REVIEWS OF JOHN PRINE CONCERTS & ALBUMS
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June 18 - Warner Theater - Washington, DC
with Support: Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez
By: Robert Newberger
opposite of old hot dog..lol One word describes it all.....PRICELESS!!..
My dad and I have been huge Prine fans for thirty plus years.. He reminds
me of Prine.. He did the Navy gig, along w/ the post office jockeying
mail.. He also plays the same style of guitar. The Library of Congress
event was amazing, because we felt like we got to know what John is all
about.... Looking forward to 6/18/2005 for the Warner theater concert(5
days after my dad'd birthday)... WOW!!!....06/18/2005 The setting was
perfect. A beautiful evening in D.C...80 degrees, a "Fair" day
at the Warner Theater "Square" and a packed house. The
opportunity to see John Prine twice in a three month timeframe in D.C.,
especially last night w/ his friends: Chip Taylor, Carrie Rodriguez, John
Platania, Dave Jacques, and Jason Wilber(an incredible diversified musical
wiz). The opening act featured Chip & Carrie w/ a supporting cast that
showcased some of the best talent I've seen in years. Especially w/
Carrie's magical presence onstage. She's definitely a "hotshot from
Austin, TX) and not the kind Prine referenced in one of his songs
"Some Humans Aint Human". Also Dave Jacques provided backup
support in the opening set. this showed no selfish feelings from Prine,
who allowed Dave to sit in w/ the opening act. Theor set got the audience
pumped up w/ "Angel in the Morning" & "Wild Thing"
(Both which Chip wrote) Then the big dance!!!: John Prine My dad and I
loved every minute of it. What a father's day present. Getting there was
interesting...We got the "roto-rooter" search when parking at
the Trade Center parking garage by security. My, have things changed since
9/11... Speaking of 9/11, "Flag Decal" was appropriate for the
opening memorable Prine set. "Fish and Whistle" and
"Grandpa" got the crowd excited to be here. Then Prine showcased
his voice in his new material in "Glory of True Love" and
"Taking a Walk". It was quite clear Prine's voice was in "Prine",
I mean prime form... His "Andel from Montgomery" didn't need
Bonnie that night. Then Prine dove back into some new material in
"Long Monday" and "Crazy as a Loon". After some
audience heckles of "Dear Abby" requests, Prine gave in with a
solo performance of "Dear Abby". His sense of humor provided a
wonderful version of "The Other Side of Town". Then of course,
you can't escape the classic "Sam Stone", which brought the
audience to their feet. One of the great highlights was one of his new
songs "Some Humans Aint Human", which Prine took advantage of
being two blocks from the White House and criticized the war in Iraq,
Ashcroft, and that "hotshot from Tx". Another standing ovation.
Then a personal favorite of mine.."Hello in There" : )..Then the
highlight of the evening! A jam session of "Lake Marie", which
really got the packed house reeling, when Prine broke a guitar string, and
never missed a beat. Prine was truly having fun!...Then came the always
encores, "Illegal Smile" and "Paradise" Paradise,
again showed Prine's unselfish manners onstage, when he invited Chip,
Carrie, and John back onstage. he let them sing and play while he stepped
back for a few and chimed back in.. Tickets for the show $140 Parking in
D.C. pain in the you know what This evening with my dad, Prine and
friends.....PRICELESS!!!!!!
By Richard Harrington - Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 18, 2005; Page C01
John Prine, Vox Populi
After Beating Cancer, A Poet's Poet Savors The Fanfare He's Given The
Common Man
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701716.html?sub=AR
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Prine at the Library of Congress in March. "John Prine has
taken ordinary people and made monuments of them," Poet
Laureate Ted Kooser said. |
After two years of service in Germany as an Army draftee, John Prine
came home in 1967 to a job as a letter carrier in Maywood, a working-class
suburb of Chicago. He started making up songs to amuse himself as he
walked his routes, but he didn't share them, even as he made the nighttime
rounds of Chicago's burgeoning folk-music circuit.
Occasionally he'd hint to friends that he could do better than the
performers onstage, and finally they dared Prine to prove it.
"At the end of 1970, I got up at an open-mike night at a club
called the Fifth Peg," Prine recalls. "It was the first time I'd
stepped on a stage."
Kentucky home town of that name, bulldozed into oblivion by a coal
company. They eventually became the three songs that, even today, are
probably Prine's best known.
"He was unlike anybody I'd ever seen -- such a young kid, and yet
he's writing songs like 'Hello in There,' " recalls fellow
singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who caught one of Prine's early
performances and immediately helped get him a record contract. "I
can't imagine myself at that age writing anything remotely that
good."
"In retrospect," Prine says, "I didn't know just how
original that stuff was or how lasting it would be. I thought it would
last as long as it would last and then I would write other stuff."
John Prine did write "other stuff" -- 15 albums' worth over 35
years -- in a voice so original that the nation's poet laureate honored
Prine in March in the Library of Congress's historic Coolidge Auditorium.
It wasn't a concert, like the one Prine will perform at the Warner Theatre
tonight, but a two-man conversation in story and song.
"I have been an admirer of John Prine since the early '70s, when his
first album came out," says Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, who just a few
weeks later was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Introducing Prine that night, Kooser compared him to Raymond
Carver, whose stories about "ordinary people elevated them to almost
heroic status. John Prine has taken ordinary people and made monuments of
them, treating them with great respect and love. . . . He is a truly
original writer, unequaled, and a genuine poet of the American
people."
In the auditorium hovered the ghost of another genuine poet of the
American people, one who also imbued his work with humor, homespun wisdom
and empathy for the common man. Sixty-five years earlier to the month,
27-year-old Woody Guthrie sat on the same stage, making his first
recordings and telling folklorist Alan Lomax tales of his Oklahoma
boyhood, freight-train-riding hobo days and other events that shaped his
writing. Highlights were heard soon after on Lomax's national radio show
but the full recordings were not released until 1964.
By contrast, the Prine-Kooser encounter, all 83 minutes of it, was
up on the library's Web site within days and remains its most popular
Webcast, with almost 3,000 visits -- double the number of any of the
library's 400 other Webcasts.
The encounter with Kooser proved downright familial. Kooser, who
worked for an insurance company in Nebraska for 35 years, is one of the
few poet laureates from the midsection of the country. Some of the praise
that critics have sent Kooser's way -- "a haiku-like imagist"
who "draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily
life" to "reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely
ordinary world" -- could apply to Prine. The songwriter offhandedly
supported the "haiku" connection, telling Kooser, "If
you're looking for the big picture, sometimes you've got to get a really
small frame."
Like Kooser, Prine is a cancer survivor. Late in 1997, a carcinoma
was found on the right side of Prine's neck. The surgery to remove it was
not a concern -- the growth wasn't near Prine's vocal cords -- but the six
weeks of radiation therapy that followed was. Prine, whose gruff,
sandpaper baritone was always an instrument of truth, not beauty, gets a
kick out of recalling the concerned radiologist who wanted to shield the
vocal cords during treatment -- until Prine asked, "Have you ever
heard me sing?"
Thirty years of smoking a pack a day obviously hadn't helped. Giving up
that habit affected Prine's voice as much as surgery and radiation. His
voice coarsened a bit and dropped an octave, closer to his conversational
level. The surgery involved removing a small portion of Prine's neck and
refashioning his bite, and he's put on some weight. With his brushy
mustache, the 58-year-old Prine looks like a friendly Joseph Stalin --
except for standup shocks of hair that may be the most electric thing
about him.
"My voice lost its strength for about a year after everything
was over with," Prine recalls. "I could pick up a guitar and
talk, but I had no power to sing. Little by little it came back. When my
voice dropped, I had to drop the key considerably, to where I've got to
carry another guitar that's tuned down two steps. . . . I'm limited in my
chords!"
Typically for Prine, he's found the upside of that change.
"To me, it's like hearing someone else doing a really good rendition
of one of my songs, to where it reawakens me to the song -- except it's me
doing it, so it's double fun for me. I'm very comfortable for the first
time with my singing voice."
A month after his Library of Congress appearance, Prine released
"Fair & Square," his first collection of new songs in nearly
a decade. It offers typically wry Prine observations in "Taking a
Walk," "Crazy as a Loon" and "I Hate It When That
Happens to Me" and the politically charged "Some Humans Ain't
Human." But songs like "Glory of True Love" and "She
Is My Everything" reflect positive changes in Prine's personal life.
They include marriage (Prine's third) to Fiona Whelan, whom he met while
touring in Ireland. They have two sons, Jack and Tom (10 and 9, born 10
months apart, what Prine jokingly calls "Irish twins") as well
as Fiona's 23-year-old, Jody, who's been with Prine since he was 11.
"I didn't have this family 10 years ago when I was writing [the last
new song collection] 'The Missing Years,' " Prine says. "It's
totally changed my life."
Prine grew up in Maywood, where his father moved the family to escape the
coal mines of Kentucky, though they returned each summer to Paradise to
stay with relatives. (Years later, when Paradise existed only in song, a
neighboring town renamed a street John Prine Avenue.) Prine's father, a
tool and die maker who became president of a steelworkers local, was
"a huge country fan, so we had plenty of country music around the
house, though I was later exposed to rock-and-roll and R&B and blues
around Chicago," Prine notes.
The new album's inclusion of a Carter Family song, "Bear Creek
Blues," is a homage to the early influence of older brother Dave
Prine, who played fiddle in local old-timey bands and enlisted his sibling
at 14 to play rhythm guitar, giving him albums by the Carters, Elizabeth
Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt. It was from these that Prine learned the
basic guitar underpinnings -- simple chords and unfussy finger picking --
that shape his writing even now.
"Entirely, because that's all I know," Prine admits with a
chuckle. "I always claim that if somebody else had taught me how to
play guitar, and taught me one Chuck Berry song, I would have written a
few more rock-and-roll songs than I ever did. . . . I'd probably have to
learn from scratch to play guitar any different, but I think my
shortcomings or mistakes have all become a style and strength over the
years."
Soon, Prine became a regular on the Chicago circuit, with other local
songwriters championing him to visitors -- including, one night,
Kristofferson, the man who wrote "Me and Bobby McGee" and
"Help Me Make It Through the Night."
"It was incredible," Kristofferson recalls. "John was
singing some of the best songs I've ever heard, and they still are the
best songs I've ever heard. . . . The best of his songs are timeless.
They're like folk music, completely original and unpredictable."
We had an apartment in the city,
Me and Loretta liked living there
Well, it'd been years since the kids had grown,
A life of their own,
Left us alone.
John and Linda live in Omaha
And Joe is somewhere on the road.
We lost Davy in the Korean War
And I still don't know what for
Don't matter anymore.
You know that old trees just grow stronger
And old rivers grow wilder ev'ry day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say,
"Hello in there, hello."
Kristofferson took Prine to New York, where he auditioned for
Atlantic Records and was signed within 24 hours. Prine's 1971 debut album
included the three songs he'd first gone public with as well as
"Illegal Smile," "Spanish Pipedream," "Your Flag
Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore," "Donald and
Lydia" and "Angel From Montgomery," about the desolation of
a dead-end marriage, told from a woman's point of view.
Bonnie Raitt, beginning her own career at the time, made "Angel From
Montgomery" a cornerstone of her repertoire.
"It's still one of the most powerful songs I've ever heard," she
says now. "It was so moving and so heartbreaking, especially for me
as a young woman."
Raitt says she was immediately enthralled. "I loved John's story --
that he was a mailman, that he'd been in the Army, that he was obviously
from the southern part of the country and moved up. He's salt of the Earth
-- in the old days, Will Rogers was our John Prine."
Like musicians, critics took notice of Prine from the start, but acclaim
never translated into stardom or sales. A certain amount of airplay in the
less restricted days of FM radio, and his charming concert persona, helped
Prine develop a loyal audience, but after five albums for Atlantic and
three more for Asylum, he found himself without a label.
So in the early '80s, Prine and his longtime manager, Al Bunetta, started
Oh Boy (named after the Buddy Holly song), one of the earliest
artist-owned labels. The first Oh Boy album, "Aimless Love,"
came out in 1984; 1991's Grammy-winning "The Missing Years"
featured appearances by Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, who has called
Prine "one of the great ones."
In 1980, Prine moved to Nashville, where one of the first people he met
was songwriter Roger Cook, who'd penned "I'd Like to Teach the World
to Sing" for the New Seekers (later a ubiquitous campaign for
Coca-Cola). Prine ended up marrying an artist Cook was producing, and
their wives became fast friends, "buzzing around Nashville, having a
good time while John and I would be hanging around at midnight, waiting
for them to come home," Cook says. "We'd sit around playing
dominoes, and then we started writing songs together."
The first fruit of their solidarity came in 1983, when Don Williams had a
No. 1 country hit with "Love Is on a Roll." Their other No. 1,
"I Just Want to Dance With You" for George Strait, arrived
providentially in 1998, just as Prine was facing huge hospital bills from
his cancer treatment.
Prine says: "Roger is what I would call a professional songwriter.
He's written a million songs and probably had 50,000 of them recorded --
he goes for odds. If we weren't friends, you probably couldn't get me to
say, 'I want to write a song with this guy.' It's because we play poker
together, play snooker, go fishing and we're both songwriters. When I
write with him, he keeps everything in line. He knows they're not the kind
of songs I write -- and he gets a kick out of that, puts something in to
where it's actually going to have some sort of appeal to it."
Cook, who co-wrote three songs on "Fair &
Square," says of Prine: "He's so happy now. If John's lyrics
lack anything these days, it's that he doesn't have that angst anymore.
He's not pleading his case against the bad and wicked world of things gone
wrong; he reflects life as he sees it, and his lyrics are happier
now."
Another longtime fan, actor-director Billy Bob Thornton, also found a way
to employ Prine at a time when he couldn't record or tour. After meeting a
Prine pal in 1996, Thornton became a phone buddy and a year later invited
the singer to visit him in Los Angeles. "We just hit it off
immediately and hung out for about three days," Prine says. "I
ended up going all over Hollywood with him -- it was like out of the
movies."
For Prine, the greatest treat was lunch at a Chinese restaurant
with one of his heroes, Andy Griffith. Prine calls Griffith "the
consummate American. Like if Abraham Lincoln was alive and I saw him on
TV, he'd be Andy Griffith. You know, Will Rogers or the character Andy
Griffith plays on 'Mayberry' always appealed to me from the time I could
crawl -- the folksy sort. Back then, even Walter Brennan always appealed
to me. I'd known people in actual life who were like that. Except they
weren't like movie people, they also had huge flaws and I could see those,
too."
A year later, Thornton had written a script and secured financing for
"Daddy and Them," a shot-in-Arkansas film starring Thornton,
Prine as his Zen-like older brother imparting knowledge to family members
at the times they most need it -- and Griffith as patriarch of what
Amazon.com called "the most dysfunctional Southern family outside a
Faulkner novel." (Filmed in 1998, the Miramax film wasn't released
until 2001, going directly to DVD and video.)
"I think the best writers are those who write about their life
experience and don't try to come up with something tricky," Thornton
says. "That's what I love about John's songs -- they're just his
observations on life. He has an amazing ability to write songs that are
very emotional and can make you cry, and yet they're funnier than hell.
John's about the best songwriter out there."
When "Daddy and Them" needed a closeout tune, Prine came up with
one of his charmers, "In Spite of Ourselves." Sung as a duet
with Iris DeMent, it echoes Thornton's constantly bickering relationship
with Laura Dern in the film. The lovers have wildly disparate impressions
of each other, but they're also very much in love: "In spite of
ourselves / We'll end up sitting on a rainbow." It was the last new
Prine original to surface before "Fair & Square," doing so
on a 1999 collection of country duets with 10 different female partners,
including Connie Smith, Lucinda Williams, Trisha Yearwood, Emmylou Harris
and his wife, Fiona. Prine's rough-edged voice works with all of them
surprisingly well.
"I always thought it was because if anything would make that voice
more comfortable or soften it, it would always be a woman's voice,"
Prine says with a chuckle.
"And now I'm more into playing live shows than I can remember,"
he says. Surviving cancer, crafting the new collection, getting back on
the road, "it's just revitalized my interest in everything. The old
songs, even though they have been good to me, now they're even better to
me. I enjoy being able to sing those words."
April 9, 2005 - The Library of Congress - Coolidge Auditorium,
Washington DC -
An Evening with John Prine & Poet Laureate Ted Kooser
By:
prinefan
The show is posted in full at the NPR radio site: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4583390
By: Robert Newberger opposite of old hot dog..lol
One word describes it all.....PRICELESS!!.. My dad and I have been huge
Prine fans for thirty plus years.. He reminds me of Prine.. He did the
Navy gig, along w/ the post office jockeying mail.. He also plays the same
style of guitar. The Library of Congress event was amazing, because we
felt like we got to know what John is all about.... Looking forward to
6/18/2005 for the Warner theater concert(5 days after my dad'd
birthday)...
By:
Capt. Holaway I just got out of a poetry reading with Ted Kooser, and he is still stoked about his time with John Prine and the Library of Congress. And justly so. By:
Suzanne I am 16 years old, and my mom and I are HUGE John Prine fans! I skipped lacrosse practice to listen to the discussion at the Library of Congress, and it was great. Prine is so
intelligent and funny and I look to him for inspiration for writing in school. His songs are enduring too... I thought Flag Decal was written recently! haha I think I may be starting a whole new generation of Prine fans. Thank you John Prine for making me think and helping my mom and I get closer together.
(also your older son is pretty cute!) By:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25619-2005Mar10.html Lyrical Accounts
Mutual admiration society: U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and venerable singer-songwriter John Prine.
At the invitation of Kooser, who termed Prine
"an American master," the two scribes sat down for a 90-minute chat
about
writing Wednesday night at the Library of Congress's Coolidge
Auditorium,
reports The Post's Peter Kaufman.
Prine played half a dozen old
favorites
(including "Hello in There," "Sam Stone" and "Souvenirs"), gave some
glimpses into his lyric-crafting process (on his avoidance of grand,
sweeping declarations: "If you're looking for the big picture, you've
got to
get a really small frame sometimes") -- and, at one point, asked Kooser
to
read a poem.
The audience joined the lovefest, too, granting a standing ovation to
Prine -- and perhaps to Kooser as well, for his insightful and
simpatico
questions. But it was a query from the crowd that drew the evening's
sharpest response from Prine.
Asked whether there was "a role for
protest
music anymore," the singer shot back: "I'd say there's a full-time
job."
You were at home that night watching Dan Rather say adios? No problem
-- the
proceedings were recorded and can be heard beginning sometime next week
at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc
. By: Charlie S.
I feel very honored to have been one of about 350 people who attended the literary discussion with Ted Kooser and John Prine at the Coolidge Auditorium. I sat in the seventh row center stage and it was great being that close to John and to watch history in the making. John's wife and three boys sat directly in front of me in row six. As usual John was great. At one point he was asked if there is room in todays music for protest songs and his comment was " I think there is a full time job". I will remember this evening for a long time to come. Thanks John for many years of great songs. You are a true American Folk Hero! By:
Erin M Well I made it to the Library of Congress tonight for the conversation with Mr. Prine. He was introduced by Mr. Ted Kooser.(U.S. Poet Laureate) He looked very appreciative and humble up there on that stage. He talked a bit and answered questions posed to him. Many about specific songs, characters or feelings. It must have been a real challenge to get interviewed in front of an
audience like that. We were given the chance to ask questions (on an index card) and he answered many of them too. Didn't get to mine, though. (Who is Lucky LaRue?) He played songs too, between the talk. Near as I can remember:
Fish and Whistle, Souvenirs, Mexican Home, Flag Decal, Hello in There, and Sam Stone. I sat three rows behind his wife and kids. He introduced them and they all stood up for a moment. I knew who they were before that, though and I just felt so honored to be sharing this night with the whole Prine family and friends. It was a really neat thing to watch his son fidgeting and sliding all
around in his seat, looking up at the ceiling, towards the end. (because it was a long night for a kid!) John said he had to play Flag Decal for his boys or they would be falling asleep. When he got to "...and one on my wife's forehead" they all cracked
up. That was cool to see that and at the end, when he got a standing ovation, John was actually blushing.... Just makes you love him all the more. Like I said, I was so honored and thankful to have been there. I still can't believe it was free.
Free but priceless.
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