My tribute to John Prine.

https://bit.ly/RememberingPrine

Music fans in  North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad have had the good fortune for years to have regular opportunities to hear the Vagabond Saints’ Society. The all-star band, led by Doug Davis, pays tribute to great artists from rock history, including Prince, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Queen, Cheap Trick, and many others. For January and February 2019, they made their most ambitious plans to date: a show of Tom Waits songs they would take to venues from Wilmington, N.C., to Johnson City, Tenn. Mitchell Snow, a VSS veteran from the group’s early days, returned from his current home in Toronto to handle the bulk of the lead vocal duties.

Unfortunately, a medical emergency intervened. Snow had a cardiac emergency a few songs into the first show in Johnson City. Some quick-thinking medical pros in the audience helped save his life, and he’s now recovering after surgery and doing well. The VSS had to cancel the rest of the Waits shows.

Which meant Go Triad, the weekly entertainment section of the News & Record and one of my regular writing outlets, no longer had any need for a story about the Greensboro show VSS had planned at the Crown in the Carolina Theatre. Here it is, a preview for a show that never took place:

Mitchell Snow heard the comparisons so often that he avoided singing Tom Waits songs for years.

“When I was a teenager, I thought if I could marry Bob Dylan lyrics to Howlin’ Wolf music, that would be really interesting,” Snow said. “Well of course it was, because somebody had already done it. I didn’t know that at the time.”

Snow has finally embraced the stylistic similarities – at least for a few concerts. He will handle the main vocal duties when Winston-Salem’s Vagabond Saints’ Society (VSS) returns to Greensboro Feb. 1 for a show of Waits songs in the Crown at the Carolina Theatre.

VSS has been around for well over a decade, paying homage to some of the biggest names in popular music history (Prince, David Bowie, the Beatles) and more obscure favorites (XTC, the Velvet Underground). A core group of musicians led by Doug Davis plays behind a stream of guest singers.

Most of their past performances have been in and around Winston-Salem, though VSS has brought two previous shows to the Blind Tiger in Greensboro: Tom Petty and Chicago. For Waits, they’re doing a full-fledged tour that includes the Crown show as well as performances in Johnson City, Tenn., Wilmington, Raleigh, Charlotte and the Ramkat in Winston-Salem Jan. 26.

“Most of our shows are designed to be community projects,” said Davis, who performs regularly with the Plaids, Magnolia Green and the Solid Citizens. “It’s not in our nature to want or need to take it out on the road. But a show like this is a little bit less of a community show and a little bit more of a showpiece. We just decided that it was unusual enough and it might have enough cachet that it might be of interest.”

Waits released his debut album in 1973 and has recorded a couple dozen records in the 46 years since. He is also an actor who has appeared in films such as “Rumblefish,” “Down by Law” and “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” the recent collection of Western shorts by the Coen Brothers on Netflix.

Thom Jurek summarized Waits’s sound for the All Music website: “In the work of American songwriter Tom Waits, swampy blues, Beat poetry, West Coast jazz, Tin Pan Alley, country, 1930s-era cabaret, and post-Civil War parlor songs meet neon-lit carnival music, and the wheezing, clattering, experimental rhythms (often played by makeshift musical instruments from car radios to metal pipes and tin cans …) form a keenly individual musical universe.”

Davis’s “showpiece” characterization comes from Waits’s unique style combined with Snow handling most of the lead vocals (along with acoustic guitar). Snow is a Davie County native and founding member of VSS who played in several bands with Davis, but he moved to Toronto years ago after marrying a Canadian woman.

This will Snow’s first time back with VSS in nearly 10 years. He previously sang lead on shows featuring the songs of other performers with distinctive, unconventional vocals: Bob Dylan and Nick Cave.

“I am the worst singer in the Vagabond Saints, easily,” Snow said. “But this will be the third full show that I have sang fronting the band, which is more than anyone else has ever done.”

Other members of the band include Davis on guitars and vocals; Randall Johnson on standup bass; and Corky McClellan on drums and percussion. Davis usually concentrates on keyboards, but guitarist Jerry Chapman couldn’t make the Waits tour, so Davis shifted into the guitar slot.

The keyboard player for the Waits shows is Jack Gorham, a High Point resident who manages Collector’s Antique Mall in Asheboro. He first played with the group in 2016 when VSS honored “The Last Waltz,” the farewell concert by the original lineup of The Band.

Like Snow, Gorham has been compared to Waits without previously knowing his music.

“Listening to this music, and listening to the lyrics and listening to the structure, I can see why people have said that to me,” Gorham said. “In hindsight, I didn’t realize what a high compliment I was getting. I feel like I’ve been introduced to an old friend.”

As much as he appreciates the comparison, writing his own keyboard parts for the songs has been a challenge. Gorham will play piano, organ, accordion and an instrument new to him: marimba.

“I was familiar with ‘The Last Waltz,’ and I knew what I was getting into,” Gorham said. “This is much different. The writing style is pretty far flung. It’s got everything from songs that sound like Klezmer music to New Orleans to real American folk to something that sounds like it could come out of the American standard jazz book. It’s an amazing collection of music.”

The Waits shows will begin with a brief overview of Waits’s early music and feature a series of guest vocalists from the cities where VSS is performing. Snow will take the mike for the rest of the show, a deep dive into the albums Waits has made beginning with such early 1980s classics as Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs.

“It’s all when he got weird, onward,” Snow said.

This week I’ll hit the road to talk about John Prine: In Spite of Himself in the North Carolina mountains, then return home to Greensboro this weekend to talk about it some more – with some friends helping out in Greensboro by singing a few Prine songs. I’ll be in good company from the highlands to the Piedmont, yakking with veteran musicians and producers Jim Rooney and Chris Stamey, as well as authors Elaine Neil Orr and Emily Edwards.

Up first is the annual conference for the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance, which takes place in Montreat, N.C., May 16 – 20. At 4 p.m. Thursday I will have the great honor of joining Jim Rooney for a panel called “Writing About Folk Music.” Prine fans will recognize Rooney as co-producer of some of the singer’s finest albums, including Aimless Love, German Afternoons, John Prine Live, In Spite of Ourselves, and For Better, or Worse. He also managed the legendary Club 47 in Cambridge in the mid ’60s, served as director of the Newport Folk Festival, and produced the first New Orleans Jazz Festival 50 years ago. Rooney’s memoir, In It for the Long Run: A Musical Odyssey, is an entertaining and enlightening look back over an incredibly diverse career.

My adopted hometown will host the first Greensboro Bound Literary Festival May 17 – 20, featuring such luminaries as Daniel Pink, Naima Coster, Stacy McAnulty, Carmen Maria Machado, Kevin Powers, Beth Macy, Nikki Giovanni, and John T. Edge. I will participate in two events on Saturday. At 2 p.m., a panel on writing memoirs and biographies will pair me with Elaine Neil Orr, author of the 2003 memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life. She also wrote the novels A Different Sun and Swimming Between Worlds – the latter set in Winston-Salem in the 1960s.

A musical event will help close out the festivities Saturday night. At 8:30 p.m. I will join Chris Stamey, legendary musician and producer. Highlights of his long and varied career include co-founding the dB’s, power-pop pioneers from Winston-Salem by way of Hoboken; releasing a series of acclaimed solo albums; and producing albums for Whiskeytown, Alejandro Escovedo, Tres Chicas, and others. He recently published a memoir, A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories. It’s part of the same American Music Series from the University of Texas Press that produced my book.

After a brief Q&A with me, Stamey will read from his book and play some songs, accompanied by cello and violin. Then Emily Edwards and I will read from our books and offer up music courtesy of our friends Sam Frazier, Big Ron Hunter, and the duo of Skip Staples and Bob Costner. Edwards’s second book, Bars, Blues, and Booze: Stories from the Drink House, was published by the University Press of Mississippi. I wrote about it in 2016 for UNCG’S Research magazine.

By the way – the Greensboro Bound events are all free! See you there.

There’s a line Bob Dylan sings in “Mississippi” that could be taken as a comment on the work he was doing at that time: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” The song appeared on what would turn out to be a late-career masterpiece – even if Dylan’s “Love and Theft” album is now almost old enough to vote.

The line applies equally well to John Prine’s new late-career masterpiece, The Tree of Forgiveness, out today. His voice and songwriting will never equal what they were in Prine’s heyday as a New Dylan, during the waning days of the Nixon administration, but his fans couldn’t ask for a more engaging, delightfully wry album from Prine 40 odd years later.

Like “Love and Theft,” The Tree of Forgiveness is a mordant reflection on death and dying that’s great fun to listen to, Grandpa gleefully dishing dirt to the kids at a family reunion – or maybe a wake. While Prine’s new record has its bleak moments (the mid-album “Summer’s End” and “Caravan of Fools” in particular), they’re surrounded by steady flashes of his trademark wit, warmth, surreal imagery, and sheer joy at being alive. Prine has survived cancer scares and lost a steady stream of friends and loved ones (some referenced by name in the closing cut, “When I Get to Heaven”), and while he clearly sees the Grim Reaper lurking in the shadows, he mostly flips Death the bird and goes about his business across the 10 tracks of The Tree of Forgiveness.

This is Prine’s first album of new material in well over a decade, following a duo album of chestnuts with Mac Wiseman, his third live album, a collection of early demos and radio appearances, a vinyl reissue of his classic 1991 album The Missing Years, and – most memorably – For Better, or Worse, the 2016 sequel to his classic 1999 album of duets with female singers, In Spite of Ourselves. It was a worthy followup, despite breaking no new ground. I’m quite happy to report that my assumptions about the death of Prine’s songwriting muse were completely unfounded. (Though he’ll be 84 if he waits another 13 years to follow up this one.)

The first few listens to The Tree of Forgiveness haven’t revealed any masterpieces, to my ears, but it’s an album full of the stuff of Prine legend, from the downhome imagery of “Knockin’ On Your Screen Door,” the lead track, to “When I Get to Heaven,” a jug band romp about the afterlife. That final track includes spoken-word passages reminiscent of 1990s Prine classics such as “Jesus the Missing Years” and “Lake Marie,” a playful dig at music critics (“those syphilitic parasatics”), and this memorable passage:

I always will remember the words my daddy said
He said, “Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead peckerhead”
I hope to prove him wrong

Prine sounds more reverent than ever on The Tree of Forgiveness, even with his customary irreverence never more than a couplet or two away. “When I Get to Heaven” is a laundry list of the things Prine wants to do in the afterlife, from smoking a cigarette nine miles long to catching up with his late brother Doug, parents, and maternal aunts (“’cause that’s where all the love starts”).

Several old friends and one comparatively new one helped Prine write these songs. He has been collaborating with most of these guys for decades: Pat McLaughlin, Roger Cook, and Keith Sykes. McLaughlin co-wrote “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone),” the Prine song with the most memorable title since “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone.” It’s a lightly rollicking reflection on mortality worthy of another wry songwriter who routinely laughed in the face of death, the late Warren Zevon.

One song, “God Only Knows,” was resurrected from a memorable writing session 40 years ago with Wall of Sound producer-turned-convicted murderer Phil Spector. (Prine and Spector also co-wrote “If You Don’t Want My Love” from 1978’s Bruised Orange at that time.) But Prine and McLaughlin penned “Caravan of Fools” with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, who was born the year Prine’s sixth album came out. “Boundless Love,” a sweet song with Prine backed mostly by a subdued organ, is a kissin’ cousin to the title track of the singer’s 1984 album Aimless Love.

There’s no mistaking the ravages of time and health problems on Prine’s voice, which was never what you’d call dulcet in the first place. But he and producer Dave Cobb (who has worked with a host of Prine acolytes, from Sturgill Simpson to Jason Isbell) wisely hang it out there in all its ragged glory, with spare accompaniment relegated almost entirely to the background. Name guests Isbell, Amanda Shires, and Brandi Carlile barely register as anything more than background vocalists, hired guns. From beginning to end, The Tree of Forgiveness shines the spotlight on Prine’s lyrics, workmanlike melodies, and joyous croak.

Prine sounds simultaneously old as dirt and fresh as a spring flower on The Tree of Forgiveness. It’s easily his best album since The Missing Years 27 years ago, and a welcome surprise half a century into a career never lacking in cheery surprises.

My latest radio interview about John Prine: In Spite of Himself is online and ready to stream. I sat down with Eddie Garcia, a producer for WFDD, the NPR affiliate at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., to talk about Prine’s life and music and the process of writing the book. (Garcia is a fine musician in his own right – he plays in a rock band called 1970s Film Stock, and he previously played in a duo called Jews and Catholics.) Listen to Triad Arts Weekend online or catch a broadcast of the show at 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 6.

In other news, Prine had to decline an invitation to perform in Bill Murray’s highly anticipated new holiday special on Netflix on Demand, “A Very Murray Christmas,” according to one of the show’s writers, Mitch Glazer, a music journalist turned screenwriter, and a longtime Murray collaborator. Glazer told the Albany Daily Star they plan to include Prine “if and when we do another one.” “Bill and I saw him in Charleston,” Glazer said. “We wanted him to go but he had hip surgery.”

Murray, like Prine, grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Prine was friends with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in their pre-“Saturday Night Live” days with Chicago’s Second City, where Murray also got his start in comedy. Belushi, Prine has said, “used to come around over to the Earl of Old Town when they had breaks at Second City – Belushi’d come across the street. And when we had breaks, we’d go watch Second City. Belushi used to do Marlon Brando singin’ my songs” – including “Angel from Montgomery.”