John Prine: Center Stage
John Prine (center) and band, Jim Shea photo courtesy of Oh Boy Records
March 16, 2014–
The circle of travel helps you find the center.
And this is where John Prine was on Friday night, standing in front of an adoring hometown audience at center stage of the Symphony Center.
Prine, 67, is back on the road after December surgery for operable lung cancer. He loves the road. He met his wife Fiona Whelan in Dublin, Ireland. He gets restless in recording studios and in a November statement he said, “There’s nothing I hate more than cancelling shows.”
Prine stands tall and strong like the old trees he sings about in his remarkable “Hello In There,” which was so eloquently covered on Friday. He represents a faded sense of a multi-generational Chicago community.
They are falling away like leaves from aspen: Earl Pionke of the Earl of Old Town, Cowboy Jack Clement, Richard Harding, Roger Ebert, Minnette Goodman, the mother of Steve Goodman—and as my friend and former Prine drummer Angelo Varias pointed out Friday-can you believe this fall will mark 30 years since Steve Goodman died?
Prine typically dedicates “Souvenirs” to Steve Goodman, on Friday it went out to his late brother Doug, a Chicago policeman. He dedicated “Angel From Montgomery” to his peer songwriter and Old Town School of Folk Music teacher Eddie Holstein, who was working the aisles with a Broadway smile. These voices, near and far are Prine’s center.
The Symphony Center gig—which Prine still calls Orchestra Hall—was just his third outing since his surgery. His voice picked up steam as the 110-minute show rolled along.
Only once did he seem to call an audible, after chugging through “Iron Ore Betty” he mumbled how his lung needed a ballad. He dialed it down to the regal version of “Angel From Montgomery,” followed by the loopy “Fish and Whistle,” accented by his gritty, son-of-a-tool & die maker/union leader’s vocals.
Prine was in typical good nature.
Wearing a black suit, black pants and starched white shirt he looked as happy as a Sun City undertaker. After “Angel From Montgomery” a lone female voice called out, “I love you John.”
Prine smiled and cracked, “I can’t see you but I love you too. And that hasn’t been the first time.”
Prine has settled into a groove with his long time sidemen Jason Wilbur (multi-guitarist, harmonica) and acoustic-electric bassist Dave Jacques. They delivered understated ambiance to “Humidity Built The Snowman,” a ballad Prine rarely covers from 1995’s “Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings,” and Wilbur’s mournful harmonica accented the fact that the themes of “6 O’Clock News” are even more timely today than they were when Prine wrote it in 1971.
Wilbur’s extended slide guitar on “Storm Windows” gave the song some moxie it did not have on the recorded version and by the trio was full tilt by the time Prine closed his set with the power anthem “Lake Marie.”
Prine called out his opening act Iris DeMent for an encore of their goofy “hit” “In Spite of Ourselves,” a 1999 album of duets which was his first release after beating throat cancer (unrelated to his recent cancer.)
In her opening set DeMent remarked how Tammy Wynette was her favorite female country singer before launching into “Making My Way Back Home,” which she wrote after reading a Wynette biography.
Again, the gift is the center, the essence.
Jim Rooney is the beloved right-hand man of the late Cowboy Jack Clement who produced Townes Van Zandt and “In Spite of Ourselves.” On March 14 Rooney released a new memoir “In It For the Long Run (A Musical Odyssey)” [University of Illinois Press, $24.95] of which Prine gave the blurb: “Wonderful fellow with an interesting life equals great story.”
Rooney writes about the Prine-DeMent sessions and how they came to understand the classic 1960s country hits were less than three minutes long. Prine makes every word count. “They said what they had to say and get out,” Rooney writes. “It was definitely before Jerry Jeff, John Hartford and Kris Kristofferson changed the songwriting rules. Hearing John and Iris together just made me smile.”
End of story.
John Prine has to sing, just as I have to write.
No matter where life takes you.
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