Garrison Keillor sharing golden year in tour coming to Cedar Rapids

Garrison Keillor retired from 'A Prairie Home Companion” on July 1, 2016, after 42 years on the show, but the public radio icon still has stories to tell.

So even though he came to Cedar Rapids with his farewell tour in August 2015, he's returning to the McGrath Amphitheatre on Thursday night with a sequel of sorts: his Prairie Home Love & Comedy Tour.

'It's a show somewhat along the same lines, but it's a better show. I want it to be, because I think it's my last go-round,” Keillor, 74 until Aug. 7, said by phone Wednesday morning from his home in St. Paul, Minn.

Audiences will again see and hear sound effects master Fred Newman, sketches featuring cowboys Dusty and Lefty, some poetry and perhaps some melodrama with private eye Guy Noir.

And music - lots of music.

'We have a really good band,” he said of longtime 'A Prairie Home Companion” music director Richard Dworsky & The Road Hounds band. Keillor also loves singing duets, especially 'with tall women,” so he'll harmonize with alto Heather Masse from the award-winning Wailin' Jennys folk trio.

Another audience favorite continues, as well, with Keillor strolling into the audience at the start of the show and again at intermission, to lead an a cappella singalong of 'songs everybody knows.”

'I see teenagers Googling the lyrics, but all around them are the middle-aged who know all of the words to all of these songs,” he said.

'This is something that people find very emotionally satisfying. There's nobody up there (onstage) waving their arms, there's no big pianist crashing away - it's just all a cappella. In the Midwest, people sing in several parts harmony, and they don't get this chance very often, and they are touched by it.”

STORYTELLING

He's also contemplating adding a Lake Wobegon story, 'a monologue that breaks all the rules of storytelling.”

Breaking those rules is a huge part of his charm, as he typically launches down a path, then veers off on completely unrelated detours that somehow mesh at the end of the tale.

'I love non sequiturs - I've made a career out of them,” he said with a hearty laugh. 'A non sequitur is a signal to the audience that you're not trying to sell them something, you're not trying to convince them of anything. I am not trying to change you. I grew up listening to people who were trying to change me, and I respect that, but it's not what I do.

'(It's) the style that I developed early in the morning sitting in a radio studio, and you've come to realize that you have an audience, and that they want to be talked to. They don't want you just to read the weather and play records - they want to be talked to.There's a lot of loneliness going on out there, so you sit in this dim studio - you keep it dim for your own comfort - and you sit there talking to yourself with people listening. And when you're talking to yourself, there's no need for tightly constructed argument and outline. ...

'So it comes from early-morning radio soliloquy, (where) you're talking to farmers and truck drivers, and mothers who are frying eggs and bacon, and people who are driving to work.”

He's driven by structure and form, capturing the stories of everyday people.

'I want to write about people who are dissatisfied, people who are crazy in love,” he said. 'I want to write about people who suffer the ordinary mishaps of life and who get angry at themselves. I tell stories about the past - I might find a way to talk about the first girl I was seriously in love with, and how thrilling and terrifying that was.

'I'm a carpenter - I build stories.”

And in the process, Keillor wants 'to do a show that makes people laugh and makes them reach for their handkerchief.”

A little of both is bound to happen when he talks about turning 75, a subject he finds 'so extremely interesting.”

But politics won't be in the spotlight. 'I'm going to leave politics to Stephen Colbert, who does it very well,” he said. 'I write about politics a lot; I write a weekly column for the Washington Post, so that takes care of it.”

turning 75

He's writing a new chapter to his life, and even though he's no longer at the helm of his radio show, he still thinks about it - but he doesn't listen to its new incarnation. 'I'm afraid I would miss it too much,” he said.

'I have a certain amount of regret about it. It's kind of a Midwestern thing - you feel it could have been better. You look back and remember shows that you did with insufficient motivation and how there were slack periods. And how inevitably you took this wonderful piece of good luck for granted and you didn't do as much with it. That's just in my nature. I gave a big birthday party at my house (last) Saturday. My wife had a terrific time and she's talking about how good it was, and I talked about how it could have been better. ...

'I do miss (the show). I was so engrossed in it, that I didn't have a chance to realize what I was doing. I was incredibly lucky to have it and to have it for so long, because I really had no talent for that sort of thing. I had to invent talent, and I had to persist, which I did, so I was lucky to be able to do that,” he said.

'It happens when you're 75. You can look back at your life and you can see these different points in your life with great clarity. You can see these points where it could have so easily have gone in another direction, and probably for reasons of your own fault, you would have made the wrong choice and you would have missed out on so much.

'The fragility of a person's life and how easily it could be different, it could be dismal, dreadful. I think about that often.”

LOOKING BACK & FORTH

'In (1974), when I got the idea for (‘A Prairie Home Companion'), I wanted to cook up a show that was a sort of amalgam of bits of radio shows I had loved when I was a kid. I came in towards the end of the radio era, and so I heard shows in the late '40s, early '50s that were classics - those actors and musicians and live broadcast of dance bands and drama and scary footsteps and creaking doors, and all of that. And what to other people are museum pieces, to me were normal entertainment.

'So I wanted to take these bits and pieces - what I remembered that I had loved - and make them into one show. So that's what I did, and I was lucky to be able to able to do that. My last job interview was in 1969, and I went to work for Minnesota Public Radio. I had my ups and downs, but I never had to look for a job after that. I stuck with it. I tried to quit once, in '87 when I moved to Denmark, but I came back and started it back up again.

'I've gotta write this in a book,” he said. 'It won't be one of your memoirs in which you recall your struggle with addiction or the cruelty of your parents. It'll be a memoir of gratitude. In other words, a boring book. I'll have to invent some catastrophic experience.”

Indeed, he is working on a couple of long-range projects, including a memoir and a screenplay he said is on its seventh or eighth revision. And if it doesn't turn into a movie, he might turn it into a play about life in a small town in Minnesota. A life he knows well, growing up in Anoka, Minn., 20 miles northwest of downtown Minneapolis, where the Rum flows into the Mississippi River.

'I grew up along the Mississippi,” he said. 'My mother was a worrier, but we went and played by the Mississippi as little kids, and no adults ever came looking for us. We never felt those eyes on us. We lived in our own world.”

One that's far removed from a recent conversation he had with a dad who was contemplating adding an app so he could track his daughter's movements when she went off to college.

Keillor's values and storytelling were shaped by the church people with whom he grew up, and especially by his aunts.

'I was brought up by my aunts,” he said. 'My uncles worked hard and were off doing things. They were a little bit stern, had high standards, and were disapproving. The aunts were loving people who were full of stories. They were the historians of the family, not the men. The men talked about cars and construction projects and gardening and did not sit around and reminisce. The aunts did. The aunts had very clear memories of their youth and were so happy to talk about it.”

RED SOCKS

That's a life far removed from that of his hero, author and historian Studs Terkel, who also wrote about the people around him. Keillor wears red socks in his honor. '(He) wore red socks and I did it for good luck, hoping I'd last as long in radio as he did,” Keillor said in a previous Gazette interview.

Reminiscing now on his friend who died in 2008, Keillor said: 'Studs grew up in a different world. He grew up in the lobby of his mother's low-rent hotel there in Chicago, and men - down-and-outers, unemployed, salesmen, all these people who were killing time. His sources were entirely different from mine.

'He's still my model for getting old. I went to see him not long before he died, and he was sitting there in his maroon long underwear, and he had a scotch in one hand and a cigar in another, and he said, ‘96 is long enough,' and he meant it. He wasn't gonna do himself in, but it was enough.

'I come from church people. Studs did not know my people at all. He came from a whole other side of America.”

And that's what makes the world go 'round.

'Well, it makes this country go 'round, that's for sure,” he said with a laugh.

If you go

What: Garrison Keillor: Prairie Home Love & Comedy Tour

Where: McGrath Amphitheatre, 475 First St. SW, Cedar Rapids

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday (8/10)

Tickets: $35 to $96, U.S. Cellular Center Box Office, 1-(800) 745-3000 or Mcgrathamphitheatre.com