 |
| |
|
Mothers need to hold their children. They need to feel that skin-on-skin thing, otherwise you breed some real monsters. There's a thing with my songs where they could be about women or about God or mom in an interchangeable way. It's all there if you step back and squint at the songs. -Chuck Prophet |
|
|
| |
|
This reminds me of "Tough Company," the opening poem from Charles Bukowski's Play The Piano Drunk Like A Percussion Instrument Until The Fingers Begin To Bleed A Bit, where unfinished poems are "like gunslingers" that mill around his apartment waiting for him to finish them. Prophet chuckles and says, "I love that! I think early on he was more prone to pour a poem from beaker to beaker more times, and I love it. But I also love his later years where he was more impressionistic. That's kinda the way I feel about Lucinda Williams right now. I love it all. I heard her sing 'Pineola' [from 1992's Sweet Old World] the other night but I also love the stuff off her new record, which isn't as chiseled."
 Chuck Prophet |
As he regards his own evolution, Prophet candidly responds, "I'm just getting the hang of it. I write better for my voice now. I think I've just grown into myself. I suppose early on I was more Dylan-esque or whatever but now there's a straighter line that runs through the songs. I have great admiration for John Prine and Randy Newman. I try to write more the way people talk. We're in an era where entertainment is just killing us. I think people have a need to be told stories, and that won't ever change. It's part of human nature and will continue to be. Keeping that in mind, it's easier to make relevant records. Or records that are fun."
"I asked my friend Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience - who've probably made 20 records - if he thought in the year 2007 it was possible to make relevant rock & roll. He's a bit of an intellectual and he said, 'Well, if it's fun it's relevant, right?' And I had to agree," says Prophet.
As a songwriter who lives in these troubled times, Prophet tries to avoid delivering political polemics but doesn't shy away from present circumstances either. "I write from a personal place that's definitely in the moment. I don't go out of my way to use archaic language or anything," says Prophet. "If you listen to my records, aside from the sort of vintage music going on, you'd think, 'This guy knows what time it is [laughs].' That's my fantasy of myself! Like when Prince went on the Super Bowl and whipped out a Foo Fighters song. I'm not a Foo Fighters fan but I thought that was so hip. It was a way of saying [Prophet's voice rising slightly], 'Prince knows what time it is!'"
Homemade Blood
While it's often easy to pick out a musician's influences, it's hard to get a clear grip on where Chuck Prophet came from. The man himself responds enigmatically, "Well, they're out there [laughs]. You have to have faith in yourself. If something sounds derivative at first, as you kick it around it'll morph into something of your own. Good writers, painters and artists tend to be pretty big fans of other people's work. There's filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch who are also great music fans. And there are great guys in music that are great fans of film, and painters who can only paint when they listen to music. There's inspiration outside of your chosen field."
 Chuck Prophet |
This spills into a discussion of Jerry Garcia's love of painting, which he'd done all of his life but only shared publicly in his later years. "He was an incredibly creative guy, a complicated dude, actually, though not when he was selling ties at Bloomingdales," cracks Prophet. "I've worked with some musicians who worked with Garcia and they all described him, out of everybody, as the guy who was out of the house ten minutes after the alarm went off. He loved the creative process."
Prophet, a native Californian, was born and raised in Orange County until he was 16, then moved to San Francisco after college and currently resides in the Lower Haight area. Prophet's live shows have a healthy pinch of the Garcia Band's good time swing and instant bonhomie, where the playing is superb but they never forget they need to engage your feet, too. A couple years back at High Sierra, Prophet played twice in the same day, offering totally different moods that fit the Vaudeville Tent and Big Meadow, respectively, to a tee. Like Garcia, he knows how to read a room and give it just what it craves, even if they didn't know what that was going in.
It doesn't hurt that Prophet is a bonafide guitar shredder capable of Beatles-like eloquence and brevity as well as the bold expression and playful pyrotechnics of Tom Verlaine (Television) and Richard Thompson.
"I definitely got my head fucked up when I first heard Richard Thompson. No doubt about it," Prophet says. "It just all came together for me when I heard his records from the '70s especially. I like how he wrote from his own voice and could go from this weird bagpipe thing straight into a Chuck Berry lick. I would probably sit on the Chuck Berry lick and just hint at something else. I'm an inverted version of that [laughs]. If Richard hadn't been such a great record maker, songwriter and singer then I don't think I'd have been as drawn into his guitar playing. That other stuff came first. You wouldn't hang around for the guitar if not for the other. The reason I heard Marc Ribot was because I listened to those Tom Waits records and hung around for the guitar breaks. I think most of the guitar players I like are singers like Jimi Hendrix and Tom Verlaine. That's why I love Chuck Berry so much. Everything he does punctuates his songs, it's all one thing."
Continue reading for more on Chuck Prophet...
|
