Concert review: John Prine at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium
As is the case with the best singer/songwriters, the works that John Prine didn’t play at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Wednesday, Oct. 30, are comparably impressive to the entertaining and enriching collection that he ultimately assembled.
In an early sign of the mutual reverence that defined the evening, the Asheville crowd offered a pleasant surprise of packing the house for opening act Ben Dickey — a rarity for non-headliners, but then this was a rare audience. Perhaps best known for playing Blaze Foley in Ethan Hawke’s 2018 biopic Blaze, the towering Dickey impressed attendees with a big, fleshed-out sound produced by merely his guitar and voice.
His warm performance offered just the right precursor for the 73-year-old headliner and his four-piece backing band bereft of anyone from Dickey’s generation. His head slightly more bent than the last time this reviewer saw him perform (2007 at Cary’s Koka Booth Amphitheatre), Prine nevertheless commanded the stage with a still-powerful voice that appeared unchanged, moving between timeless originals — made with non-trendy instruments, and told with a lyrical wit and heart that keep them fresh — and new additions from his 2018 album The Tree of Forgiveness, made in the same manner and likewise built to last.
When he wasn’t elating the crowd with sequences like a potent full-band rendition of “Angel from Montgomery” followed by a solo take on the sniffle-inducing “Souvenirs,” Prine tickled funny bones with a host of anecdotes, none more hilarious than the fishing-trip story that inspired recent release “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967.”
After a pair of harmonious duets with Dickey, including an especially riveting cover of Foley’s “Clay Pigeons,” Prine shared the story of his first public performance of an original song and how it was followed by nearly 30 seconds of silence. He then played that tune, none other than the Vietnam vet ballad “Sam Stone,” and the stunned quiet of a roomful of blown minds quickly made perfect sense.
The band back together, the ensemble closed out the set with a raucous working of “Lake Marie” that got Prine so filled with the need to dance that he set aside his guitar and took to shuffling like a man possessed, stepping around his instrument as he did the Septuagenarian Boogie offstage.
The glorious sight would have been a fitting exclamation mark at the end of a fulfilling night, but a proper encore ensued with the cheery new “When I Get to Heaven” and a full-crew dose of “Paradise,” featuring vocals from Dickey and Prine’s wife Fiona. Celebratory as these final songs felt, their tales of impermanence provided a sobering reminder that the artist’s remaining Asheville shows are likely few, but regardless of Prine’s remaining time on Earth, the show further solidified that his impact on current and future generations will doubtlessly endure.
(Photo by Danny Clinch)
