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   3 2 1 Rick Yancey and Richard Mainegra, who had been like intertwined fingers since the beginning of Cymarron and all through their second phase as the Remingtons, are no longer in communication with one another. Richard said it best as he paraphrased his own composition: “There’s nothing left to do but go our separate ways, and pick up all the pieces left behind us.” C h ap t e r 2 4 Wasted Doing Nothing The wasted opportunity with Cymarron was another demoralizing experience for the American musicians, all of whom were rooting for the trio and felt that their own creativity was highlighted by the fact that these singersongwriters had been found and nurtured by their studio. At about this time, in the summer of 1971, three other singer-songwriters came in to record. One of them became a generational icon; one was a writer and vocalist of strong promise who was held back by the resegregation of the music charts; and one had been a singer-writer before the term was fashionable. The writer who became an icon was a firstgeneration Chicagoan with strong roots in Jackie DeShannon’s western Kentucky. Inspired by Roger Miller and Bob Dylan, John Prine had been writing songs for some time, but was unknown until Kris Kristofferson heard him in a Windy City club after hours one night at the behest of Steve Goodman, another songwriter who had just completed work on his first album . Kris pulled some strings; another early patron—Paul Anka, of all people—pulled a few more, and before long Prine had a contract with Atlantic and Arif Mardin was bringing him to Memphis for his first recording session. (After a brief lull—perhaps awaiting the outcome of the Crews lawsuit—Atlantic Records again began bringing acts to American by mid1971 .) “John Prine was (admittedly after I talked to him many years later) scared to death,” said Mike Leech. “It was his first studio experience and we made him very nervous.” Some of Prine’s songs had a country flavor, so it may have been assumed by the Atlantic 3 2 2    w a s t e d d o i n g n o t h i n g team that their standbys could get more out of him than could musicians in New York. The tectonic plates seemed to be shifting within the country music industry; Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, backed on records at this point by many of Nashville’s renegade younger musicians (including, by now, Glen Spreen on occasion ), were creating a demand for the kind of melodic playing and hard-hitting lyric content that the American group had been featuring all along (Wayne Carson, in fact, placed a song with Jennings that year, the narrative “Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Tulsa,” although Wayne’s recording of it is better). John Prine’s work fit perfectly with this rising demand, and his album, with the American musicians backing him, became a rallying point for the movement . Not that the musicians were aware of the trend: their job was to concentrate on whatever was brought to them to record, and no one discussed with them why certain acts were there or for what the artists and producers were looking . “Motown had meetings, Stax had meetings , to discuss things like that,” Hayward Bishop noted. “We never had meetings. We never even discussed the groove [when we were recording ]. I tried, a couple of times, and then I got these looks like, ‘Oh, he’s going to make us think about it; he’s going to make us analyze the groove.’” The group preferred to arrive at recorded perfection almost by magic; this was good in the emphasis it placed on spontaneity, but bad in that no attempt was made to look at the whole picture. The fact that publishers and producers in New York and Nashville saw Kristofferson’s success as a template was even more obscured in Memphis, where for the most part the studios were making the kind of music they always had. Willie Mitchell was having a phenomenal recording comeback with Al Green, as well as lesser hits with Syl Johnson, Otis Clay, and Ann Peebles (who had married Don Bryant, Reggie Young’s and Bobby Emmons’s acquaintance from their days at Hi); Stax continued to make solid R&B records (though more often than not, no longer in Memphis but at Jimmy Johnson’s Muscle Shoals...

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