On his 10th studio album, Temple Beautiful (Yep Roc), Chuck Prophet found his muse in the city he’s called home for 30 years. Exploring the local landmarks and myths with friend and poet klipschutz, Prophet winds his way through San Francisco, stretching tales even taller along the way. But this guided tour isn’t a detailed and prefabricated concept album, so much as it’s the product of spontaneous inspiration, and it’s not a document of the city’s past as much as it is of its present. MAGNET caught up with Prophet to explore some of the things that inspired the making of Temple Beautiful. Prophet will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.

MAGNET: Temple Beautiful has been dubbed your “ode to San Francisco.” What inspired this album-length exploration of the city?

Prophet: I was writing songs with a friend of mine, Kurt; his pen-name is klipschutz. We were just kind of messing around, really, and we tapped into this vein where I was just like, “This could be a San Francisco record.” And that’s really it. It kind of floated to the top, then once we tapped into that, everything started flowing.

I know ¡Let Freedom Ring! had a bit more of a political tone or thread. Do you feel like giving yourself these sorts of conceptual frameworks helps the album come together?

Yeah, for me it does for sure. I know some things about writing songs. I know how to put things together. But really, I’m kind of in awe of the whole process. Mostly, I feel like I don’t know anything, so I guess it helps to be pushing an idea along. Then it’s like, you have an idea in a room with somebody, and you’re playing some chords, and you’re shouting at the walls and bouncing sounds around, and, you know, somebody says, “Well, we’re going to have to see if Willie Mays will show up in one of these songs.” That’s kind of the way it goes, you know.

Is it a deliberate thing for you, to come up with an idea for the record before you start really getting into the meat of the song?

I mean, I can write songs, like love songs or relationship songs or whatever. But I feel like at some point something emerges. At some point you stand back and squint and say, “Well, this is kind of where this record’s going.” I dunno. Maybe it’s something you figure out when the record’s done.

I wonder sometimes, too, how much is just critics projecting.

People only have so much time. So, if somebody says that they went to Alaska and lived in a teepee for a year and wrote these songs, that might be the best way to describe it. I really don’t know. I know that when we tapped into the spontaneity and the kind of energy that brought me here in the first place, then we had songs I was excited about. I guess that’s it. And you gotta understand, too, I was born in Whittier, Calif. I was born only a few miles from where Nixon had his first law office, and for all intents and purposes, I should probably still be down there pushing a lawn mower or something. I didn’t really grow up very culturally aware, so most of it came from listening to records and stuff. I started traveling, then when I moved to San Francisco I started getting my own sort of self-education in different people of different races and colors and sexes and shit, punk rock and arty stuff. For me, coming here kind of opened my eyes. When we tapped into that, I felt like we were tapping into something I could get excited about.

When did you move to San Francisco and what brought you there?

I basically moved here to go to college in the early ’80s, and I never left.

How many of the characters in the songs are real? I recognized a lot of the places, or have found out about them after hearing the songs, but how much are the people in there actual people of San Francisco?

We kind of leaned a little more toward the mythological side of things, but, I mean, Willie Mays is very real. There’s also a whole host of characters on the record, from the Mitchell Brothers to Redman to Jim Jones—a lot of people who probably wouldn’t be caught dead with Willie Mays, or Willie Mays probably wouldn’t be caught dead with them. We knew he was going to be on the record somehow, and he’s a very real person, and he’s sort of the hero of the record. He’s a kinda quiet guy, and he’s a man of substance and stood up to racism. There’s probably a lot of thick books written about him, but all we knew about him is that he always swung for the fence.

The reason I ask is I read an interview from January, where you’d said, “I’ll always take the myth over the truth.” When you’re writing creatively, that’s always kind of what you’re doing, shaping the truth or the memory, but do you see mythmaking as part of your goal in writing these songs?

No. Well, if you’re lucky, sure. I’m trying to think of the guy from the Silver Jews (David Berman). He has an expression that somebody told me. He calls it “Google Pure.” If you can Google something and not find it, and it doesn’t come up anywhere, he calls it “Google Pure.” A lot about this record is sort of “Wikipedia Pure.” We didn’t really know. We were definitely in a woodshed when we wrote the songs, in the sense that we didn’t have any Internet. Even a song like “Castro Halloween,” that we snuck out about the parade that happens really only a couple blocks from my apartment every year, I thought two people were killed, but it turns out that really two people were shot and nine people were injured. The first line of the song is “When the shots rang out/And two men died,” so somebody corrected me, like, “Actually, Chuck, you know, nobody died.” Spoilsports.

That’s how storytelling works, though. Through memory or accidents things change and become something new.

It’s also rock ’n’ roll; it’s not journalism. Sorry. Sorry you got the short end of the stick when it comes to the fun.

I was interested to see that you had done some gigs playing London Calling front-to-back. That’s been one of my favorite records forever because there’s so much variety in it. It seems like maybe that’s an attribute you value in your music.

Oh, absolutely. I think that the Clash are very roots rock and world music and all that stuff with London Calling. For me, prior to that, punk rock was pretty narrow, and that record showed what was possible. I still feel like that’s probably the record I’ve been trying to make, in many ways. They were just discovering American jazz and rockabilly and ska, and they had a deep well of music history that they were drawing from, and they dipped their bucket down into that well, and they weren’t afraid to drink it. Even if you listen to “Train In Vain,” which was a very contemporary-sounding track at the time, they weren’t afraid to play with disco, which was really just contemporary black music. It’s an adventurous record. I think if it wasn’t a direct influence on me, it at least showed me what was possible.

You’ve worked with a lot of people. Whether helping Sonny Smith put out a record or helping Alejandro Escovedo write one or playing guitar with god knows how many folks at this point. How important is collaborating, and getting fresh insight from people?

I like it. I appreciate writing songs by myself, but I sometimes like having somebody in the room with me. With somebody like Alejandro or klipschutz, it’s easy company. It’s probably also my social life, in a lot of ways. What I like is I like a shared experience. I’ve been playing with my wife, and I’ve been playing with my friends, and that’s why I got into playing music. I didn’t really get into music to be by myself. I like the shared experience, and I think that’s something that helps me to work with other people.

Would you say that you’re actively searching for new sounds and new influences?

I don’t know if I’m actively doing much of anything really. I have a pretty healthy appetite for music, so yeah I like to listen to records.

You’ve complimented the new crop of garage/psych bands in San Francisco, bands like Thee Oh Sees, Girls and Fresh & Onlys. What about that do you relate to, or find inspiring?

I like to see people playing guitars and making noise with their friends. It’s inspiring to see a new crop of bands from my hometown. And just the energy of it, I really like. It’s inspiring because there’s energy and that thing, you know?

Do you feel like you’re, by virtue of being in the same place, a part of that in any way?

I don’t know. Like I tell people, I’ve been duct taped back together so many times I don’t even know what I’m a part of. I’m probably not a part of it. They do their own thing. When Green On Red was playing ‘60s music and into psychedelia and stuff, that was just our way of saying fuck you to everything else that was around, and that’s pretty healthy, I think … In a lot of ways, the money ruined everything in the ‘90s. Money makes people stupid. I think a lot of bands around here got signed, and I think there were these unrealistic expectations, and there were a lot of bands that ended up signed to major labels in the wake of all that, when the music business model was just massive. I didn’t think of that as an inspired time, but now I see people recording records in their closets and people building studios in their basements, and people making records with just the sheer desire to do it. I think that’s always really inspiring.

With Temple Beautiful, what would you hope people hearing it get out of it?

I’d hope they didn’t need an owner’s manual to get into it. I hope that when it hits you, if you like rock ’n’ roll, that it’ll speak to you.

—Bryan Reed

Mike Ragogna: Hi Chuck. What was your plan approaching your new album Temple Beautiful?

Chuck Prophet: I knew I wanted to make a rock ‘n’ roll record, a guitar record, and then somehow, I got the idea of digging into the local lore of San Francisco, which is endless. I was writing with my friend Kurt, aka, Klipschutz, and when we tapped into that, the ideas began to flow. On a good day, an idea might actually grow up into a song. Ultimately, we leaned on the more mythical side of the street.

MR: San Francisco must mean a lot to you.

CP: San Francisco means a lot to a lot of people, and yeah, I am one of them. I mean, everybody comes here from everywhere for all the obvious reasons, and some maybe not so obvious. There are so many different cities packed into seven square miles, and they intersect and overlap. I guess you could say I wasn’t very culturally aware when I was growing up in Richard Nixon’s hometown. Then I moved around. Ended up in San Francisco going to school. Joined a band. Started to travel, saw some things. Fast forward a little and here I am. What I mean to say is that San Francisco is an education. It’s an education on different kinds of buildings, food, people, races, colors, sexes and the like. It opens your eyes.

MR: How did you assemble the cast of characters that appear with you?

CP: Once the songs were there, it fell together. I played guitar on a session where the drummer was Prairie Prince. He had that feel, you know? So I reached out to him. He’s got experience to burn and he still plays like a teenager. So that was the groove. Very teenage. James DePrato plays guitar in my band and together, we know how to make it sound like one big guitar. Rusty Miller played bass. And Stephanie Finch, my wife and long time partner in crime, brought her thing—singing and playing some keyboards here and there. Brad Jones produced and engineered. It’s a much less layered record. The guitars are pretty graphic. Even the cover art is just black and white. Honestly, I was pretty confident with the songs and just didn’t feel the nagging need to add more than that.

MR: This is your twelfth album, and many of your contemporaries haven’t made it past half of that. What’s your secret?

CP: No secrets. I guess I’m lucky that I’ve been able to stay interested in the whole thing. Writing songs and making records and kicking the songs around on the bandstand. There have been times where I wasn’t that excited and it showed. There are other things to do. I’m trying to get some hobbies in fact. Yeah, anyway, to wake up excited about what you’re doing is a gift, I suppose.

MR: Q Magazine said you are “... a sparky songwriter worthy of greater attention.” Mojo said, “Prophet delivers with quixotic swagger and declamatory sneer.”

CP: Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I’ll take it. I’ve been known to write my own blurbs, but that one is cool. Thanks for not choosing some of the others, by the way. I need the love. Every time I’m done making a record, I suggest that the promotional department gather in a circle, join hands and pray. Then we dig up some old quotes for the bio, book gigs anywhere anyone will have us, and hope for the best. My records have never really sold that much. I guess I should feel bad about that? I’m sorry I brought it up.

MR: (laughs) In your opinion, how does your music these days compare to your Green on Red days?

CP: Not that much different. Dan Stuart and I were always looking for trouble. And I guess I’m still out there standing over steaming manholes.

MR: What are your thoughts about the old Paisley Underground versus these days?

CP: A lot of great music came out of that time. If you look at what was on MTV or the radio, it’s amazing that we got record deals. I think The Bangles really ran with it, and I hear they’re still making great music and have a really great live show these days. I wanted to go see them play at The Fillmore recently, but I missed them when they were in town. But the scene… I don’t know. I think it was pretty short-lived if you think about it. But those years in a van with Green On Red were wild. No one knew where they’re next big chunk of hash was coming from. Now, I’m into lunch. Speaking of which, mind if I give a shout out to Split Pea Seduction on 6th Street? There might be a free crostata in it for both of us!

MR: (laughs) Thanks. Okay, “Willie Mays Is Up At Bat” must speak to the baseball fan in you? What’s the story behind that song?

CP: I’m all for the Giants. No matter what, actually, I always root for the home team. For the album, though, we knew we needed a hero. Any myth needs a hero. And you can’t beat Willie Mays. Talk about larger than life. I mean, at the downtown stadium, there’s a bronze statue of him 10 feet tall. The greatest center fielder that ever lived. Of course we had to go and mix him up with a bunch of characters he wouldn’t be caught dead with.

MR: Such as?

CP: Oh, you know, Carol Doda, Laffing Sal, Bill Graham, Jim Jones, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck—that crowd.

MR: (laughs) Can you also go into the story behind “Castro Halloween”?

CP: The Castro District is world-famous, isn’t it? And Halloween there tends to be a party and a half and lasts ‘til dawn. I live four or five blocks away, leading my quiet married existence, watching reruns of The Wire when the biggest dress-up party west of Berlin is in full swing. The song triesto bottle some of that magic and then set it free. I think my guitar solo at the end is longer than all the verses put together. It was hard to fade it.

MR: How often do you feel like Jesus, you know, like the song with that title?

CP: Not often enough. That one is dedicated to the Albion, which used to be on the corner of an alleyway off 16th Street, in the Mission District. There was a backroom for music. It was a dive. It was a firetrap. It was heaven. We used to play in that backroom. Sometimes for like four nights in a row. And it was magical. It was a scene that only lasted so long. The title of the song refers to the way I felt when I met my wife and she looked at me that “special way.” Stephanie used to play the upright piano back there and sing the best harmonies. I always liked the sound of our voices together. Made me feel bigger than life.

MR: Can you go into Emperor Norton, who he is and why you wrote a song in his voice. Maybe people outside of San Francisco might need a little help.

CP: Compared to overseas, this whole country is still pretty new on the block. San Francisco wasn’t founded ‘til the mid-1800s. Emperor Norton came to town and proclaimed himself an Emperor and never paid for another drink or meal in his life. We tried to steer clear of him as a character on the record, but he insisted. And who were we to say no?

MR: Your songs were recorded by Heart and Solomon Burke. What did you think of the recordings?

CP: I love those covers. The song Solomon Burke cut, I wrote with Dan Penn. When I got a copy, I went over to Dan’s and we listened to it together. Solomon did these off the cuff ad libs at the end and I remember Dan really vibing on it. We listened to it a few times. It’s hard to top hearing Solomon Burke sing a song you did with Dan Penn! Heart was great as well. That song “No Other Love,” it only has about three lines of lyrics to it, and it’s been maybe my most popular song. Ann Wilson really sings it. And it’s pretty awesome. She is something else. Like a female Elvis or something.

MR: “No Other Love” was also included in the film P.S. I Love You. What did you think of how it was used?

CP: The film was a pretty forgettable chick flick. But people really responded to that scene, particularly young Latinas. So that’s been really cool. The film really connected with young girls full of that romantic longing. I think that it was real nice.

MR: What’s it like having your music on Californication and Sons Of Anarchy?

CP: It’s like money in the bank! Literally. And I like all those shows. So it’s about as win-win as it gets.

MR: You recorded with Warren Zevon. I imagine you were a fan. Do you miss him?

CP: I barely knew him, but yes, I did play on Life’ll Kill Ya, one of his later discs. I was a fan, am a fan, and can’t imagine I’ll ever stop listening to his songs. I’m sorry there won’t be any more of them. He was a tough character for sure. He had an incredibly quick wit. And you wouldn’t want his caustic wit pointed at you. He could be a cantankerous guy, but also very charming and always funny. At the time, I worried about his Mountain Dew intake. He’d show up in the morning with a grocery bag of cans… he was drinking like a case of it a day. And when he ran out, he’d get these splitting migraines.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

CP: Heck, I don’t know. Nikki Sudden once told me that Keith Richards told him that coffee is the absolute worst thing you can put in your body. Seriousness aside, I honestly don’t have any advice for anyone. I suppose if anything, pay attention. Try to be on time. Honor your commitments. Don’t waste other people’s time, especially the audience.

MR: What does your tour schedule and future look like?

CP: We’re gearing up for some quality time in the van. “Van Therapy,” we call it. The year is filling up fast. As to my future, is it okay if I pretend you didn’t ask that?

MR: Ask what? (Laughs.) Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.

CP: My pleasure. Thanks

Tracks:

1. Play That Song Again

2. Castro Halloween

3. Temple Beautiful

4. Museum Of Broken Hearts

5. Willie Mays Is Up At Bat

6. The Left Hand And The Right Hand

7. I Felt Like Jesus

8. Who Shot John

9. He Came From So Far Away (Red Man Speaks)

10. Little Girl, Little Boy

11. White Night, Big City

12. Emperor Norton In The Last Year Of His Life (1880)

If you can measure a person’s character by the quality of his friends, Chuck Prophet is a lucky man.

The San Francisco singer-songwriter plays the Southgate House in Newport Thursday with one of those friends, Kim Richey. Earlier in the day, they will stop by WNKU-FM (89.7), where music director John Patrick once described Prophet as “the coolest guy we’ve ever had in here.”

Testimonials are nice, but the proof is in the music. Prophet’s latest album, “Let Freedom Ring!” is a meditation on our life and times, somewhat inspired by one his heroes.

“It was Hunter S. Thompson who really based his career on the life, death, rebirth and total disappearing of the American dream,” Prophet says. “I was interested in that when I started writing songs for this album. I had the window open, and after about two or three songs, I realized that’s where I was going.”

In addition to his solo projects, Prophet is a trusted collaborator to folks like Richey and Alejandro Escovedo among others. He co-wrote more than half of the songs on Escovedo’s 2010 “Street Songs of Love” and partnered on every one on 2008’s “Real Animal.”

“When we get in a room, we just never run out of things to talk about,” Prophet says of Escovedo. “It’s like touching two jumper cables together. The songs just kind of spill out of that. To Al’s credit, he has the ability to make somebody feel like you’ve known him your whole life.”

Prophet’s whole life hasn’t been spent basking in a cocoon of critical acclaim. He started living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle as a teenager, and fell victim to those temptations. But while he struggled with a drug problem, he also made good music with the band Green on Red, an early acolyte of the country punk sound.

“We really took that lifestyle thing as far we could,” he remembers. “We were working with (Memphis musical legend) Jim Dickinson on a record called ‘The Killer Inside Me,’ which kind of split the band, brother vs. brother.

“While we were there, Alex (Chilton of the Box Tops and Big Star) would drop by. ... Big Star was like the Sex Pistols in their own way ... the influence that it had, just like the influence that the Velvet Underground had, Big Star had the same amount of influence.”

Spending time with Dickinson (who died last year) and Chilton (who died this year) certainly influenced Prophet, but cool innately knows cool.

“The thing about Alex is ... he was cool. He didn’t have to say a lot about (his life and music), and he never did a lot of explaining. There was nothing exaggerated at all. He was the coolest (guy) who ever lived.”

Patrick might disagree. “(Prophet) is just cool. You can’t fake cool.”

When San Francisco guitarist and singer Chuck Prophet set out to record ¡Let Freedom Ring! [Yep Roc] last spring, he assumed a change of environment, specifically Mexico City, would inspire him and add some manic energy to the album. He didn’t count on periodic power outages ruining takes at Estudio 19, the oldschool studio he picked to lay down tracks, nor a 6.4 earthquake shaking the building’s foundations. And nobody expects a pandemic.

“What I didn’t predict was that the swine flu scare would start three days after we arrived,” Prophet says. “The CNN paranoia, if you crank that stuff up to 11, makes everybody start to feel a little off. People got itchy. We put on blue masks and had a driver take us to the studio.”

Also, according to producer Greg Leisz, Prophet didn’t remember how small (roughly 12 feet by 20 feet) the high-ceiling main room was at Estudio 19. Reacting to his last record, Soap and Water, which included sections with arranged strings and a children’s choir, Prophet wanted to dial things down. The former member of ’80s L.A. cowpunk band Green on Red wanted a light touch and a raw performance. Normally, tight spaces complicate the situation. But with a few deft arrangements of equipment and a willingness to use bleed and leakage to their advantage, the musicians and engineers working on ¡Let Freedom Ring! made it sound both spacious and fully charged.

“People think isolation is the way to go,” says Jason Carmer, who engineered the album. “But getting the bleed reinforces the stereo imagery. You can hear the guitars from the perspectives of all the mics in the room. I find that the bleed gives you great depth of field.”

The whole album was recorded in one general formation in the main room to help capture a live feel. While there were some guitar overdubs later, and pedal steel and fiddle tracks were laid down separately to add extra color and tone to songs like “What Can a Mother Do,” the aim was to capture raw performances.

Electrified opener “Sonny Liston’s Blues” was a completely live take. Chuck occupied the right corner. His guitar, usually a Squier Telecaster, which he favors for its simplicity, was plugged into a pedal board and run into an amp, usually a Fender Princeton Reverb or a Vox AC30, which stayed in the main room and was recorded through a RCA 77DX ribbon mic. An Ibanez AD-80 analog delay was sometimes plugged in to provide a vintage slapback feel on some of Prophet’s solos. Baffles were then set up to cover his Neumann U 47 vocal mic (run through a GML preamp with a Urei LA-3A compressor), chosen because the rich, warm sound worked well with Prophet’s Tom Petty-esque voice.

“Both the mic and Chuck’s voice have character, so I wanted to capture that,” says Carmer. “It helped deliver the smashing, classic vocals of old records that we were looking for.”

Drummer Ernest “Boom” Carter, who played on Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” set up a borrowed ’60s Gretsch drum kit across the room, miked with a mono U 87 placed between the beater and snare that “pulled it all in,” according to Carmer, and added a spaciousness to the recording. Guitarist Tom Ayres, bassist Rusty Miller, and Leisz, who occasionally added another guitar line, squeezed in the middle of the room. Their amps were placed in the machine room or lounge, with doors left slightly ajar to capture some bleed. Everything was tracked according to its orientation, says Carmer, which meant they could capture the reflection of the space.

To accentuate the live energy in the room, lots of compression was added to the guitar tracks via Neve 1073s and UA 1176s. It really pricked up the guitar lines snaking through the rave-up “Where the Hell is Henry?”

“The general modus operandi was to go for it and be aggressive,” says Carmer. “[Compression] helped give it an authentic feel but also trash it up a bit.”

Prophet and others half-jokingly referred to the studio as a state-of-theart room from 1957, and while there’s some truth to that, the studio’s cache of vintage gear and mics added a lot of character. A vintage Ampeg SVT added powerful reverb, and Carmer especially enjoyed using Pultec EQP- 1As on kick, snare, toms, rooms, guitars, and bass. More importantly, the somewhat cramped space—from the overflowing studio to the courtyard where they’d eat tacos for lunch—gave them a sense of unity of purpose.

“There was so much chaos outside the studio that when we got in there and the power was on and we could lay down a track, there was a certain teenage energy,” Prophet says. “It reminded me of being in the studio with my first band.”

Chuck Prophet isn’t in a reflective mood today. It’s early Wednesday morning and the San Francisco singer-songwriter has just returned from a hectic European tour in support of his latest album, “Let Freedom Ring.” In just a few days, he’ll launch the American leg.

“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 .

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.”