Atwood Concert Hall, Center for the Performing Arts, Anchorage, AK
October 26, 2002

By: jed
I just wanted to say that the concert was one of the best shows that I have ever seen. It was my first John Prine show, I am 24 years old. I loved it. My wife and I were moving from Alaska and had to wait three weeks to see the concert. We are very glad that we waited. Jeff Ross and Selene Copeland "you got gold inside of you" John Prine p.s. loved the one leg wiggle.

By: John "Howler" aka CREAMSTER
    I saw John Prine fifteen years ago in Anchorage. I'm a big Prine fan, like countless others, and I've seen him perform outside of the Last Frontier, too. However, I patiently waited for him to come back to Alaska. OK, ok, maybe I did grow a bit impatient. To be frank, I almost gave up entirely! But, man oh man, it was worth the wait! I hope he remains true to his word, and he doesn't take so long to return. You know the only down side to any Prine show is that you always go away from the auditorium wishing he would have played a few more songs! (I guess that's what all those records, tapes and CDs are for. Lord knows, I've got enough of 'em to listen for hours...)

By: Jim O'Toole
    In the middle of "Illegal Smile" on Saturday night, I turned to my girlfriend, who had never heard of John Prine before, and asked her if I was singing too loud. She laughed and said "It doesn't matter, everyone else is singing too." That probably says as much about John Prine as anything. People lose themselves in his music as he seems to be singing to you alone about you or people you know. John Prine mesmerized the 2200 people who packed the PAC with his 2 hour show, interrupted only briefly for drinks of water, an occasional short story, and introductions of the two musicians who played brilliantly behind him throughout most of the evening. I was one long time Prine fan who was seeing him live for the first time and I couldn't help wondering if the cracks in his voice were normal, a result of his being a little tired from his current tour or, more likely, a reminder of his recovery from the throat cancer. In the end it didn't matter a bit. Even his forgetting the lyrics to "Sam Stone" ("I've never messed up this song in my life" he said) brought a loud ovation that seemed to inspire him to crank out even more of the emotion that we have come to love about him all these years. Anchorage is hoping that John will be true to his promise that "I won't wait fifteen years to come back to Alaska this time" as the crowd quieted after a roof splitting ovation brought him back on stage for four more songs. "Paradise" ended the show. I didn't hear anyone singing along. The crowd was buzzing all the way out the doors and down the streets of Anchorage where unseasonably warm temperatures seemed appropriate given the warmth that had been generated inside. John Prine, one of America's truly great song-writers, had given us far more than we could have hoped for. Come on back anytime, John. We'll help you with the words whenever you need it.

By: Susan Morgan
VOICE IS THE LEAST OF PRINE'S CONCERNS
http://www.adn.com/weekend/story/2019397p-2120604c.html

    When Bonnie Raitt introduced special guest John Prine on a recent "Austin City Limits" public television concert, she called her old friend "one of the great treasures."
    And when it came time for Prine's solo on "Angel From Montgomery," the song he wrote and Raitt made a heart-rending standard, the audience cheered.
    "When I was a young girl," Prine sang incongruously, to whoops from the crowd, "I had me a cowboy."
    By the time the duo harmonized the drawn-out final line -- "To believe in this living is just a harrrrrrrd way to goooooooo" -- it was to a standing ovation.
    Nobody sings his own songs -- or anybody else's, for that matter -- like Prine, who comes to Anchorage for one long-awaited show on Saturday.
    Funny thing is, the man Rolling Stone magazine described as possessing "the rumpled, slightly cracked benevolence of a 19th century Dickens character" and a South Dakota reviewer once said looked "a bit like a squirrel" might never have been a musician at all. Instead, the Illinois native with the out-of-control hairdo spent six years as a Chicago mailman. Disgruntled, to hear him tell it.
    "Walking the streets as a mailman is kind of like being in a library with no books," he told Rolling Stone. "You go for hours and hours without seeing anybody."
    Luckily for everyone involved, in 1970 Prine wandered into open-mike night at a Chicago bar. After he complained about the talent, someone asked if he thought he could do better. Fueled by a few beers, he did, performing tunes that would later become Prine classics, like "Hello in There" and "Sam Stone." The club owner promptly signed him for more appearances.
    It was at that club, The Earl of Old Town, that Prine met future best friend Steve Goodman, who'd written "The City of New Orleans," which Prine called "the best railroad song ever recorded." Both men were eventually "discovered" (Prine after Goodman brought Kris Kristofferson to the club to hear him) and signed to record labels. Goodman died of leukemia in 1984.
    In 1995, Prine told National Public Radio's Scott Simon about an early gig at the Bitter End, when Bob Dylan came onstage to jam.
    "It was (intimidating)," Prine told Simon. "Actually, at the time, it was intimidating for me to sing my songs for anybody."
    Over the next three decades, Prine recorded numerous solo and collaborative albums, eventually playing in all 50 states. "It took me 56 years to do it," he told a South Dakota audience earlier this year.
    Among the memorable tunes he penned over the years were the coy "Illegal Smile," "Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" and the pseudo-plaintive "Dear Abby."
    Prine has said he wrote the latter song in Rome, where he found the ubiquitous columnist to be the only relief in a newspaper filled with "all the tragic news in the world crammed into six pages."
    According to a Web site devoted to Prine, somebody took a verse of the song -- changed enough so it no longer rhymed -- and sent it to Abby herself. The song version goes:
    "Dear Abby, Dear Abby, you won't believe this/ But my stomach makes noises whenever I kiss/ "My girlfriend tells me it's all in my head/ But my stomach just tells me to write you instead/ "Signed, Noise-maker."
    In the song, the columnist advised: "Noise-maker, Noise-maker, you have no complaint/ You are what you are and you ain't what you ain't/ So listen up buster and listen up good/ Stop wishin' for bad luck and knockin' on wood."
    The Web site reports that in this case, when the real Abby answered the bogus letter in her column, she suggested the writer seek professional help.
    While few can match Prine's way with a poetic lyric, he's also been known to ruffle feathers. A prime example is 1994's "Jesus, the Missing Years": "It was raining. It was cold/ West Bethlehem was no place for a 12-year-old," the song begins as it chronicles Jesus' imaginary travels through Europe as he danced, watched movies ("Rebel Without a Cause"), married unhappily, discovered the Beatles, recorded with the Stones and eventually opened for "old George Jones."
    "So Jesus went to Heaven and he went there awful quick/ All them people killed him and he wasn't even sick," Prine noted in the final verse.
    He told Rolling Stone that one unhappy listener sent him that particular CD broken in half. "I thought it was kind of hard to break a CD."
    After previous nominations, Prine finally received a Grammy -- for best contemporary folk recording -- for 1991's "The Missing Years." He told Rolling Stone that winning was "pretty darn neat."
    Prine had a health scare a few years back, undergoing surgery for throat cancer. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the surgeon was concerned about saving Prine's singing voice.
    "I told him, 'Doc, apparently you haven't heard me sing before. You'd know that should be the least of your concerns.' "

JOHN PRINE plays in Atwood Concert Hall at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26. The concert is sold out.

By: Dermot Cole
John Prine's audience savors 'Souvenirs' from Hering concert http://www.news-miner.com/Stories/0,1413,113%257E7254%257E952870,00.html

    JOHN PRINE RETURNED to Fairbanks for the third time in the past two decades and his fans filled every seat in Hering Auditorium for what may have been his strongest performance here yet.
    He set the tone for the evening of story and song when he said, "I've been away for quite a while from Fairbanks." A second later a bit of trouble with a guitar led him to add, "My guitar has been away even longer."
    Prine's self-deprecating humor and his ability to tell a good story, no matter if he's talking or singing, have always set him apart. After Prine played without a break for two hours and 15 minutes, he received two standing ovations Friday night.
    When Prine released his first album 31 years ago, a Rolling Stone reviewer said, "If he's this good this young, time should be on his side."
    Prine's strength is that he writes about ordinary events in an extraordinary way. My brother Kevin in Cincinnati, who introduced me to John Prine's music in 1972, puts it this way, "He gives voice to something you didn't know was there but now that he's told you, you will never forget it."
    Prine has a lot of miles on him, but in a strange way he seems better suited to many of his classic songs today than he was three decades ago. Of the couple of dozen songs he played Friday, nine of them came from that remarkable first record, which tells me that time is on his side.
    He's no longer the fresh-faced kid sitting on a bale of straw who graced that early album cover, but his eloquent songs are more powerful today when delivered by a 56-year-old with a lifetime of experience behind him and a voice as smooth as sandpaper. He won a Grammy for "The Missing Years" in 1991 and remains a first-rate wordsmith.
    Prine had several bottles of water on the stage and he drank before and after every song and not just because of the climate. After he came down with neck cancer in 1997, doctors had to remove his saliva glands, so his mouth gets as dry as his sense of humor.
    The Fairbanks audience did not consist entirely of people who know his songs, which was apparent when there was a smattering of laughter at the references to the fat girl in the beginning of "Donald and Lydia," a tender song about dreams and loneliness.
    But most of the audience, at the concert arranged by Trudy Heffernan of Acoustic Adventures, knew that song as well as all of the others, with the possible exception of one song he has yet to record that he wrote while recuperating from hip replacement surgery. Prine joked that his new titanium hip is supposed to last up to 30 years, which is longer than he will last. "I hope the family enjoys it," he said of the titanium joint.
    The audience sang along heartily to "Illegal Smile," a tune that Prine insists was written about his propensity to laugh to himself at things that other people don't find funny.
    He did update the lyrics on that one. The original included a reference to Judge Julius Hoffman, who handled the Chicago 7 trial. In the song's revised litany of bad things that can happen to a guy, he said, "I went to court and the judge's name was Ashcroft."
    In one of his asides to the audience, Prine said there are stories about lots of his songs and sometimes the stories are better than the songs.
    He said there are three stories about "Fish and Whistle" and he decided to tell the middle one.
    In 1966, Prine and three of his buddies were drafted on the same day. They passed the physical and were given aptitude tests "so we could be all we wanted to be."
    Prine said he never looked at the questions, but wrote down random answers on the multiple-choice form. The results came back that he was a "mechanical genius," which is how he was placed in charge of a motorpool with construction equipment.
    He said the only good thing was that the huge nuts on the bulldozers and cranes were easy to spot in the maintenance manuals.
    "I remember one morning we had an inspection and we had one too many bulldozers. That's just as bad as being one short, so we buried it," he said.
    Prine told stories about his mother and father and some of his friends, including Steve Goodman and Iris DeMent. His mom died a little more than a month ago and he told a story about her favorite of his many songs.
    It's a song on Prine's second album that has been as closely associated with Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984, as Prine
    "Steve had a way of playing guitar on this song that it would sound like it was my guitar and therefore it would make it sound like I could play," Prine said. "It was also my mother's favorite song.
    "I was working at this little club in Chicago called the Fifth Peg, just one night a week. I was delivering mail during the day. I didn't know if they were going to throw me out of the club or not. I had been singing there for about four weeks in a row and I was driving down to the club," he said.
    He thought to himself that many of the same people might be in attendance and he would probably need a new song to go with his earliest songs, "Hello in There," "Sam Stone," "Paradise" and others.
    Prine said he had the melody to the new song in his head, but his guitar was in the trunk of his car. "I had myself convinced by the time I got to the club that the melody that I'd come up with had about 15 different jazz chords in it."
    "Soon as I got there I took my Martin and went to the men's room and I played this song and it was with the same three chords I always play," he said.
    After that introduction, he launched into "Souvenirs," playing the chords of G, C and D.
   

The chorus is a good keepsake: "Memories, they can't be boughten. They can't be won at carnivals for free. Well it took me years, to get those souvenirs. And I don't know how they slipped away from me."

By: Ima Prinefan

http://www.homernews.com/stories/102402/pho_102402pho0030001.shtml  
LIVING LEGEND Much to the delight of his loyal fans, folk legend John Prine, left, returned to Homer after a 15-year absence, playing two predominantly acoustic shows at the Mariner Theatre. Here Prine, left, performs "Souvenirs," one of his most beloved songs, with guitarist Jason Wilber.

Thanks John