![]() A problem with a PA is a laugh compared to some of the personal and musical hoops these two have fallen through. Like Bonnie Raitt, he is used to adversity. A songwriter who's labored in obscurity for 20 years, John Prine is no prima donna. I just asked 'em to turn it down." John Prine is not the kind of guy to pull the plug on a playoff game, especially when the home team is up. "It's the Wildcats by ten," Prine said, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head in mock disgust as the audience broke into a round of applause. Somehow the TV audio had bled into the PA system. The stage crew had been watching the game backstage on a portable TV. It was the spring of 1988, and the University of Arizona Wildcats were hacking their way into the NCAA Final Four. After a minute he was back, a wide grin spreading across his face. Suddenly aware of this strange interference, Prine stopped in mid-song and listened. Coming through the PA system along with Prine's voice and guitar was something that sounded like the play by play of a basketball game. Out in the audience, static had been obvious from the first note. After the first song or two, he added a cigarette. Dressed in a blue silk shirt and jeans, he sported what has become his post-Seventies look: well-worn cowboy boots mid-length dark and graying hair and a soul patch beneath his lower lip. ![]() Opening for musical soul mate Bonnie Raitt, Prine was playing solo. He went on, “They’d been telling me for years to get on cholesterol medicine, and I would go, ‘Am I all right now?’ And they’d go, ‘Yeah.Midway through his set, John Prine began to hear the noises, too. … He said, ‘John, you can say whatever you want to me or act any way you want, but a first-year medical student can tell you you’ve had a heart attack.’” “The looked at me and he said, ‘You’ve had a heart attack.’ I went nuts,” the “Jack & Diane” singer remembered. Mellencamp famously recalled the story of his heart attack while smoking a cigarette during a 2015 appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” “I learned my lesson after I had a heart attack at 42.” Mellencamp eventually gave up the hard partying and drug use of his younger years on the road. “I had lots of doctors going, ‘John, your cholesterol’s way too high and you smoke.’ I’d go, ‘F–k it,'” Mellencamp, who began smoking at the age of 14, recalled. The musician admittedly still smokes but is mindful of his overall well-being after suffering a serious health scare in 1994 after a show at Jones Beach in New York. But when you get to a certain age, it’s not funny anymore. “It’s funny and attractive to be 25 years old and be someplace high and drunk. ![]() “There comes a time when you got to go, ‘OK, I’m done with this s–t.’ “They couldn’t get off the party,” he explained. He said that unlike many of his friends and peers, he was able to simply mature out of using them. Mellencamp quit drugs and alcohol in 1971. “And you’re talking to the luckiest guy you’re ever going to talk to.” “Very simply, luck is thinking you’re lucky, period,” the 70-year-old rocker told People Wednesday while reminiscing on his decades-long music career. ![]() John Mellencamp knows how fortunate he is to have survived a rock star lifestyle and a heart attack. Denise Richards denies saying Teddi Mellencamp lives in her dad’s ‘shadow’
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