KC Confidential.com

On the surface, John Prine on Saturday night at the Midland by AMC might have passed for any older man in a black suit with a guitar around his neck singing a little hoarser and talking a little wiser than he used to.

You might expect that from any serious veteran of words and music. But you might not expect songs so sad they’re sweet and so sweet they’re sad without a still-evolving genius being involved.

As the years have turned into decades, it has become a greater temptation to just be done with it and put a tag on Prine’s sleeve right next to the heart he wears there that reads: “America’s Greatest Living Singer-Songwriter.” Of course, he would fight it. He’s too humble for that.

But even when Prine, 62, pretends to be shallow – like when he makes fun of his own guitar playing or talks about how he once tried to write a bad song but somehow or another it still turned out good – he is unavoidably deep.

For almost two hours before a rightfully reverential and thrilled near-capacity crowd of 2,200, Prine shared his profound gift for getting to the point without rushing, for taking care with his message without coddling and for transporting other humans to places where they may think they have never been yet have already visited.

Prine received several standing ovations, beginning with his entrance. He bowed at the waist, said “hello,” and began strumming his acoustic. Out came the jaunty “Spanish Pipedream” and its unlikely pairing of two people – “She was a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol and I was just a soldier on my way to Montreal” – who spark a romance and find happiness by blowing up their TV and going to the country.

It quickly became apparent that Prine was stirring the crowd’s emotions with two extremely capable sidemen: Jason Wilber on electric guitar and mandolin and Dave Jacques on stand-up and electric bass. Their accompaniment was fascinatingly subtle while still offering chosen moments of brilliance, especially Wilber, whose exquisite picking and slide work could make you drop your jaw and forget to close it. Heck, mine may still be open.

As the applause faded after the first number, Prine asked, “How ya doin’?”

“Alright!” the fans called back as one.

“I’m feelin’ just about the same way,” he said.

True enough for Prine the person, yet Prine the artist next offered the heart-aching “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” (“What in the world’s come over you and what in heaven’s name have you done… you’re out there runnin’ just to be on the run”).

Like so many of his songs, it sought to understand a peculiar course of events while also communicating hard-earned knowledge, which was also true in the gentle mull of “Souvenirs”:

“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”

Prine ended the song by dedicating it to his late friend and fellow songwriter, Steve Goodman. The applause that followed brought chills.

A breezier stretch followed with the funny but hardly frivolous message of both physical and spiritual donation of body parts and other post-mortem giveaways in “Please Don’t Bury Me” (“down in the cold, cold ground, no, I’d rather have ’em cut me up and pass me all around):

“Venus de Milo can have my arms

Look out! I’ve got your nose

Sell my heart to the junkman

And give my love to Rose”

Those lyrics brought smiles, and the singer’s between-song patter got laughs.

“I’m endin’ up taller than my microphone tonight,” Prine said, looking down at his stand-up mic. “Somebody must have put somethin’ in my shoes.”

He introduced “Fish and Whistle” by explaining that it was a song he tried to write badly enough so that a bossy record producer would let him stop working on an album. But it didn’t turn out the way that Prine planned.

“After I sang it a couple hundred times,” he said, “I started likin’ it.”

So did the audience at the Midland, which undoubtedly appreciated the lively ditty’s Huck Finnish take on life and religion.

“Father forgive us for what we must do

You forgive us, we’ll forgive you

We’ll forgive each other till we both turn blue

Then we’ll whistle and go fishin’ in heaven”

Prine kept the good feelings going with “Glory of True Love,” which he wrote with “an old buddy of mine from Bristol, England, named Roger Cook,” he said. “When we were in the middle of writing this song, I kind of had my mind on my wife. And I was hoping he didn’t.”

The lyrics told why:

“You can climb the highest mountain

Touch the moon and stars above

But Old Faithful’s just a fountain

Compared to the glory of true love”

The grandeur of this show included many shout-outs and hoots of approval from audience members. Prine offered his own call of the wild in “Crazy as a Loon” – both his own sardonic falsetto impression of the bird as well as the song’s titular metaphor of a fellow who feels like he’s going nuts from trouble following him, when, of course, it’s really him who’s following trouble. Still, the self-delusion was eloquent:

“I headed down to Nashville

To become a country star

Every night you’d find me hangin’

At every honky-tonk and bar

Pretty soon I met a woman

Pretty soon she done me wrong

Pretty soon my life got sadder

Than any country song”

Nearly every selection had a story behind it that Prine charismatically shared, but none was more amusingly uncomfortable than the one that went with “All the Best.”

“This song is for you, if your ex has ever called up and invited you to her wedding,” Prine said, eliciting compassionate laughter from the crowd. “And then she asks you to get up and sing one for her. I figure always be prepared.”

The tune was suitably pretty and gave a nod to being a good sport (“I wish you love and happiness”). But Prine got in the last shot with the lyric: “I wish you don’t do like ‘I Do’ and ever fall in love with someone like you.”

After cutting to the bone with the classic ballad, “Angel From Montgomery” (“To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”), Prine undertook a meaningful solo set that included “Christmas in Prison (“The searchlight in the big yard swings round with the gun and spotlights the snowflakes like the dust in the sun”) and the doomed Vietnam vet junkie elegy, “Sam Stone” (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose”).

But the highlight of Prine by his lonesome onstage was his 1971 comical anti-establishment ode to organic self-help, ‘Illegal Smile.” The crowd loudly joined in on the defiantly laid-back chorus:

“And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile

It don’t cost very much, but it lasts a long while

Won’t you please tell the Man I didn’t kill anyone

No, I’m just tryin’ to have me some fun”

The final time that the chorus came around, a beaming Prine said, “It’s your turn to sing,” and let the audience handle it. After receiving another standing ovation, he said: “Aw, you just like to hear yourself sing.”

That we did. I dare say it was a moment that anyone lucky enough to be there will never forget.

When Prine was rejoined by his bassist and guitarist, he shared the tragic and tender balladry of “Hello in There,” movingly addressing the plight of the lonesome elderly; and “Lake Marie,” a marathon combination of spoken words, a wistful chorus and a climactic instrumental finish that inventively interwove American Indian history, the story of a man trying to save his marriage and the promise of “peaceful waters.”

Prine left the stage to yet another standing ovation, but soon returned for an encore with his two sidemen as well as opening singer Carrie Rodriguez, who proved a worthy duet partner in the upbeat romantic send-up, “In Spite of Ourselves.”

The wonderful show concluded with “Paradise,” whose ear-pleasing traditional twang seemingly contradicted the song’s sorry tale of a coal mining company destroying a beautiful passel of land.

But that’s Prine for you, mixing up his poetry so it feels as complicated as real life.

Brian McTavish