Stories in Prine Time : Tales Come First in Folk Artist’s Generous Show

The difference between a star and an artist is that a star sells sensation while an artist tells a story.

The value of sensation is that it can bring a moment’s exhilaration into your life. The value of a good story is that it can help you make sense of your life.

John Prine is no star. With his droopy mustache, thick, dark eyebrows and boxy head, he looks like the split difference between Clark Gable and Joseph Stalin. Prine’s voice is a dry, husky burr; sometimes, when he tries to hit a high note, it’s the aural equivalent of a slow, chunky, baserunner taking a leaping belly-flop toward home and coming up short.

But wherever Prine plays, they should hang out a shingle that says “storyteller at work--this man makes sense.”

At the Coach House Tuesday, Prine opened a three-night engagement (ending tonight) with a typically generous show that spanned 29 songs and almost two hours. The main difference between this go-round and other local Prine club dates in recent years was that he had a three-man backing band with him instead of playing solo. Prine also had a slew of new songs from “The Missing Years,” the fine 1991 release that not only won him a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album, but has succeeded well enough to allow him to hire a touring band.

The drummer-less band brought mainly appropriate hues to Prine’s songbook, with suitably understated application of accordion, piano, electric bass, harmonica, mandolins and electric guitars. Prine, on acoustic guitar, Bill Bonk and Phil Parlapiano, on a little of this and a little of that, and Duane Jarvis, a strong lead guitarist, were able to rock effectively with a country or rockabilly accent in the show’s occasional departures from the reflective or gently humorous moods that Prine usually inhabits.

The musical arrangements recognized the most important thing about Prine: the story comes first. The sound mix, however, didn’t always recognize that as well as it might. Prine’s phrasing tends toward a relaxed drawl, and during louder moments, both with the band and in a seven-song mid-set solo stretch, his vocals could have used a boost to ensure that the lyrics would ride clearly above the music.

As for Prine’s story and its coherence: When a singer begins a concert with a song about an imaginary paradise gained, and ends it with a song about an actual paradise lost, you can assume that he has given this art-and-meaning stuff some thought. The ongoing story that Prine wove in concert was an exploration of happiness and grief. It delineated their nature and their sources, measuring just how much happiness a person can expect, and how much pain one can take.

Prine opened with the amiably twanging “Spanish Pipedream,” one of seven songs he pulled from his indispensable 1971 debut album, “John Prine.” It was a light fantasy about a man hitting it off with a stripper, taking her advice to seek the simple life, and spending the rest of his life in her company with these goals uppermost in mind: “Plant a little garden / Eat a lot of peaches / Try to find Jesus on your own.”

Prine closed with “Paradise,” also from “John Prine,” in which the idyllic garden world of his youth gets plowed over and turned into a slag heap by a coal-mining concern.

In the middle of the show, Prine placed his Everyman symbol: Jesus. The song, “Jesus The Missing Years,” was a humorous talking-blues that fancifully filled in blanks in the Biblical account. Funny as the song was, Prine paints Jesus as a figure a lot like the rest of us, falling in love, having it go sour, trying to get some spark out of life, and ultimately having to submit to a not-so-pleasant fate.

With those three songs tracing the broad outline of Prine’s concerns, he devoted most of his show to tales from the private realm where individuals stumble onto happiness or sorrow. A few songs painted love’s garden flourishing; mostly, though, Prine sang about the weeds.

Most pop singers are most convincing when they fly off to emotional extremes--that is, going for the sensational. Prine’s earthy style tended toward understatement, subtlety and moderation. His funny songs, like “The Bottomless Lake” and “Jesus the Missing Years,” were delivered in a folksy deadpan that drew laughs consistently without making a giddy bid for them. That refusal to go for the broad comic gesture helped keep alive some of the songs’ more serious, philosophical implications as well.

Prine’s divorce songs, including “All the Best,” covered seeds of bitterness and sorrow with a loam of fond remembrance. In that balance of feelings lay the possibility that hurt might give way to understanding and recovery. Prine’s musical world was full of the ache of life--an ache of tragic dimension on the eloquent “Angel From Montgomery” and “Sam Stone,” two more from that debut album. (Prine also sang four songs from “Bruised Orange,” another juicy album from his catalogue, and 10 of the 14 songs from “The Missing Years.”)

As Prine moved along, there emerged that question that all good stories raise: will it end happily, or not? Near the end, Prine took a decided turn toward the downcast, heading into a long streak of songs about sadness and suffering. But for his second-to-last song, Prine was able to reach into his deep sack and come up with a lighthearted number, “That’s the Way That the World Goes Round.” It portrayed troubles as bearable, and life not as a horror but as a game of acceptable stakes.

The concluding “Paradise” may have told the destruction of Prine’s boyhood Eden, but its sturdy folk-ballad melody, its steady tempo, and its truth-telling and finger-pointing at despoiling powers resounded affirmatively. It had backbone.

The few false notes sounded during Prine’s show came from Parlapiano’s synthesizer. It brought ersatz strings, bell chimes, and even a massive choir to the stately, sorrowful ballad, “If You Don’t Want My Love.” The song is too lovely to be destroyed, even by that overdose of the ersatz. But Prine fans can consider themselves warned: this is how he’ll sound if Michael Bolton’s producers ever get him in their clutches.

Parlapiano’s strings-in-a-box also made a saccharine appearance at the end of “Hello in There.” This memorable but flawed song, the monologue of a lonely old man, ends with some of Prine’s least believable lines as he slips out of character to moralize openly. The synths just compounded the problem (less damaging, but still slightly unsettling, was the canned rhythm track employed on “The Sins of Memphisto”). If anybody belongs in the natural-produce section of the pop supermarket, it’s John Prine.

Opening was Liz Byrnes, who has the same managers as Prine and appears as a backup singer on his latest album. This unsigned performer showed promise with an airy, bluesy drawl that recalled Rickie Lee Jones. Byrnes is no Jones clone, though, thanks to an ability to register forceful dynamics at key moments.

Byrnes’ assets included a nimble, light-fingered acoustic guitar style and the confidence both to recast Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” with blues-informed urgency, editing the lyric to her own purposes, and to include one of Prine’s own songs, “Sleepy Eyed Boy,” in her half-hour set.

She managed to hint at emotional complexities with her alternately dreamy and direct singing (amid its overarching melancholy, Byrnes sprinkled the Prine song with a touch of coyness). Byrnes’ own songs showed, if not a great melodic gift, at least a willingness to stretch imaginatively. One, “Girls’ Night Out,” seemed to pose similarities between the motivations and performance ethic of a professional singer and those of a curbside prostitute--not just crass monetary motivations, but deeper emotional considerations that underlie the need to perform and to please.