"I don't know why you want to talk to me, I'm totally brain dead," he says by way of greeting. "I've gotten about three hours of sleep in the past 72 hours. There's actually drool running down the front of my shirt."

The former Green on Red front man, who plays at the Great American Music Hall next Sunday, is nearly two decades into his celebrated solo career and still taking huge risks. "Let Freedom Ring" was recorded in Mexico City with co-producer Greg Leisz this year just as the swine flu pandemic hit.

"Our timing couldn't have been worse," Prophet says. "Within three days of arriving, the city shut down. So we put on our blue masks and got to work."

The musician and the members of his band - including his wife, Stephanie Finch; guitarist Tom Ayres; bassist Rusty Miller; and drummer Ernest "Boom" Carter - were able to avoid the H1N1 virus but not the ensuing paranoia, giving his roots and rock tunes added edge.

"It was definitely an adventure," he says. "But it was recorded under such duress, it made a band out of us."

We asked Prophet, who has released more than a dozen full-length albums on his own and with his former outfit, to reminisce about his recording sessions.

Green on Red, "Gas Food Lodging" (1985)

"I just got my first passport and all we wanted to do was make a record and go out and play our songs. We met our producer Paul Cutler through a mutual friend, who was a pot dealer and worked five days and nights. It was totally effortless. We had a van and the label gave us a gas card. Those were good times."

Green on Red, "The Killer Inside Me" (1987)

"That was the record that split the band. It was bombastic and humorless. I remember on that tour we played in Athens, Greece, and Dan Stuart attacked somebody in the audience with his guitar and broke it. So we got a note from a doctor and canceled our final gig at the Astoria in London. It was something I never felt good about, so three years ago, when we had our reunion tour, we rescheduled that gig, and anybody who was supposed to be at that original gig could get in for free."

Chuck Prophet, "Brother Aldo" (1990)

"I just had my kite up, and the wind changed direction at the right time. It just kind of happened that myself and Stephanie and a bunch of other local songwriters were all sort of in bands that had gone out of business or collapsed or folded. We started a poker night at the Albion, and there was a healthy competition among us. We would play a gig one weekend and come back the next week and do the songs differently. But people ended up stealing each other's girlfriends and guitars, so it was scene that didn't last long."

Chuck Prophet, "Feast of Hearts" (1995)

"It's the record that cost the most and made the least. If I stand back and squint, it's got some pretty good songs. But it's where I just hit a wall. It was probably the first record where I worked with an outside producer (Steve Berlin), and we never really got in a groove. He just worked out of one side of his brain - I'm not sure what side, but it was the opposite of mine."

Chuck Prophet, "No Other Love" (2002)

"That was when we seriously started to think more about the States. Stephanie said I needed to dumb it down a little bit, so I wrote 'Summertime Thing' using the first three chords everybody learns on guitar. We were on tour with Lucinda Williams, and I was at a salad bar and heard it coming out of a speaker. It was a very strange feeling. From there it started getting some airplay and climbing past people like Sheryl Crow, the Wallflowers and Springsteen on the adult alternative charts. Heart later recorded 'No Other Love.' That record has more than paid the utility bills."

Chuck Prophet, "Age of Miracles" (2004)

"It was a fun record to make. I recorded it in a lot of different places. That song 'You Did' has been in 'True Blood.' It's just got a bunch of weird stuff on it - songs about marriage, miscarriages of justice and midgets. And that's just the M's."

Chuck Prophet, "Dreaming Waylon's Dreams" (2007)

"It's not an official record. One weekend. we got locked in the studio, and I was bragging how I could recite Waylon Jennings' 'Dreaming My Dreams' record by memory. So we started with one song, and by the end of the weekend we recorded the whole album. My friend, who was on tour with a bunch of new country acts, told me he bought it and put it on the tour bus and a fight broke out."

Chuck Prophet, "Let Freedom Ring" (2009)

"I found a studio in Mexico that was state of the art for 1958. In today's economy, that had it's appeal. In terms of perspective, I was writing that album just as the bottom was falling out of the wet sack of the American dream. We didn't really go for mariachi horns, but we were hoping to feed off the energy there. It's a city that hustles and bustles and vibrates beneath your feet. I thought, 'With these songs, why not?' " {sbox}

Chuck Prophet: 8 p.m. next Sun. Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell St., San Francisco. $15. (415) 885-0750, http://www.gamh.com.

To hear Chuck Prophet's music, go to

chuckprophet.com.

Follow Aidin Vaziri at twitter.com/MusicSF. E-mail Aidin Vaziri at avaziri@sfchronicle.com{{PERIOD}}

[ LINK ]

WHEN Chuck Prophet joined Green On Red as a teenager, he had no ambitions to be a rock 'n' roll star. "I grew up in a small town in California and I didn't even know anyone who'd been in a band or in a recording studio," he says. "I didn't get into music to buy my parents a yacht." Three decades later, music is all he's known. "It's the healthiest addiction I've ever had. And I've had a few." More of that later. With Green On Red, he recorded eight albums until leaving to pursue a solo career. That was 20 years ago. At the end of next month, he'll be releasing his eleventh solo effort Let Freedom Ring. "I didn't think I was going to do another one. But I wrote a batch of three or four songs, stood back and thought 'these songs may be going somewhere I've not been before'. "Once I knew the direction the album was going in it was easy." The album was partly inspired by Mexico City, where it was recorded. "It's only a three-hour flight from the west coast but might as well be the other side of the moon. It's a magically inspiring city full of opposites and extremes: friendly folks/corrupt cops, endless beauty/grime. "With the ink barely dry on a shoe-box full of songs we rolled tape – and with the punches – for eight days while enduring poorly-timed blackouts, shakedowns by the Policia and a 6.4 earthquake. "What really sticks in my mind was eating little tacos around a picnic table and smiling like idiots after plugging the guitars straight into the amps and blowing the roof off that tiny bamboo-lined room." Music is his passion and way of life these days. "Since I got clean from drugs and alcohol around eight years ago, my social life has revolved around making music with my friends." For the show at The Maze next week he'll be with The Mission Express: Stephie Finch, Kevin White, Todd Roper and James Deprato. Prophet has collaborated with a number of other songwriters but he has no preference whether he writes alone or with a partner. What does he believe makes a good song? "Nobody knows really. For me, I have my own values like honesty, but you need to be lucky too. It's a very mysterious thing. People can learn the craft of songwriting and learn how to go from a verse to a chorus but I don't know what it is about someone like Smokey Robinson that makes it different. "Someone like Leonard Cohen pours things from beaker to beaker over time and creates a master painting, but then a band like Art Brut can come out with their first album and every song is great. And I have no idea how they did it." As befits a man who is involved with music for music's sake, Prophet's take on success is pretty simple: "I try to be nice to my wife, cook myself a decent meal every once in a while and still hope to find a guitar that will stay in tune. That's about it."

We spoke to Chuck Prophet about "Always a Friend," the opening cut on Real Animal:

I suspect that you've known Alejandro a long time, probably even dating back to his Nuns days, but I think this is the first time you've written with him. What led to you work with him on his new record?

He had an idea that it would work. And he was right. He asked me to come out to his place in Wimberly, Texas. We then spent a year splitting time between my little office space in San Francisco and his garage-cum-manspace in Wimberly. It took us a while to get up to speed. But Al has this incredible faith and patience. He's very patient. I'm like, "What's with the whole patience thing?" He tells me, "Bro, that's the Mayan thing." There were days of us just laying around talking. We spent a lot of time laying on the carpet in the dark talking. And listening to Mott the Hoople records. And naps. Lots of naps. But when we got worked up into a lather, it would flow through us. I often thought that if someone were to see us-if someone were to look in the window at us when we're in the throes of it-they might be tempted to call the cops.

The full interview is here:

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.

Soundbites from the performer, on the road, doing what he loves

As he makes his way across Germany -- specifically, from Berlin to Hanover -- Chuck Prophet is offering cell phone snippets of life on the road abroad.

His conversation isn't intended to seem like a scrapbook. It's just that the miracle of telecommunication technology isn't on anyone's side this day, regardless of which side of the Atlantic they happen to sit. One moment, Prophet is jubilantly deconstructing the songs -- or, more specifically, the inspirations behind them -- that make up his fine new album, Soap and Water. The next, the phone line goes dead, to be replaced by a severe recitation in German.

"It's a brave new world, my friend," Prophet says when conversation resumes.

The acclaimed San Francisco producer, writer, guitarist and concert artist began forging a devout indie following more than two decades ago in the Los Angeles garage-psychedelic-Americana band Green on Red. But through a solo recording career that began in 1990, Prophet developed an even more expansive pop sound that was as literate as it was lyrical.

In short, he sang a little like Tom Petty, wrote a lot like Tom Waits and rocked with an onstage abandon all his own, as evidenced generously by a string of Lexington concerts after the release in 2000 of his album The Hurting Business.

"It's my job, as a songwriter, to have my antenna up so I can look around for the right details," Prophet said. "And to be perfectly honest, I'm not always in the right head-space to wrestle every idea that floats by to the ground. I don't have that kind of energy."

Prophet compared the process of crafting an album from the ideas he does wrestle with to "honking your horn in a tunnel until you get bored."

"It's like you're spending your life chasing after this thrill," he said. "There's a buzz that comes from writing a song you get really excited about. But the buzz never lasts long. You're always left wondering where the next song will come from."

Kelly Willis, the veteran country-Americana artist whose newest album, Translated From Love, was produced by Prophet, says, "Chuck has always been involved when it comes to music. I have always really, really loved and connected with his instincts for songs. He is one of these people that live and breathes music and just instinctively knows what to do with a song."

Rather than elaborate further on the general discourse of songwriting, Prophet said he'd talk about specific songs he has penned, to offer more exact examples of how his pop smarts take on a tune.

What a great idea. Then the phone goes dead again and a recorded German scolding returns. A third call is placed, and renewed conversation accelerates. After all, another foreign tongue-lashing could break in at any moment.

The first tune Prophet detailed was Doubter Out of Jesus, a Soap and Water song that is a study of conversion more social than religious. It struts to an electric drum groove and swells with, of all things, the support singing of a Nashville children's choir.

"We were near the end of a recording session," he said. "Everybody had packed up the drums and basses and everything. A bunch of us were in the control room talking about what the album was missing. So I went through my notebook and pulled this song out. We just jammed on a riff using a drum machine. The whole thing was a freak accident. But when we brought in the children later on, everything went to another level."

Prophet also was asked to discuss Soap and Water's finale, Happy Ending.

"I was just fingerpicking around on the guitar on that one," he said. "I started thinking of it as the closing credits for a movie. I thought, 'This is great. I have the last song for the album. Now all I need is the first one."

As varied and curious as the creative process can be in crafting a song, designing a new life for his music every night onstage can be equally exciting. For Prophet, though, the rewards are numerous. Life on the road offers a chance to hook up with a combustible performance persona that his records seldom reveal in full. But there is a personal bonus as well. Prophet's longtime keyboardist, Stephanie Finch, is also his wife.

"Performance is kind of my addiction, I suppose. But in terms of addictions, it's the healthiest one I've ever had. I'm lucky to travel and hammer things out onstage with Stephanie. There's always something going on out on the bandstand.

"You know, people are always talking about the (music) industry being in the doldrums, that nobody is buying records anymore. For me, I feel like I'm just getting the hang of this. In that respect, I've never been happier."

Green on Red
Valley Fever: Green on Red Live at The Rialto

(Brink Films)

Just over a year ago, Green on Red, the seminal 1980s Paisley Underground/alt-country/roots rock/whatever band, reconvened at Tucson’s Rialto Theater to celebrate Hotel Congress’ 20th anniversary as well as pay tribute to their fallen drummer, Alex Macnicol. The 16-song set was initially burdened by the band’s don’t-wanna-talk-about-it baggage, but shortly got to cookin’-and soon singer-songwriter-guitarist Dan Stuart’s jokes got better and the four remaining members smiled, sweated and played like it was 1985 all over again. Guitarist Chuck Prophet discussed the event with Harp.

HARP: Shall we speak of Green on Red’s "sloppy brilliance?"

Some people thought we were the saviors of rock ’n’ roll, and a lot of other people thought we were pathetic. I think they were both right.

There is kind of a Wild Bunch element to Green on Red. But there’s safety in numbers. We’re all tight enough to just embrace the sloppiness when it happens, you know. Before we played the show, we went to London and rescheduled a show that was meant to be the last show of our tour, before we basically imploded. We had a huddle backstage and Dan said, "Okay, we’re old. We know what to do."

HARP: Takes a big man to admit that.

Seriously, there were times when it meandered into brilliance and when it was pathetic.

HARP: Where were you brilliant and where were you pathetic?

Anybody that learned five cowboy chords at Catholic youth camp could probably play any of [Green on Red’s] songs. At the same time, there was something about the collective thing that happened when we all played together. But, you know, to be honest, there's really not a lot of things I want to revisit from 18 years ago. We had to do the reunion because we all know things about each other that we don’t want anyone to know.

HARP: You’ve been through a lot with these guys.

In the four years that we were really active toward the end, it was like we were running on the same nine-volt battery; things got pretty dim. We were all pretty dispirited and it got pretty unfriendly. But it didn’t take long to stand back and squint and remember the good stuff.

HARP: So will you play the Hotel Congress festival every year?

I think somebody started that rumor, in the "If you book it they will come" spirit, but we don’t wanna revisit that. Even though it had been a short time that we’d all been communicating, it didn’t take long before we started bristling at each other’s emails, I’ll tell you that.

HARP: So-how hard did you have to squint to see the good stuff?

Gee, Dr. Phil, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I guess we’re still workin’ through it. One thing I was thinking about today was how things have changed in the music business. One thing was, when we were touring around, our version of really making it was to have a gas card. And we had a gas card; we could fill up the van. In that way, we made it.

We get along creatively as humans, I think. There’s a certain brotherhood to Green on Red, but I think for the uninitiated, if they were to see us all together, somebody didn’t know us might think, "Gee, those guys don’t seem to like each other very much."

Chuck Prophet, "Age of Miracles" (New West): Prophet's records always seem to find a way into my best-of lists. No one layers country, rock and 1960s soul idioms better than this former Green on Red guitarist. "Age of Mircales" includes the eerie/erotic "You Did (Bomp Shooby Dooby Bomp)," and "You Got Me Where You Want Me," a duet with wife Stephanie Finch, recalls the innocent charms of Sonny and Cher.

There's been lots of water under the bridge since Chuck Prophet's band Green On Red tried to take the airwaves by storm in the 1980s. They wrote the right songs, had the right look, and performed a kick-ass live show. Big record labels rolled out the red carpet and extended Big Time contracts. But things just never panned out. Chuck quit the band, cleaned up his act, and throughout the '90s released critically-acclaimed, slim-selling CDs. But suddenly, Chuck Prophet's on the radio. "Summertime Thing" is a hit, and finally, finally, America's getting a taste of the genius of Chuck Prophet.

Jeff Troiano: What's happening, Chuck?
Chuck Prophet: Not much shaking here. I finally resurfaced after about six months of submarine duty.

How long have you been home?
I guess for about a week. I went to Nashville and did some work after the tour ended.

How do you like that Nashville scene these days?
Well, I dig it, you know, because for me as a writer, well, for a number of reasons. I don't really party anymore, so that's what's left of my social life-writing with other people. And Nashville is the last vestige of any sort of Brill Building spirit.

What kind of building?
The Brill Building was a place in New York where Carole King and Doc Palmis and Gerry Goffen wrote songs. If you got lucky, somebody might record one.

You've had some luck in that regard lately. Who's been cutting your tunes?
Well, I've had a bunch of obscure records over the years, but last year I did have a top-40 single by a girl named Cyndi Thomson. It caught on. Cyndi's a nice Christian girl, farm-fed, centerfold material. My friend Kim Richey and I wrote a song called "I'm Gone," actually upstairs from the Red Vic on Haight Street. It's kind of a '60s Tommy James kind of song. We made this real ghetto demo of it in this crappy studio with a cement floor, and we played it and cut it and put a few things on it, and we decided it needed bongos, and a year later it comes out on the Cyndi Thomson record-with bongos.

So they stayed true to the Haight Street feel?
Getting a song cut, even if the version strays off from what you had envisioned, is amazing. There's no such thing as a bad cover version of a song. It's a good day.

How do you get compensated when someone else makes a hit out of your song? Is that big money?
Well, yeah, there's sort of a bittersweet ending to that story that I'm not going to bore you with, as far as making bad business decisions. On a record like that, you should make some change. You get compensated for every time it's sold; you get your pennies for every time it's played on the radio. It's all gravy.

The reviews have been very positive for your new CD, "No Other Love." How's it selling?
This record was pretty rare. There was probably less blood on the floor after we finished this one than any of the others. We caught a little bit of a wave with the single on the radio. And for so many years we had just ignored North America, hoping it would just go away. Not that we were selling out stadiums or ballrooms across Europe, but Europe has always been good to us. Our single has allowed us to infiltrate pop culture, just a skinny little foot in the door. I heard it coming out of a little speaker in a salad bar in Philadelphia, which was rather cool. That helped a lot. And Lucinda Williams took us out on tour all summer; that really helped with record sales.

How did that happen with Lucinda?
My A&R guy, Peter Jasperson, is an old friend of hers. He played the record for her, she liked what she heard, looked up and said, "Do you think he'd come out on tour with me?" That was it.

How many shows did you do with her?
It might have been 20-some odd dates with her. She only plays three or four times a week, so we were out there for a couple of months in the Midwest and the East Coast.

What did you do with all of that downtime on the road?
We did everything we could do to keep up with her two buses. I tell ya', man, I mean sometimes there might be 800 miles between gigs, and I have an '88 Dodge Ram, so we spent a lot of time sucking her diesel, as they say. But the highlight of the whole thing for me was when we had this show at an amphitheater, and the weather was beautiful, and these beach balls were bouncing everywhere. Lucinda just kept looking at these things while she singing like a puppy, and she said, "Heck, I don't know. It's a summertime thing." But there were many nights when we'd play the gigs and we'd gather around the catering, and we'd have an official band meeting, and we'd say, "Okay, tonight, after we finish our set let's load up the van, get the union guys to help, and get the fuck out of here, and try to get in four hours tonight. So we'd make the grandiose plans and then, inevitably, when the time arrived, I'd look around for everybody and they'd be glued to the side of the stage watching Lucinda's first encore. Night after night, watching Lucinda is like going to church or going to school or both.

You tasted success in the past, during the Green On Red days. Did you ever have the big tour bus?
There were times. I mean, somebody else was paying for it. Yeah, we tasted success, but we were always well under the radar. We had a couple of major deals with labels, but we were always kind of stowaways for those labels. Eventually they'd have a board meeting and say, "Who the fuck are these guys?"

The new stuff seems to have lots of interesting influences. I hear a bit of hip-hop, some Middle Eastern, some sampling, and of course the roots-based stuff. How'd that happen?
As a songwriter, I'm a slave to traditional song craft, whatever I do. I mean, my heroes are still going to be Dylan and Carole King and Hank Williams. But for me, the process of making new records is a matter of constantly seeking new ways to cast the movie. I'm turned on by people like Moby and DJ Shadow, and I appreciate what those guys have been able to do by bending traditional song structures. As much as I admire that stuff, I'm still a "first verse, first chorus" kind of guy. I see some people out there taking some sort of modern approach and trying to shoehorn it into their songs, but that doesn't really work. You've got to listen to the song's needs and go with that.

How do you categorize your sound these days?
What I do is "American" music. You might call it "Americana." I just do what I do, throw in what interests me, what I gravitate toward, throw it into a pot, bring it to a boil, and I see what floats to the top. The European tradition of music is that you play music as it's written on the page; I'm not part of that tradition.

Which radio stations are playing "Summertime Thing"? What do you call that format?
There's a format called AAA-WXRT in Chicago; KFOG here in San Francisco; there are a lot of them, kind of like KFOG. KFOG has had an incredibly profound affect on the things here at Chuck Prophet, Inc. I mean, I've got my '88 Dodge Ram van with 250,000 miles on it; I've got a five-piece band; I've got a drummer with a teenage daughter, and radio has really helped. I'd heard about good things like this happening, and I'd read about it. It's just wonderful.

I heard something about a national TV appearance...
We did the Craig Kilborn Show. It was pretty exciting, pretty nerve-wracking. We had a rehearsal to set the camera moves and stuff, and you play it once through for the audience and that's it. It was cool. Craig is not at his best when you're playing, but I kept pointing over there and yelling at him, "Yo, Craigy, 'I bow down and pray to every woman I see. Can you feel me?'" So that was sort of my inside joke. But he was pretty cool. He tracked me down into my dressing room and said, "I'm hearing a little Iggy Pop in there." And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "I'm hearing a little bit of Dylan, a little Beck," and I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Who are you listening to these days?
"Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits;" David Holmes' Organization; I like the new Cornershop record. I like a little bit of the new Dixie Chicks' record. I listen to a lot of old music and as much new stuff as I can. When it comes to songwriters, it's still Warren Zevon, John Prine, and Randy Newman for me.

What's it like doing what you do from here in San Francisco? Is it awkward sometimes? I mean, do you ever want to be in L.A. or living in Nashville?
No, I love it here. There's just something in the air here. It sounds kind of corny, but there's just a certain spirit and a certain quality to the light that I love. I moved here to go to college, and it has just always seemed like a place where people were waving their freak flags high. I've always been able to find a place to play and to work with some great musicians. And it's not an industry town; it's a town for freaks.

Who would you recommend that we listen to locally these days?
There's a guy in the Mission from Detroit, Kelly Stoltz. We played a gig with him, and he gave me a vinyl record that he'd recorded on his 8-track. It's probably one of the most beautiful things I've heard-that I can ever remember hearing. I'm all for Kelly Stoltz.

I'm going to throw a few names at you. In 10 words or less, tell me what you think. Here's the first one: Eminem.
Stone cold genius.

Joe Henry.
Madonna's brother-in-law.

Ryan Adams.
He's just an exceptionally talented puke.

Britney Spears.
No redemption there.

Bruce Robison.
Oh, writer of perhaps the best song to come out in 2002-"Traveling Soldier"-as covered by the Dixie Chicks. If it doesn't bring tears to your eyes, then just check yourself for a pulse.

Gram Parsons.
Beyond country rock; beyond rehab.

And last but not least, Mr. Bob Seger.
Vastly underrated.

Kelly Willis made the following quote about you: "If I could sing like anyone, I'd sing like Chuck Prophet." What do you think of that?
She was confused but I'm not gonna call her on it.

Do you care what anyone else thinks about your music?
I can't afford to care too much. I had a conversation with a friend the other who said, "Well, I guess everybody's happy now, now that the record's doing well." What do I fucking care? I'd never get anything done. And that's the kiss of death to start to care too much. Don't get me wrong-I want the love. But I don't wanna have to work to hard for it.

Chuck Prophet is literally livin' large, so we arrange to meet for coffee with one caveat: "It's got to be the right place, because I take up a lot of space," he said. That's ok. The guy has plenty to shout about.

His fourth solo album, "Homemade Blood," shows off his stunning songwriting, guitar playing and vocals--a traditional, rootsy, raw, and heartfelt stew that digs for the source but comes out "sideways." He has a new label, Cooking Vinyl and he's been to Europe twice since the first of the year; he's off again this Summer for four European festivals and a U.S. tour with his mighty band--Max Butler; guitars, Anders Rundblad; bass, Paul Revelli; drums and Stephanie Finch; keyboards and vocals. He just saw the release of a live collaboration with buddy and Memphis music legend Jim Dickinson and he remains happily ensconced in his San Francisco digs with his band mate and partner, Finch.

Though his struggle with hard drugs could make a case for the contrary, nonetheless, Prophet appears to finally be comfortable in his own skin. He looks like rock and roll personified--tall and thin, hair that looks like it's never been washed, a cigarette dangling from his lips--the kind of musician they don't make too many of these days.

Eleven years is a long time for anybody to sustain the kind of musical career Prophet has (without ever holding a day job), particularly when one's music supersedes trends. His lyrics will often fuse the honesty and artfulness of Bob Dylan with the tunefulness of say, Tom Petty. For more contemporary references, you could pigeonhole him in the same place Pete Droge, the Jayhawks and Wilco reside (Americana/No Depression-land), but that would be doing Prophet a big disservice as belongs in a class by himself. He was simply born at the wrong time.

Had he been born earlier, his keen sense of rock history, his continual search for "the source" probably would've earned him the accolades of an Eric Clapton or Keith Richards. Had he been born later, he would be as lauded and adept at deconstructing rock as Beck. But Prophet belongs to that middle generation who live in the shadow of boomer musicians and fans and precede X-ers who don't always care much about the source.

"I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I got way too many miles on me, man," he said. "I wish I had a generation. I would've made a great slacker, but I'm just a little bit old and I wanted to do things," he said.

His song "You've Been Gone," from the new record perfectly explains that kind of lost weekend lifetime of experience: You've been gone, you've been gone, clouds make rain and days make years...I think you'll find some changes here.

"The line, Sweet Lorraine's on SSI, her mind walked off before she said goodbye made me think of all my drinking buddies at the Albion," he said, referring to a 16th Street watering hole. "All of those guys were on SSI. I swear it's gotta be more work than working, but I wouldn't know." Somehow, time slips away.

With the songs presented in a down-home style with none of the artifice that is currently fashionable (i.e. the lamest band on the charts that uses mandolin and accordion you can think of inserted here), since his days as the teenage guitarist in LA's Green on Red, commercial enthusiasm for Prophet has never reached critical mass. But he's a survivor and possesses a certain wisdom well beyond someone of his 30 some-odd years.

"Part of being real is what you learn from good literature, like Raymond Carver poems. They're really plain and the way people talk is really plain and it's so plain it hurts because it's not glamorous. If you get real you get closer to the truth and if you get closer to the truth you get closer to God and that's art. If there's a just God, those people who are pretending are going to get busted anyway," he said.

Funny that a man who looks to rock's poet laureate, Dylan, as king songwriter would be espousing the pleasures of plain.

"Most of Dylan's greatest songs are painfully plain," he asserts. "Even though 'In the Garden's got the most complicated chord structure I can think of, it's really a straightforward song as is 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door'. You know what he's talking about. Anybody can tie a bunch of lines together, but if you know where you're going with it, then it's a lot harder."

"I could've dressed up the songs on the album in all kinds of gothic shit, and I didn't. People don't need to come to me for that," he stated matter of factly. "You can't find a source for this music. It comes from some guy strumming a fence on barbed wire. The Stones took traditional music and turned it sideways and that's what I'm trying to do," he explained.

Prophet's "plain" songs for his fourth solo album were inspired by a detox-break he took last year at his parents suburban East Bay home, while he weaned himself "from sucking the glass dick," as he refers to the crack pipe.

"I went back home and I realized it was the last place I'd been before I was kind of fucked up and I could smell everything and it was weird and brand new and kind of spooky. That's where I wrote 'K-Mart Family Portrait.' I know exactly what happened. It has a Linda Ronstadt melody from her album, 'Mad Love,' that my sister used to have. I got kind of inspired because I got kind of creeped out. I don't really get that when I walk up and down 16th Street anymore. I've strip-mined the Mission. There's nothing there," he explained. "And all the rural stuff has been strip-mined too--don't go there.

Consequently, the album's deepest vein is that of suburban angst. "I started having dreams about being a kid," said Prophet. "I'm not precious enough to write my dreams down and think I'm going to turn them into songs, but there was a lot floating around. It was new subject matter to stick into songs--I wanted to stay off the known roads."

" My favorite Raymond Carver poem is the one where he's sitting in his driveway in his station wagon drinking a six-pack and he can't go inside because his family's in there," no doubt explaining the car parked in front of the pick-a-suburb home that adorns the album's cover. When he finished writing, Prophet took his band into the studio to cut the songs live, to give the record the kind of free-wheeling feel that the group has developed as a consistent live act.

"Everything was a reaction to spending too much time in the control room on the last record. I wanted to have some fun with the songs and break out of the singer/songwriter mold."

Prophet has kept the same line-up for some time which allowed the band to roll with the free-form and immediate recording process.

"I wouldn't have done it like this if I didn't have a band. Stephanie can sing around me which isn't easy to do, but I never had a guitar player till I found Max. If it gets too comfortable, it's not good, but when we're on the road, we have these telepathic workouts. He knows when I bend over it means to do this--we don't have to talk about it."

As for living with a band mate, "it's weird. You don't really want to show anybody a song till it's done. I got up one night to go to the bathroom and I went and picked up my guitar and Stephanie was yelling, 'What are ya doin' in there?' and I was whispering a song into a tape recorder. I yelled back, 'I'm writin' a song.' When I'm just pulling things out of the air, I don't want anyone around."

"Credit" is one of those fantastic songs that came out of the air while Prophet and one of his co-writers, Kurt Lipschutz, were working together. "It's one of those character songs and a play on words. A song like 'My Generation' doesn't look very good on paper but when he stutters it means so much more. Or like 'Unsatisfied" by Paul Westerberg when he screams--it means so much. When my friend Kurt and I printed it out and it didn't look that good, we thought, we're really on to something now," he laughed. "And I get to scream in it," said Prophet referring to the line, "I want some CREDIT."

"Someone in my manager's office said, 'That's a good double entendre and my manger said, 'It's a single!'

Prophet doesn't really look for outside projects, but often they(itals) find him(itals). He just played guitar on a little-known singer/songwriter, Calvin Russell's new album.

"He used to walk about ten steps behind Townes Van Zandt," he said. It was produced by Dickinson and features the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section. "It's a top 30 album in France, as we speak. And I got to record in Memphis with Dickinson, and that was great." Last year, he recorded with another songwriter's sidekick, Dylan's old pal, Bobby Neuwirth. Prophet spoke of the thrill of recording with yet another legend.

"There were eight guitar players in the room... Steven Soles, Billy Swan, Neuwirth, Rosie Flores...we did a run down of the song and I wasn't sure who was going to play guitar and Swan said, 'you take the lead,' and I got to play my Telecaster with Billy Swan playing rhythm guitar. He played rhythm guitar for Kristofferson, you know?"

He also recently recorded with beat poet Herbert Hunke. "He's dead now, so no one else is going to get to do that. I'm not the biggest Chuck Prophet fan, so I don't have 50 side projects where I think everything I touch should be released. I do a lot of things and most of them are invisible and they probably just should be."

"I'd still like to do a record with Stephanie, but we move at our own tempo," he said.

Though he may have profited more had been born alongside his spiritual mentors--Dylan, Petty, Springsteen, Young, Dickinson, Van Zandt, Kristofferson, Neuwirth, Chilton and the like, Prophet won't back down. Plus, he's already made a couple of marks on the pages of rock history.

"I survived the Paisley Underground--now that was dumb. Some journalist was trying to get me to dis the No Depression movement--I wouldn't, as long as we understand they didn't invent it. I actually think Uncle Tupelo were pretty good and I like Wilco," he said cheerily.

"I'm not nostalgic and I don't think things used to be better. I think these are the good old days. "