Chuck Prophet covers outlaw Waylon Jennings, and it works beautifully

Chuck Prophet is a Californian born and bred, so it’s only natural he takes a few liberties with the lyrics to “Waymore’s Blues,” one of the songs he covers on his latest full-length-a weird, loving re-creation of Waylon Jennings’ classic 1975 country album Dreaming My Dreams. “Well, I gotta leave San Francisco / I gotta spread the news,” Prophet sings. “Women up in this piece / They don’t wear no shoes.” On Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams, the singer and songwriter respects the running order of the original work as well as its emotional core, but Prophet is in the line of subversive American pop artists whose affinities are shifty by design.

From Whittier, Calif., Prophet first gained notice as guitarist for Green on Red, a band whose whacked-out Americana updated the time-honored trash aesthetic in the ’80s. After their breakup, he released a series of well-received solo records, worked with Dan Penn and Jim Dickinson and produced country-pop singer Kelly Willis. Last year he released the fine Soap and Water, on which he came across like the chameleonic Alex Chilton with fewer misgivings about pop’s elusive soul.

Cut in San Francisco and in Nashville with producer Brad Jones at Alex the Great studio, Soap and Water took Chilton’s insouciant, good-boy-itching-to-be-bad charm as its template. “I met Alex at the 688 Club in Atlanta,” Prophet remembers. “He pulled out of that Buick Skylark that he had, with a Super Reverb amp and his clothes in the back, and that was it, you know? Alex sang the blues the way Mose Allison sang it-he had a great, cool way of doin’ it.”

Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams came about as a result of Prophet’s longtime admiration of Jennings’ masterpiece, and turned on a bit of self-aggrandizement. “We cut it in California over a weekend, and it was really kind of done on a dare,” Prophet says. “I think I started braggin’, and said, ‘I could do that whole record from memory, right now.’ Three or four songs in, we were starting to get punchy, you know, and we were bringing the words down off the Internet.”

The result is a loose, lively document that sounds neither country nor pop. Prophet’s humorous baritone holds notes and inflects lines with a sort of pathos that never gets out of hand. “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” stomps along in hard, concentrated fashion, with atmospheric guitars. “Waymore’s Blues” (itself a reworking of Furry Lewis’ 1928 “Kassie Jones”) joins the list of inspired readings of the venerable tune by Memphis producer and pianist Jim Dickinson.

“We played it with Dickinson in 1991,” Prophet says. “We did a brief tour with him and my band backed him up. Every time I would quote anything from the Waylon version, he would kinda snarl at me. He’d say, ‘Man, I don’t even acknowledge that version.’ “

However finely tuned one’s historical sense might be, Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams works beautifully. It turns a Nashville record (Jack Clement produced the original) into something close to the Bluff City in spirit. If Chilton’s work triangulates Memphis, New Orleans and Brian Wilson’s California, Prophet’s vision includes Music City.

“In the late ’90s, Nashville kind of saved me,” Prophet says. He came to town to write with the likes of Kim Richey, with whom he penned a 2002 Top 40 country hit for Cyndi Thomson, “I’m Gone.” A first-rate songwriter with a fine sense of pop classicism, Prophet might seem an unlikely cowboy standing in line to sing the blues. To paraphrase Jack Clement himself, Prophet might be a fake, but Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams proves he’s no phony.

Folkster finds inspiration in music’s margins

INDIANAPOLIS - Chuck Prophet has touched many an itinerant soul with his quirky, loosely-compact folk music. But to call him an influential genius is to get an opposite response from him.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Prophet said of that description. “I think I’ve gotten away with murder. I can’t believe I sell as many records as I do.”

He’s no household name, but Prophet did provide a blueprint for the alt-country movement, starting with his Bay Area exercise-in-excess, the band Green on Red in the 1980s. It’s continued with numerous solo albums, the most recent being last year’s “Soap and Water.” The release features more of Prophet’s signature mood swings - the loutish rollick of “Freckle Song” to the spectral chill of “Doubter Out of Jesus (All Over You).” That essentially defines Prophet, an artist as comfortable writing simple chord progressions as he is elaborate sound collages.

“Some songs just don’t want to behave,” he said of the latter. “Some songs become so married to a certain arrangement that you’ve gotta take ‘em out and rotate the tires. It’s elusive about what people respond to. That’s really the greatest part about any art form. You can be the greatest craftsman in the world, but you don’t know what people are really going to respond to.”

It was the ‘80s punk movement that Prophet and his friends were enamored with. Though Prophet may not have translated the buzzsaw guitars and truculent speed, the iconoclastic spirit remains intact.

“The goal was just to have a band,” he said of those early days. “We didn’t do much, just sat around fantasizing.”

It could be said that’s what Prophet continues to do. He still frequently tours (“I’m probably one of five people who doesn’t complain about it”), produces others’ records, and runs his own label, (((belle sound))). Yet he still won’t fully admit to being a professional musician. He’s never had a business plan. Rather than measuring success by any economic indicators, Prophet’s reason for performing has always been for his own amusement.

“I just have a dark need to write songs and wrestle them to the ground in the form of records and play,” he said. “That’s what I do. You’re really only competing with yourself. The goal is to do something that keeps you interested in what you’re doing.”

Best Single Set:

Chuck Prophet at the Ale House, 11 p.m. Friday. That the room was about two sizes too small for the crowd—and for the increasingly ambitous scale and scope of Prophet’s music—only served to amplify and intensify the glorious performance turned in by Prophet and his four-piece band. While he’s always been a compelling live performer, Prophet seems to be stretching beyond himself these days, reaching heights he’s never quite hit before. The vocal balance between him and keyboardist Stephanie Finch is precisely on target, while the rest of the crew just keeps driving all the dramatics and dynamics and grooves of Prophet’s songs to tighter and trippier end-results. The peak moment: “Let’s Do Something Wrong”, a mission-statement for breaking the daily grind that had the crowd chanting along by song’s end: “Let’s do something wrong, let’s do something stupid!”

Austin, Texas isn’t known as the “live music capital of the world” for nothing, and you don’t need a SxSW wristband to partake. On any given weeknight, a live music addict wandering 6th Street or South Congress can step through the nearest pub door and find a quick fix of blistering rock and roll—one-off live shows that would shame more anticipated and choreographed productions taking place only on weekends in other cities.

Even by Austin’s standards, though, Tuesday nights in particular must seem a bit special of late. Beginning last year and continuing through January, Austin’s Alejandro Escovedo (link) took up a Tuesday night residency at the famed Continental Club. In listening to the concerts, Escovedo and his band (his frequent mix of string quartet and buzz-saw guitars) sound muscular, confident, and ready to take to the road.

Of all of the residency shows, however, none were more anticipated than a special show last Friday night, when Escovedo and singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet debuted material from their highly-anticipated release, Real Animal. Real Animal, an album of songs reflecting on Escovedo’s life, including the title track, a tribute to one of his biggest influences, Iggy Pop, is slated for release in June. In fact, last Tuesday’s show not only “debuted material,” but, following a set by Prophet and his band (touring behind Prophet’s 2007 release Soap and Water), Escovedo, Prophet, and band roared through through Real Animal in its entirety, track-by-track, in order…

Thinking man’s rocker Chuck Prophet rolls into the Continental Club Friday with Alejandro Escovedo, and I caught up with him Monday night as the van was traveling down I-10 near Fort Stockton, on its way toward Central Texas. We spoke about his latest disc, the indefinable Soap and Water (Yep Roc); his recent appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman; and the new album of songs he’s written with Escovedo.

Geezerville: I saw you on Letterman a week or so ago. What was that experience like? Had you appeared on that show before?

Chuck Prophet: We’d never done the show before. It was a cool experience for a number of reasons. We’re kind of a blues band. I don’t mean that we play the blues, but we travel in a van, and if your amp’s too heavy [and] you can’t carry your own shit, don’t bring it. So we ended staying at a hotel around the corner, coming in the night before. We were in the studio at 10:45am. Loaded in the gear. Right around that time there was a guy loading in the tubular bells, and I watched five union guys arguing over where to put it. Then they argued over how to mic the thing. That was really kind of funny.

G: That version of the song you did, “Doubter Out of Jesus (All Over You),” was pretty different from what’s on the record. Is that the way you’re doing it live?

CP: It’s hard to get a definitive version of any song on a record. But that song has been one of the sleepers in our set. It’s the song from the record that just ended up asserting itself. It never got left off the set list, and we’ve been on the road for a few months. I thought it would be cool to have some horns on it. That was Tom “Bones” Malone who did the horn charts, who you might remember from the Blues Brothers, so that was kind of a thrill.

G: You had kind of a dazed look in your eyes when the song was over and Dave came over to shake your hand.

CP: Yeah, I didn’t know if I was allowed to engage [laughs]. “Dave there are a few things I’ve been meaning to ask you …”

G: It’s been three years since the last record. Was there a dry period, or did you just want to take your time?

CP: I kind of burnt myself out touring behind Age of Miracles. The tour probably went on for two or three weeks too long, I think, and that was a crucial two or three weeks. After that I fell out with New West. Being on New West was a bit like, after a while, like driving with the brakes on. They dropped me, and I spent the next year just goofing off and finding other stuff to do, which I think was great in the end.

G: Did that help you with this record?

CP: Dan Stuart from Green on Red and I used to say, whenever we were asked what came first, the music or the lyrics, “The advance came first.” It wasn’t like anyone was waving an advance at me, you know. But I didn’t know if I would make another record. I never really do know if I’m going to make another record.

G: How much of this record was made in the studio?

CP: It was made in the studio just the way a film is made on a film set, I suppose.

G: The arrangements and sounds, are they something you had in your head when you were writing the song, or was it something you came upon when you were recording?

CP: Sometimes when I’m writing, I can hear the full arrangement in my head, and I get excited about it. But once you get on the film set and you’re making the movie, I have to be prepared to let go and take advantage of whatever gift you get from being there. It had a spine to it, but a lot of it was spontaneous. Brad Jones, who co-produced the record with me, and I would take a day to record one song and then spend two weeks arguing about what the one overdub should be. I was like, “I’ll get an all-boys Methodist choir in here tomorrow.” That’s pretty typical of the way it was.

G: I’m glad you mentioned that, because I wanted to ask you about the inclusion of the choir on “Let’s Do Something Wrong.” It’s a pretty funny moment when they join in.

CP: I’ve been listening to a group called the English Congregation, the Godspell soundtrack, things like that. The English Congregation made a couple of albums in the 1970s with a lot of group singing. I was playing some of that for Brad, and we were talking about choirs, and he said that when we got to Nashville, there were a lot of gospel choirs, and I said I was looking for people who could sing, but I don’t want people that sound like they’re singing. It was his suggestion to get the children’s choir, and it really added to the song in a way I didn’t see coming, because “Let’s do something wrong, let’s do something stupid” is so much more perverse when the kids are singing it. Kids don’t know that their actions have repercussions. They don’t have things like regret. You’ll find very few kids in recovery. They’re just pure. So I thought that was pretty fun.

G: How important are the lyrics? Some of the songs seem inscrutable to me; I’m not sure what you’re singing about, and I’m wondering if that’s intentional.

CP: I always have some kind of context, I think, even if only I know what it is. I guess that’s a struggle for anybody, whether it’s lyrics or writing or painting. You want things to make sense; you just don’t want them to make too much sense.

G: The combination of the different ways you arrange instruments and the lyrics is what makes the album attractive. You were trying to do something different or trying to stretch from what you’ve done in the past. Would you agree with that?

CP: Sure, the songs have their own needs, and if you cast each one of them as a movie, you can’t help but think it’d be great to have Wilford Brimley walking in right about now. You also try to mix it up in a way that keeps you interested in what you’re doing. So if I sort of tap into something that I haven’t done before, then I get more excited about it.

G: You recently wrote a bunch of songs with Alejandro Escovedo.

CP: We wrote an entire album together over the last year or so. We recorded over the holidays in Lexington, Kentucky, with Tony Visconti producing. It’s Al’s record, but I think he had me around as an insurance policy to make sure that everybody got the chords right.

G: Did he invite you to write with him?

CP: We’ve known each other for years, and we played a gig together. He said, “I’m going to make a new record, and I thought that maybe you and I could get together and write some songs.” So I went out to Wimberley, Texas, for three or four days, and after three days, we hadn’t written one note. Then Al decided he wanted to go into town, and he stopped in this little antique store, and he was buying baskets and scarves. I was starting to get a little nervous. After we got in his pickup truck and started it up, he looked at me and said, “Hey brother, don’t worry about it; it’s all part of it.” He’s got a lot of faith. I think that’s one of his biggest gifts. He’s got this enormous faith that we will pull something out of the air. And he was right; we always do. If we don’t, we just lie on the carpet and listen to Mott the Hoople records. That generally gets us through it. It’s going to be a great record, because the songs are pretty concrete. We name a lot of names.

G: It’s the story of his life, right?

CP: Well, we immediately found out we had things in common. We both grew up in Orange County. We both surfed the Huntington Pier. We both saw our first shows at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach. It’s sort of an exploration of song through geography, love, life, death, loss, and whatever.

G: Are you going to be playing with him at the Continental Club on Friday?

CP: We haven’t spoken about it, but I’m hoping to. I have the feeling that’s the idea. I’m hoping that he’s up for as many of his new songs as possible.

WHO: Chuck Prophet

WHAT: “Doubter Out of Jesus (All Over You)” (The Late Show With David Letterman)

WHY: Another 2007 album unceremoniously and undeservedly ignored by both normal people and - surprisingly - many critics was Chuck Prophet’s wide screen roots-rock epic Soap and Water. The record found the journeyman songwriter expanding his sonic palette, slyly adding a children’s choir to songs about casual sex and employing machine-made beats. On the album, this song is an ominous oddity full of chiming bells, chintzy drum blurts and Prophet’s cryptic and wary words about a certain female who holds a god-like power over him: “You could make a doubter out of Jesus,” he repeats, eventually accompanied by the evil-sounding kid choir. On Letterman, the song’s creepy strings are replaced with boisterous horns as it’s transformed from a writhing warning into a full-fledged rocker. Prophet is a scarily solid old-fashioned songwriter - he’s the type of artist the Grammys should love. Unfortunately, Soap and Water was released one week after the Grammy deadline last year. Maybe next time.

Journeyman producer-songwriter and wife, Stephanie, sound so much like Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, we checked to see if the two had ever sang together. They have. This is better. (Grooming)

Chuck Prophet ain’t no household name. Despite putting his shoulder into rock & roll since the late ‘70s with proto-Americana pioneers Green On Red, he remains a San Francisco treat known to a devout following and a coterie of fellow musicians who recognize what a true blue rocker Prophet is. He’s released three of the finest albums of the new millennium – 2000’s The Hurting Business, 2002’s No Other Love and 2004’s Age of Miracles - and his latest, Soap and Water [released October 2 on Yep Roc Records], looks to make it four. With Prophet, everything is in its right place. In the past decade he’s taken his roots rock beginnings into increasingly experimental terrain, juxtaposing boogie riffs with turntables, acoustic guitars with fuzzbox vocals. Like the man himself, the curves are always subtle and infused with a sense of divine laughter.

Prophet holds on tight until material is ripe, only releasing a new slab every couple years. His albums are creepers, where you might not realize just how good they are until you start pulling off individual cuts and see how they shine next to the work of others.

“I know I never let go of them until there’s a fair amount of blood on the floor. But that doesn’t make ‘em better! Music’s funny like that. There’s a kind of abstract-expressionist-cubist-blues approach where if you don’t connect all the dots and use a ruler there’s still some mystery left to the record. I think that’s the thing that makes people return, where more is revealed each time. I think good pop music sounds great the first listen but oftentimes you burn out on it. There’s no mystery to return to,” offers Prophet. “I like The Cars and ABBA and stuff like that but albums like Music From Big Pink or Tonight’s The Night are the ones that come into your mind and you continually return to.”

These are albums that ask the listener to make a leap with them. Every sentence isn’t strictly declarative and fresh, personal associations emerge over time. It’s music that rises above mere entertainment or distraction into the realm of philosophy and psychology. And in the best instances, we can still dance to it.

“As long as there’s something concrete there it’s fine. The music I like least is the purposefully obtuse indie rock or soundscapey stuff. That’s just me, but I still listen to Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen and Some Girls [Rolling Stones]. In general, there’s just too much recording going on. Not everything needs to be preserved,” says Prophet. “It’s happening with filmmaking, too. At the same time, with the advent of video cameras and desktop editing you started to see movies like Hoop Dreams, which wouldn’t have existed otherwise and are just beyond words. I guess it’s just a whole lot of work for the consumer now [laughs].”

We’re rising and we’re falling

Falling and we’re rising

Lost on the invisible sea

A thousand stolen kisses

A crime without a witness

Throw me overboard captain would you please

I just can’t stand myself

Soap and Water draws palpably upon love and lust, which are given equal gravity in Prophet’s work, blasting off with the one-two punch of “Freckle Song,” a bright spot of late ‘70s Stones chug, and “Would You Love Me?,” tattered gospel for the faithless. While the tendency is to focus on either love or sex exclusively, Prophet commingles the two in a truly Gnostic fashion.

“Mothers need to hold their children. They need to feel that skin-on-skin thing, otherwise you breed some real monsters,” muses Prophet. “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. ‘Would You Love Me?’ was one of the last songs that went on the record, and was inspired by Anna Nicole Smith. She was everywhere in the media, and she was tragic. She died of a broken heart. Kinda reminded me a little bit of Elvis. [These type of figures] help us get out of ourselves. We think, ‘I’m fucked up but I’m not THAT fucked up.’ We need those people. We need to drag them out into the city square and stone them. Everybody will feel better.”

Prophet’s tone is mocking but there’s a sliver of ugly truth to his words. One wonders if we’re on our way back to coliseums where the rejected and downtrodden are forced to bloody themselves for the amusement of a desensitized world. “It’s already happening,” says Prophet. “Bin Laden or whatever, the boogie man is something people just have a need to create. It’s a scary part of our human nature. We can’t love ourselves enough to love mankind.”

One of the chief lures of Prophet’s work is a sense that all the fundamentals of strong musicianship - arranging, songwriting, performance and production - are always in place. There’s a rib-sticking fullness to everything he does that’s grown progressively stronger with each solo release.

“I cast each song like its own movie, and I try to find the characters to make it come alive. I hope there’s something about it that can keep me interested,” Prophet says. “I get a lot of ideas, start a lot of songs or push things around on my plate, but I don’t always have the energy to wrestle it all the way to the ground [laughs].”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

Men frequently struggle to articulate their feelings and thoughts about women. Even the best songwriters often unconsciously veer into misogyny or thickheaded simplicity (see Dylan’s oddly beloved and oft-covered “Just Like A Woman” for an examples of both). Prophet manages to spring over these pitfalls, writing woman odes that use the distaff among us as genuine muse for tunes of real depth.

“It’s a delicate thing,” cautions Prophet. “There’s a delicate thing to the blues where it can go either way, where you can go downwards or celebrate the glory of having the blues. It’s a glorious thing to have the blues because it starts with love. It’s better to have your heart broken than to never have loved at all. That’s the part you have to stay in touch with if you want to sing these songs over and over again.”

His songs openly acknowledge the sway women have over many of us boys in a very honest way. “Yeah, absolutely,” enthuses Prophet. “On ‘A Woman’s Voice (Will Haunt You)’ [from Soap and Water] I cut verses. I have an editor’s sense to take out the parts that I didn’t think were true, even though they sounded really good [laughs].”

While women remain central to Prophet’s creative process, he’s often pretty solitary when working up new material.

“I don’t really run it by people. I’m superstitious,” says Prophet. “When I’m in the process of writing a song I don’t go out of my way to solicit anything. I’m just happy when it’s fucking over. At a certain point that’s enough. They take up space in your psyche. Some songs can be really difficult. It’s almost like I don’t feel like starting them but it feels good when they’re finished.”

Taking his time means that what ultimately emerges has a craftsmanship and sturdy endurance that stays around for decades. It’s a trait missing from a lot of modern rock, which too often has the staying power of Pop Rocks. Shortsighted rockers could never come up with a chilling lyric like, “I always did the right thing, what did it get me?”

“[laughs] I love that line, too. I really do. That might be my favorite part of the record, that bridge [on ‘Let’s Do Something Wrong’],” says Prophet, who excels at lines you can’t walk away from once you’ve been exposed to them. “It’s a fun character study of someone who always played by the rules and never left his small town. I think what makes the song really come together is the children singing, ‘Let’s do something wrong, let’s do something stupid.’ They sing it in such an earnest way because they don’t understand the implied costs, the repercussions as an adult for all your actions. When they sing, ‘Let’s do something wrong, let’s do something stupid,’ they sing it with all their heart and soul, without any sense of regret.”

For many older fans, Prophet will always be associated with Green On Red more than any of his ten solo records. While the band does the occasional reunion gig it does seem fraught with the kinds of regrets Prophet was discussing. “It’s like spending a weekend with the kids from your first marriage [laughs]. It’s a mixed thing,” admits Prophet. “We did one show and we were all really surprised how fun it was. We’ll do it from time to time.”

For now, his focus is his own work, a quiet, ceaselessly excellent string of recordings and performances that speak for themselves. All the praise in the world can’t measure up to the intrinsic pleasures awaiting one, in both the long and short term, inside Prophet’s music.

“I feel like I’m just getting the hang of it, so I hope I’m getting better. It’s hard [to get records into people’s hands] but my biggest fear is that I would have to stop. Ultimately, that’s the thing any artist fears more than anything,” says Prophet. “Economically, none of this has ever made any sense for me but you just make the records and play the shows. That’s really all there is to do.”

Chuck Prophet Re-records Entire Jennings Album

Chuck Prophet has re-recorded the entire Waylon Jennings album Dreaming My Dreams With You while accidentally locked in the recording studio of Tim Mooney (Red House Painters).

Apparently, one Friday evening last January, Prophet and his band were at Closer Studios in San Fran, and studio co-owner Sean Coleman had left and set the alarm code. But he forgot to give the musicians the disarm code or the phone number of the alarm company, and as it turned out he’d also left his cell phone in his vehicle when the locked-in people tried to reach him. Prophet was justifiably steamed, but eventually the need for food (and beer) got the better of him, and soon enough everyone decided to make the best of things. Someone cued up the Jennings album, which happened to be on hand, and after still more drinking of beer… you can guess what happened next.

As band member John Murry put it, “Yes. We would do the fucking thing. We would re-record the record with all new interpretations of the songs. We were half drunk, didn’t want to argue because peanut butter makes your mouth REALLY sticky and it kinda starts to hurt if you try to talk too much, and so we gave in. J.J. had all the gear up and running in no time. Guitars, amps, mandolins, basses, drums, a Casiotone key-tar thing, and assorted crap was gathered together. We started recording, beginning with “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” and going straight on through to “Bob Wills Is Still The King”. Sean came back late Saturday night. We scared him; not looking so good and all: smelling like peanut butter, cigarettes, and beer and what not. The rest is history. Recorded history.”

Go to the Dreaming Waylon’s Dreams website for the complete story. (Don’t forget to click on the box that reads “View Photos Here”—it takes you to a page at the ever-eclectic Brink.com site wherein you can look at images from the sessions.

The music is currently being streamed at the website. Meanwhile, a limited, hand-numbered edition of 1000 has also been manufactured with artwork by Bruce Licher of Savage Republic and Scenic fame, plus photographs and a chapbook detailing the recording.

Chuck Prophet has been cranking out sly, soul-tinged Americana for more than two decades, and he’s long overdue for an FM breakthrough. Soap and Water, his ninth solo offering since his days fronting Green on Red, is unlikely to earn him that. The dozen tracks gathered here have hummable hooks and brisk backbeats. But there’s always some element that pushes them too far for the Arbitron zombies who run mainstream radio. On “Would You Love Me,” it’s the creepy keening of a children’s choir. On “All Over You,” it’s a haunting assembly of violins.

Or consider “Something Stupid” (the song, not the cultural circumstance). It’s the exact kind of insanely catchy number John Mayer might have crooned to Jessica Simpson for a VH1 special, and which would then wind up topping the charts for the next six years. But Prophet turns the tune into a kind of mini symphony, summoning a wall of sound that includes strings, keyboards, assorted background voices, and his own sinuous work on the Stratocaster. Radio might not want to risk this kind of majesty, but you should.