Andy Pratt

Boston-born singer-songwriter Andy Pratt has recorded over two dozen albums since 1969, flirted on occasion with the national sales charts and soaked in warm praise from critics at such A-level rags as Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. His best-known song, “Avenging Annie,” launched a career that seemed destined to make him a household name in popular music, but as the initial sales spikes grew increasingly distant, he just forged ahead, producing an exceptional musical catalog of limitless colors and varying styles. The troubadour has endured; nearly 60 years later, Pratt still marches to his own beat, self-recording and releasing songs to this day.

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS, DEBUT ALBUM, “AVENGING ANNIE”

Pratt graduated from Harvard in 1968 with a degree in literature and began playing in Boston-based groups including rock trio Butter (with drummer Rick Shlosser, who played on Pratt’s first two solo albums), which performed at The Boston Tea Party and once warmed that stage for Chuck Berry. He’s proficient on many instruments, but his primary vehicle is the piano and favorable comparisons to a singer-songwriter from England named Elton John are not unfounded. Both wrote prodigiously (although Pratt edges John in a sense because he also penned the lyrics) and each were masters of their keyboards. After finishing at Harvard, Pratt wasted no time; barely two years later, he recorded a set of songs that Polydor Records released as his debut album, Records Are Like Life.

The LP didn’t go far, but Pratt quickly prepared for another. In 1971, he worked with audio engineer Bill Riseman to finance and build Aengus Studios (in the Fayville section of Southborough, Massachusetts), where he recorded his eponymous breakthrough album. The producer on those sessions was John Nagy, the bass player from Boston-based Earth Opera, which had split up a few years earlier. Columbia Records’ legendary president Clive Davis had signed Pratt and found promise with his towering falsetto and memorable chorus in the track “Avenging Annie.” Released as a single in 1973, it found moderate success, peaking at #78 in the Billboard Hot 100, but it made a big splash with critics, who heralded Pratt’s arrival and readily awaited his next project.

Unfortunately for Pratt, however, Columbia fired Davis amid a payola scandal in July of 1973, when Pratt was touring to support the album. With his primary advocate now removed, he found additional label support nearly non-existent and eventually he slid off the company roster. Still, Pratt played live to great success for the next couple of years before coming off the road in 1975 to enroll at Life Institute in Boston. Ever the questing intellectual, he sought education and discussion about the meaning of life and the importance of love (this was, after all, “the Age of Aquarius”). Eventually, he embraced Christianity as the answer to those questions.

RESOLUTION, SHIVER IN THE NIGHT, 1980S/’90S ACTIVITY

But music remained a true passion, and Pratt signed with the Atlantic Records imprint label Nemperor, which released Resolution in May 1976. Even finer than his previous release, according to many critics, the album was helmed by legendary producer, arranger and Atlantic vice president Arif Mardin, who masterminded the historic mid-’70s run of disco smashes by The Bee Gees. Mardin didn’t submerge Pratt’s material in the depths of dance beats, however. Instead, he focused Pratt’s visions to create an album that Rolling Stone said “has forever changed the face of rock” with songs that “carry rock harmony one step beyond The Beach Boys and the Stones.” This was monumental praise; Resolution went on to become Pratt’s biggest seller.

Next came 1977’s Shiver in the Night, another dynamic album on the Nemperor label. Also that year, Roger Daltrey of The Who recorded a version of ”Avenging Annie” for his third solo album, One of the Boys. The single fared poorly in the US, however, which might have had something to do with the fact that Daltrey couldn’t hit the original’s high vocal parts. After another release for Nemperor (Motives, 1979), Pratt recorded three more LPs for various labels before moving to Europe in 1987. There, as his Christian faith took greater hold and he considered himself a missionary, music remained an integral part of his life. He continued to record but switched focus to gospel and faith-based songs, recording five albums on the GMI and Highway Music labels.

2000S ACTIVITY, LEGACY

By 2003, after living in Holland and Belgium, Pratt was on his way home. He created secular music albums on his own and in collaboration with his former guitarist from the ‘70s, Mark Doyle, who produced the discs and played nearly every instrument Pratt couldn’t (or didn’t want to) handle. Back in Boston, he connected with guitarist Sal Baglio of The Stompers and drumming ace Tom Hambridge for shows in New England and the memorable Recorded Live at the Village Underground, NYC 3/11/03 album, which also featured his longtime mate Doyle. Pratt remained in high gear, cutting nine albums between 2003 and 2008 on the artist-friendly label and site ItsAboutMusic.com while living in Nashville, Rockport, Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire.

Pratt has recorded a further six albums on a variety of labels since 2008, including self-releases, notably the 2011 album Life and Death, recorded in Miami Beach on which he thanked both Jesus and Rodney Dangerfield in the credits. If that doesn’t summarize the duality of his sacred and secular approaches to music, I don’t know what does! On his 2017 release Horizon Disrupted, he traveled to Chicago to record with former Nirvana producer Steve Albini. Since 2019, he’s released over a hundred additional recordings that are available at bandcamp.com.

All of this speaks of an immense talent who won’t stop creating until he draws his last breath. There seems to be no limit to the ideas Pratt might explore, the studios and people he might work with or the experiments in recording he may attempt during his ongoing artistic quest. His output is laudable and it’s staggering. If you’d like to find out more about this unique New England music treasure, you may want to pick up a copy of Pratt’s 2006 memoir Shiver in the Night. Note: When searching for more information, be aware that there is another artist named Andy Pratt who is an accomplished jazz guitarist, singer and composer working out of Chicago; he may show up in your search results.

(by Carter Alan)

Carter Alan is a former WBCN deejay now heard on WZLX-FM in Boston. He’s the author of Outside is America: U2 in the U.S. (Faber & Faber, 1992), U2: The Road to Pop (Faber & Faber, 1997), Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN (University Press of New England, 2013) and The Decibel Diaries: A Journey Through Rock in 50 Concerts (University of New England Press, 2017).