POP MUSIC REVIEW : Prine Gets Down to Business at Pantages

On the same Pantages Theatre stage where Bob Dylan begins a week’s engagement on Wednesday, another great folk-related songwriter stepped to the microphone on Friday.

John Prine has been coming to Southern California regularly since his local debut at the Troubadour in 1971, but this was a special evening for the man who specializes in warm, insightful tales about all the rites and wrongs of everyday life.

Much like Bonnie Raitt, Prine has made honest, involving music for years, earning enormous respect from peers but generating only modest commercial impact. In all this time, he has never had a Top 40 album or single.

Prine was so disillusioned with the formal record industry machinery by the late ‘70s, in fact, that he started releasing his records in the ‘80s on his own label.

That’s usually the last step before oblivion in pop, yet the quality of Prine’s sometimes witty, always poignant songs has remained constant, and his “The Missing Years” won a Grammy for best folk album of 1991.

Thanks in part to the Grammy victory, Prine is enjoying renewed attention--the Pantages, for instance, is the largest room he has ever headlined in Los Angeles.

As he stepped to the microphone Friday, the audience seemed ready to celebrate this pop survivor’s good fortune. Yet Prine, characteristically, didn’t waste time on ceremony.

There was no sentimental speech nor any thanks for the support over the years. Instead, he and a frisky three-piece band, which added all sorts of bright accordion and mandolin flavoring to the songs, went right into “Spanish Pipedream,” a sweet, rollicking story about homespun values that was on Prine’s 1971 debut album.

In a dramatic leap across years and moods in his body of work, Prine followed with “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness,” a dark 1986 song about loneliness and isolation.

For the next 70 minutes, Prine explored the various twists and turns in his extensive body of work, from the early social consciousness (the anti-war “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Any More”) through the tales of lost innocence that highlight “The Missing Years.”

In the tender “All the Best” and “The Sins of Memphisto,” both from the album, Prine combines familiar images in graceful, understated ways that capture the contradictions people encounter in pursuit of simple but elusive dreams. Sample line from the latter: “Sally used to play with her hula hoops /Now she tells her problems / To therapy groups.”

Like Dylan, Prine approaches each show like a man committed to the role of lifelong troubadour. There’ll be some times in his career where sales or attention are higher or lower, but his purpose is simply to explore and expand his art.

So there may not have been the celebration on stage that one would have expected Friday, but the show offered consistent inspiration. Again like Dylan and Raitt, Prine--who’ll return for shows in July at the Coach House and Ventura Theatre--deals in the soul of music, not the commerce.

Friday’s co-headliners were the Cowboy Junkies, a capable and heartfelt band that continues to have trouble moving past the wistful restlessness of its brilliant 1988 “The Trinity Sessions” album.

The group, featuring the vocals of Margo Timmins, offered lots of guitar bite this trip, but the songs on the new “Black Eyed Man” fail to approach the intimacy or revelation of such standouts as “200 More Miles” or the later “Sun Comes Up, It’s Tuesday Morning.”