Amie

You Zoo Freaks know the feeling when a song sneaks up on you and sticks around for decades. Pure Prairie League’s “Amie” from the 1972 album Bustin’ Out is one of those tunes that just refuses to fade. Written by a young Craig Fuller as little more than a songwriting exercise when he was about nineteen or twenty, the track was never meant to be a big statement about any particular girl. Fuller has said more than once that there was no real-life Amie behind the lyrics. It was simply a name that fit the meter and the mood, something that sounded right when he was stringing words and chords together. One of the other guys in the band, Mike Reilly, has pointed out that the name plays on the French verb that means “to love,” which gives the whole thing a gentle ring without tying it to any one person. That hasn’t stopped generations of listeners from claiming the song as their own. Mothers have walked up to band members over the years and said they named their daughters Amie after the tune, and at least a few of those Amies grew up and named their own daughters the same thing. Even Amy Lee of Evanescence carries a version of the name that traces back to this record.

The recording itself took an unexpected turn. Fuller originally pictured “Amie” as a harder-rocking number, but once the band got into the studio in Toronto the arrangement softened into the acoustic guitar jangle and close harmonies we all know. Producer Bob Ringe had the idea of wrapping the song with a short reprise of the album’s previous track, “Falling In and Out of Love.” The two pieces bookend each other so naturally that many stations have played them as a pair ever since. The sessions stretched through an entire summer, with the guys luxuriating in a healthy budget while Gordon Lightfoot and others dropped in to cut their own records in a fraction of the time. Mick Ronson, the guitarist who had worked with David Bowie, even stopped by to add some guitar and string arrangements. The result is that easy, rolling country-rock feel that still sounds fresh when it comes over the air.

Bustin’ Out landed in the fall of 1972 and did next to nothing at first. RCA dropped the band not long after, and Fuller himself left under difficult circumstances. He had applied for conscientious-objector status during the Vietnam years, ended up serving time, and never rejoined the original lineup right away. The remaining players, including Reilly who stepped up and kept things moving, kept hitting the road and playing college dates. Campus stations kept spinning “Amie,” and the song built a quiet following that finally forced the industry to pay attention. When RCA reissued it as a single in 1975 it climbed to number 27 on the Billboard Hot 100, the album itself went gold, and the band was suddenly back in business. Fuller later called it a perfect storm of a good song, radio support, and a little luck. The whole story is a reminder that sometimes the best records take their own sweet time to find their audience.

The band that cut that record had only been together a couple of years when they walked into those Toronto sessions. Pure Prairie League started in southern Ohio around 1970, put together by Craig Fuller along with drummer Tom McGrail, singer and guitarist George Ed Powell, and a few other local players who had known each other from high-school bands and Cincinnati clubs. McGrail came up with the name after catching an old Errol Flynn western called Dodge City on late-night television. In the movie a fictional women’s temperance group called the Pure Prairie League tries to clean up the town while a barroom brawl rages next door. The guys liked the ring of it and kept the moniker even as the lineup shifted almost constantly in the early days. They built a following as the house band at a place called New Dilly’s Pub in the Mount Adams section of Cincinnati, playing a mix of covers and their own material that blended rock edges with country instrumentation, especially once steel-guitar player John David Call came aboard. A Cleveland promoter saw them, helped land an RCA deal, and the first album appeared in 1972 with that famous Norman Rockwell cowboy painting of “Sad Luke” on the cover. By the time they reached Bustin’ Out the personnel had already turned over more than once, but the core songwriting partnership of Fuller and Powell held the thing together long enough to capture the songs that would define them.

Those early years of constant change never really stopped. Over the decades more than fifty musicians have passed through the ranks, among them future country star Vince Gill, who spent a few years in the band in the late seventies and early eighties and has always been quick to credit the experience with helping launch his own career. The current lineup still tours and still leans on the old catalog, including “Amie,” which remains the song most people want to hear when the band walks onstage. You can catch up with what they’re doing these days on the official site at pureprairieleague.com and follow along on their Instagram. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning deep cuts and the hits that never get old, and you Zoo Freaks know where to find us on THE ZOO.