John Prine with Josh Ritter at the Saban Theater
Friday, April 17, 2009
by Josiah Daniel Golojuh
Friday at the Josh Ritter / John Prine show, I became aware of two things. The cost of tickets are paid in blood and Ticket Master fees, and I was twenty years younger than nearly everyone else. In a music scene full of hipsters and indie kids, I found myself at a nursing home. The first other face under fifty belonged to Josh Ritter. Grinning ear to ear, the ever-gracious Josh broke into a solo acoustic set.
He hit all the expected beats, and did his best impression of himself, telling strange, mythic, and occasionally made up stories. The reaction was tepid. The older crowd just didn’t get this guy, but like an encouraging parent at their son’s little league game, supported him the wrong way. Josh became the kid who swings at all three pitches and whiffs, only to shouts of “good swings,” from the bleachers.
As Josh worked his way through the lyrics of “The Temptation of Adam,” the aged and unaware crowd was full of laughs. The song, like most of Josh’s lyrics, are cutting and poetic, funny in the ironic sense, unlike that of John Prine who uses his subversion in that laugh of loud, this is actually a joke sense. The laughs seemed to throw the ever-smiling Josh through a loop as he had to restart a few verses, never losing the beat nor the beauty. Later, halfway through his set, when John Prine began to play “Angel From Montgomery” I felt a shudder, a mixture of revelation and the shame of ignorance. It was that, “oh, he’s the guy that wrote that song” feeling. I suddenly fell out of place with the history of music, abasing my shaman like hosts. I stopped rooting for my generation’s relevance and began to root for the music. With the encore it all came together. The misunderstandings of generations became lost, time became a circle, wrapping back around itself, a crowd of individuals became one. When John brought Josh out on the stage for the encore we didn’t stop bleeding, but we all bleed together.
