell the man I didn\'t kill anyone\nNo I\'m just tryin\' to have me some fun..."\n"Sam Stone," also from Prine's first album, was the lonesome ballad of a drug addicted war veteran. Its dark lyrics and sing-songy chorus, "There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes... Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose," struck a chord in the war-addled seventies and took Prine from the bar room circuit to the annals of American music history.\nIU Music Professor Glenn Gass, who teaches the history of rock and roll, described Prine as a throwback to the folk music of the sixties in a time when a new breed of singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Neil Young were first hitting the scene. Gass said Prine's first-person, character-driven style cast him in the folk artist mold and his funny, sing-along style drove his success.\nWinning the mantle of folk singer was a tough gig in a time when seemingly every song writer who picked up an acoustic guitar was compared to Bob Dylan. Gass said Prine's first album was the pinnacle of his career. \nBut Prine kept on truckin', releasing four more albums in the next four years, including 1975's Common Sense, which was sometimes described as fluffy or fruity. The mixed reviews could have come from folk purists who didn't like the new direction Prine was taking with songs like "Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard," which took a poke at hippy culture. Prine continually released albums through the 80s, finally winning a Grammy for 1992's The Missing Years.\nWhile Prine's albums haven't been consistently great, it would probably be inaccurate to say that's what's kept him from pop stardom. After all, slews of musicians from the 1970s have put out bad albums for 20 years and still sell out football stadiums. No, John Prine avoids the limelight. In 1992 he told Rolling Stone's David Wild, "My current popularity will probably pass. I can't really see what I do going on to arenas and my name becoming a household name.