Daddy Won’t You Take Me Back to Vanderburgh County: John Prine Plays The Centre

The last three months in Evansville will have witnessed a string of high profile concerts by singer-songwriter legends. First, we were treated in August to a performance by one of the originators of the 60s folk revival and most revered songwriters of all time, Bob Dylan. By September 30^th, we will have seen Canadian songster Gordon Lightfoot, who has been at it almost as long as Dylan (over 40 years), who has had one of his songs covered by Dylan, who cites Dylan as a major early influence, and who is a lovely man to interview, by the way. Hear an MP3 version my recent interview with “Gord” at www.news4uonline.com. </shameless_plug>

The third Von Braun rocket in this musical blitzkrieg arrives on October 24^th at 8 p.m. at The Centre. It is then, my fellow citizens, friends, and Americans, that we will be treated to a performance by my personal favorite of the three, John Prine, who was called “the new Bob Dylan” when he first started out in the early 1970s.

            As with Dylan, I have had the opportunity to see John Prine a number of times – three to be exact. Once in Central City, Kentucky in 2001, once in Louisville at the Palace Theatre, and once, I believe, at The Centre. (Too many beers that night to remember where I was, I suppose.) With a skeleton crew band featuring himself on acoustic, Jason Wilber on mandolin, harmonica, slide and electric guitar, and Dave Jacques on upright acoustic bass, Prine has found an ideal arrangement. I doesn’t hurt that he draws from an extensive song repertoire replete with sad, fingerpicking ballads and folksy comedy numbers spanning a 36-year career and these songs happen to work very well with this three-piece, bluegrass-inspired instrumentation. It also doesn’t hurt that the songs themselves are so good they are often capable of making you laugh and cry at the same time – a difficult thing to explain away to bystanders when you have your headphones on. I dare anyone, even the most hardened of hearts, to try listening to his 1971 song “Far From Me” without tearing up a bit.

            John Prine is no stranger to the awards podium. He’s won an AMA Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting, AMA Artist of the Year, a BBC Radio Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting, and a Grammy for his 1991 release The Missing Years, the title track of which muses with hilarious effect about those “missing years” between ages 12 and 30 when Jesus dropped off the historical radar.

            Most will find familiarity somewhere in his catalogue, usually with the hits “Sam Stone,” about a self-destructive Vietnam vet who is a junky and hurts everyone near him, “Paradise,” about the little town in Muhlenburg County, Kentucky, that gets sacrificed at the alter of Mr. Peabody’s notion of “progress,” or “Illegal Smile,” about…well you can probably guess what that one’s about through the title.

But some of his best work still lies stuffed behind the cushions, tucked away on his middle period albums, languishing in relative obscurity. “The Bottomless Lake” is one that springs to mind. It’s a riotous ditty about an ill-fated trip that sees a whole family take a dip in a bottomless lake with their car windows rolled up. Then there are songs like “One Red Rose” that will just damn near bleed your tear ducts dry. But where Prine perhaps shines most is on the songs that manage to be lyrically unconventional in a Beckish sort of way while maintaining a deep root of emotion that leaves you breathless. On the song “He Was In Heaven Before He Died,” Prine manages to combine humorous, metaphoric whimsy and poignant poetic sentiment seamlessly in a song that talks about something familiar to this area – the Wabash River. “Well I smiled on the Wabash the last time we passed it/Yes I gave her a wink from the passenger side/My foot fell asleep as I swallowed my candy/knowing he was in heaven before he died,” goes the chorus, while the verses sing a lamentation about the human condition that transcends time and station. “The sun can play tricks with your eyes on the highway/The moon can lay sideways ‘til the ocean stands still/but a person can’t tell his best friend he loves him/’til time has stopped breathing/You’re alone on the hill.”

This is the kind of lyric that makes aspiring songwriters throw down their pens in shame and disgust, but it’s the kind of poetry that has seemed to pour naturally from Prine throughout his career. With his scratchy, disarming, cowboy-twang of a vocal, he has disarmed the hearts and inflamed the minds of millions of people. I can almost guarantee this great and important artist will do the same for you on Oct. 24^th …if you let him.

Tickets for this show are $50.50 and $40.50 and can be ordered by calling (812) 423-7222 in Indiana and (270) 926-6661 in Kentucky. He will be joined by female singer/songwriter Kate Campbell, who has already released a staggering 11 albums since 1994 and has been called “one of the most unique artists recording today.”

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Beck: Odelay

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Like its creator's freewheeling songwriting process, Odelay is a monument to wondrously precise pastiche. It's a glowing junkyard of musical styles, absurdist images, distorted samples, postmodern anti-emotions.