Photos by Sara Bill, Pabst Theater.
That rough-cut jewel of a song adventurer, John Prine, filled our town’s jewel of a concert hall, the Pabst Theater, Saturday night with affirming witnesses (and old friends) as he delivered a career-spanning voyage through a richly expressive, Midwesternly witty and heart-probingly philosophical repertoire.
Re-encountering his detail-driven glimpses into lives lived and ruminated upon in Midwestern towns not unlike our own, I thought about how much Prine’s flinty, pithy musical tableau shares with the early music of The Band.
Prine and The Band both conjured up a new sort of song with a sense of character emerging between the lines via a lived-in and thought-in sort of cryptic rightness. The debt owed by later masters such as Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams owe to Prine’s decidedly non-methodical method of songwriting was winningly apparent. (During the concert he joked that he often presented “three unrelated stories held together by a completely unrelated chorus.”)
Prine was born into New Deal, post-WW II, common-sense Illinois (as one of his album titles would have it), and was raised ranging about our neck of the woods and that of his Kentucky forebears. Having served in the Armed Forces and worked as a postman before the release of his debut record, Prine wrote stark and true, right off the bat. There are thrown-off crystallizations of self-assessment scattered all around the ground of his songbook from the very beginning, spiked with dead-on skewering of the foibles and rituals of public life.
Lots of Studs Turkel-ian working men and women emerge, most with wicked senses of humor or the coolly dissected, amusing lack of the same. Lonesomeness and yearning amidst the glories of nature as the skies darken by the minute are in the center of his wheelhouse. Sanctimony does not have a home here, but a sniffing after the useful fumes of spirituality is under all.
On this autumnally chilly night, he was ably assisted by Jason Wilbur on “everything,” as Prine put it (everything being a variety of Telecasters, a Strat, harmonica, baritone and acoustic parlor guitars). On mandolin, acoustic and electric guitars was Pat McLaughlin, the grand and kinetic groovemeister and Prine songwriting partner (and all too rarely encountered in these parts – his own magnificent solo recordings are well worth seeking out), while the sterlingly musical Dave Jacques played acoustic upright and electric bass. With this direct combo all chiming in on vocal harmony and incisively summoning up the nuances of decades of American vernacular music, Prine called up moods excruciatingly tender to raucous and then some with a bemused nonchalance and unvarnished probity on full display.
Having recovered from treatment for squamous cell cancer in 1998 (and for the removal of a small lung lesion last year), Prine re-emerged with a lower, more textured and occasionally fragile voice that is in some ways more expressive of the narrators he’s been steadily conjuring. Performances now come replete with a joyous relief that such a true master is fully engaged and present.
He began the night viciously strumming the intro to “Spanish Pipedream,” then plunged into mid-career in a toughly rocking (though drummerless) manner, culminating in a gleeful, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Any More” (which had gained added resonance in the specious rationale for America’s early century incursion into Iraq).
Then, a stripped-down, lusciously finger-picked, “Six O’Clock News,” with a haunted harmonica interlude by Wilbur, followed by “Souvenirs,” which was dedicated to the late Howie Epstein, a Milwaukee native and member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers who helped lift Prine’s career from a midcourse dip with his production of two fine albums. Next, a spoken anecdote about his boyhood relationship with his grandparents.
“Grandma would wake me up in the morning with a bowl of sugar,” he told the sold-out crowd. “I spent a lot of time with them. For many years I’d gravitate to the more elderly corner of any room. When I grew up, what I wanted to be was an old person.”
He then launched into his “Grandpa Was a Carpenter” and my parents’ favorite, the emotionally perfect “Hello in There,” which was made even more poignant by Jacques’ mahogany-toned bowed bass interlude. Then, if you’re John Prine, you can follow that with the ever-so-reluctant resignation of “Far From Me,” and let McLaughlin’s swelling mandolin and Wilbur’s cantina guitar elucidate the isolation.
Rocking away from the wreckage with “Iron Ore Betty,” then allowing Wilbur to bring “Christmas In Prison” into the universe of Marty Robbins, Prine joyously related that “She’s My Everything,” and casually and devastatingly delivered the “I am an old woman…” opening of “Angel From Montgomery,” which maintains its mystery and cold-eyed precision, always. He then set the band aside for a three-song solo excursion marked by a reminiscence of a family visit to Wisconsin’s Devil’s Lake in his youth that colored his tune “The Bottomless Lake.”
Beginning the stark tale of the pre-traumatic stress of “Sam Stone” in near darkness, Jacques quietly crept back to anchor the low end of a low, low story, and, with electric guitar in hand, Prine began one of his collaborations with McLaughlin, “That’s Alright By Me,” which sports a lovely climbing bridge sung in near brotherly harmony. This was followed by a pair of blues-tinged offerings and the ’60s rock referencing wonder that is, “Lake Marie,” set on the Illinois-Wisconsin border. With references to Sam Cooke, Santo & Johnny and the Kingsmen, Prine left the stage to a near instantaneous standing ovation.
Genially returning, he offered the Midwestern winter of “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” and ended the evening with, arguably, one of the opening salvos of the contemporary environmental movement, “Paradise,” his peerless evocation of the rapaciousness with which the infernally wealthy corporate “citizens” of those hoary days of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s had stripped Prine’s ancestral homeland of its enduring character. As we wrestle with the legacy of our present ignoramus of an ideologue’s cozying up to the “Mr. Peabodys” of our day in the Wisconsin northwoods, may the cautionary precision of “Paradise” color our fellow citizen’s activities as they enter the ballot box tomorrow.
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well they dug for their coal ’til the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
The setlist for Saturday’s show:
1. “Spanish Pipedream”
2. “Picture Show”
3. “Humidity Built the Snowman”
4. “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Any More”
5. “The 6 O’Clock News”
6. “Souvenirs”
7. “Grandpa Was a Carpenter”
8. “Hello in There”
9. “Far From Me”
10. “Iron Ore Betty”
11. “Christmas in Prison”
12. “She’s My Everything”
13. “Angel from Montgomery”
14. “Aimless Love”
15. “One Red Rose”
16. “The Bottomless Lake”
17. “Fish and Whistle”
18. “Sam Stone”
19. “That’s Alright By Me”
20. “Great Rain”
21. “Saddle in the Rain”
22. “Lake Marie”
Encore
23. “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone”
24. “Paradise”
