Chuck Prophet hit the road straight out of high school in the ’80s with the psychedelic roots band Green on Red, and he never looked back. In addition to working as a singer/songwriter, guitarist, bandleader, and collaborator with artists as diverse as Cake, Kim Carnes, Solomon Burke, and Alejandro Escovedo, Prophet’s deepening solo catalog of self-produced “sideways” roots rock has steadily become his calling card.
Born in the Southern California suburb of Whittier, the San Francisco-based Prophet made his debut as a solo artist in 1990 with Brother Aldo; one U.K. music paper called its collision of lo-fi and country “as close to the genuine article as a white boy can get.” Developing his style over the course of seven albums, including Balinese Dancer (1993) and Feast of Hearts (1995), Prophet hit his stride with his gritty meditation on suburbia, Homemade Blood (1997), followed by the studio-tweaked and poetic The Hurting Business (1998) and the streetwise epic No Other Love (2002), which sparked the radio hit “Summertime Thing,” while the title track was covered by Heart.
Prophet’s 2004 release Age of Miracles marries vintage sounds with state-of-the-art studio technique, while never compromising its raw roots foundation. Released in 2007, Soap and Water barges through rock’s barriers with a helping of swamp rock and hip-hop. Between albums, Kelly Willis and Boz Scaggs are among the many artists who’ve laid down versions of Prophet’s songs, while his guitar tracks have shown up on recordings from Warren Zevon, Lucinda Williams, and Jewel. In 2005 and 2006, Prophet rejoined Green on Red as they reunited for a series of shows; one of the concerts was released on the album Valley Fever: Live in Tucson 2005.
Prophet continued to perform as a solo artist and with his band, the Mission Express, featuring his wife Stephanie Finch, on keyboards and vocals, and released Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams in 2007, following it with a politically themed solo album, Let Freedom Ring, in 2009. The fascinating and ambitious Temple Beautiful, a concept album that tackles a sort of alternative history of Prophet’s adopted San Francisco, arrived early in 2012. In 2014, Prophet returned with the album Night Surfer, which featured instrumental assistance from former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck and Prairie Prince, drummer with the Tubes.
Chuck Prophet describes his new disc, Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins, as California Noir. “The state has always represented the Golden Dream, and it’s the tension between romance and reality that lurks underneath the surface in all noir films and paperbacks, and that connects these songs. Doomed love, inconsolable loneliness, rags to riches to rags again, and fast-paced violence are always on the menu on the Left Coast.” The album features “A Bad Year for Rock and Roll,” an ode to all of the great artists we lost in 2016 and a bunch of other Chuck Prophet (soon to be) classics.
2020’s The Land That Time Forgot balanced personal numbers about life and love with politically themed tunes examining America’s past and present, recorded after the skyrocketing cost of living forced Prophet to leave San Francisco for upstate New York. But then… For two weeks in March of 2022, Chuck Prophet didn’t know if he would live to see the end of the year. Days earlier, the musician was gearing up for an international tour — one that had already been rescheduled three times due to COVID. He’d released a full-length in 2020, but hadn’t yet taken it on the road, and the acclaimed San Francisco rocker was excited to get out there. Instead, after a routine checkup, doctors discovered a mass in his upper intestine. “Mr. Prophet, you’re not going anywhere,” he remembers one physician telling him. It was clearly cancer. But determining which kind required a type of scan that Kaiser couldn’t schedule for 12 long days. “It blindsided me,” says Prophet, 61. While he waited to learn his fate, he turned to music to distract him from fear. He’d been getting into Latin dance music for the last few years, so he listened to a lot of that. And then he wrote a song.
Two and a half years later, after surgery, chemotherapy and immunotherapy for stage-four lymphoma, Prophet is in full remission. Sitting at a Mission District coffee shop on a warm October afternoon, he is yet again gearing up for an international tour. “One Lie for Me, One for You,” the song he wrote during that two-week purgatory, is now a tender cowboy lullaby, undercut by both dread and acceptance, with lyrics about plunging into “dangerous waters” ahead.
It’s track 8 of 11 on Prophet’s new record Wake the Dead, an album that drives headlong into the songwriter’s dark night of the soul with an unlikely companion riding shotgun: cumbia.
2024: The album, out Oct. 25, sees Prophet collaborating with ¿Qiensave?, a Salinas-based band of brothers whose sound enchanted Prophet when he first heard them back in 2022. As soon as his health allowed, he began driving from his home in the Duboce Triangle to their place near Salinas to jam. Eventually, they all headed into an Oakland studio to record, intermingling with the usual suspects — including Prophet’s wife, keyboardist/vocalist Stephanie Finch — in his longtime band, the Mission Express.
The result is an adventurous, soulful project that deftly balances darkness and hope, shot through with the unmistakable energy of a veteran musician having more fun than he has in years. Longtime followers of Prophet’s work (his wide, loyal fanbase includes Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams and Stephen King) will find plenty that’s familiar here. A storyteller at heart, he retains his usual dry wit and wistfulness over warm, jangly guitar, with tinges of rockabilly and surf punk.
But from the opening notes of the title track, clave rhythms, accordion and a Farfisa organ announce that this will not be your standard Americana record. “Gonna wake the dead, get ‘em on their feet,” Prophet sings slyly over rhythmic Latin percussion.
At the handful of live shows he’s played with this new band (“Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes”), people do something Prophet hasn’t always seen at his shows. They do get on their feet, immediately, and they dance.
2024 REF: KQED
Discography
Ref: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/chuck-prophet-mn0000125088/biography