POP MUSIC REVIEW : John Prine, a Mark Twain Guitar Man, Earns Hero Hoopla : Performance: At the Coach House, the singer-songwriter uses parallel ache and absurdity to delight his fanatical following.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Given the consistent insight, heart and individual vision of John Prine’s work since his debut nearly 20 years ago, it’s a grievous oversight that America hasn’t named him its poet laureate, or at least President.

Instead, as “respected artist” has increasingly become a code word for “virtually unheard-of artist,” the singer-songwriter has had no airplay to speak of and for the last seven years has had his records released only on his own cottage-industry Oh-Boy Records.

Yet, as his career has sojourned along at the speed of shoes, Prine has built a rightly fanatical following, evident in the hero’s welcome that greeted him when he took the stage Thursday for the first of two nights at the Coach House.

Much like the wonderfully representative 1988 “John Prine Live” album--recorded chiefly at the Coach House--his 31-song set drew from all points of his career and, as such, explored many of the avenues and byways of American life.

The most easily communicated of Prine’s qualities is his humor. Examples Thursday included his “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian”; an ode to organ donors (“Please don’t bury me in the cold, cold ground/I’d rather have them cut me up and pass me all around”), and a wealth of anecdotes, including a recent experience in Berlin. He bought a chunk of the Berlin Wall from a street vendor, he said, mostly because it looked like his home state of Illinois. Paying with too-large a bill, he was given a rock-size piece of wall as change.

“They must have thought we were Fred and Wilma Flintstone,” Prine deadpanned.

He had gone with friends to Berlin in January “to see what fresh-baked freedom smells like right out of the oven.” He came back with a new song, which included the lines:

I want your East German kisses on my West German face

We’ll hang old Gorby’s picture up above the fireplace . . . .

If you show me your lederhosen, I’ll take you to a shopping mall

Because tonight we’re going dancing on the wall.

While covering the more crass and commercial aspects of the border’s opening, his loose-gravel voice added a sense of wistfulness and one-to-one romance to the song. And its celebratory tone perhaps caught the moment better than all the laborious tomes written about the wall coming down.

Prine mixed the fantastic with the commonplace in “The Bottomless Lake.” To the question of just what goes on in a car sinking in a bottomless lake, Prine posited a family eating chicken legs and smoking all available cigarettes, while:

Papa played the music on the radio

Mama rocked the baby to sleep

He said he would have taken the other road

But he didn’t think the lake was this deep.

It isn’t merely a clever wordsmith behind Prine’s wry smile. Rather, like a Mark Twain with a guitar, his lyrics could often be at once funny, bittersweet and true.

With such imagery as “heat lightning burnt the sky like alcohol” or the childhood memory of Green River, “where the air smelled like snakes,” Prine needed no more than the space of a song to create a palpable world. The latter line is from his “Paradise,” a powerfully evocative song that uses the true story of a childhood haunt being strip-mined as a metaphor for lost innocence.

These often mean-spirited times are encapsulated in one line from his “People Puttin’ People Down”: “People without love sometimes build a fence around the garden up above.” One of the most heartbreaking songs of the last 20 years must be his “Sam Stone,” with a child’s-eye view of a broken Vietnam veteran: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where the money goes.”

Even though Prine delivered it right after the uproarious “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian,” his “Hello in There” ached with the isolation of aging. It was that parallel ache and absurdity running through Prine’s show, perhaps, that gave the performance such a palpable sense of life.