Chuck Prophet

Let Freedom Ring (Yep Roc)

By Todd LazarskiAt the heart of hugely underrated singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet’s sound there’s always been a kind of tug-of-war among disparate eras. In turns Petty-esque, Springsteen-like and generally rife with Stones swagger, there’s also an undeniably coy, modern indie slant. Sure there’s “Born to Run”-style driving guitars, and even some “shoobie-doo-wop” backing vocals, but, hey, LeBron James gets name-checked too. In fact, Prophet’s latest sounds a bit like Franz Ferdinand after an all-night bout of Studs Terkel: old-timey, good times rock, but with a conscience.

Prophet empathizes with the downtrodden (“What Can a Mother Do”), apologetically pokes fun at his roots (“American Man”) and seems generally earnest in hopes of a renewal in the Americana from whence he borrows so much of his sound. From jangly country rockers to straight KLH-style distortion, what mostly comes out is a from-the-hip, nostalgic take on the American ennui that was 2009.

The songwriting peaks may be clearest on the introspective tracks—“Leave the Window Open,” or the lovely “Love Won’t Keep Us Apart”—but as a whole the album feels like something more. It’s a sensible, rollicking, perhaps important look at the hard times of the moment.

By href="mailto:">JOHN BECK

FOR THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 10:01 p.m.

When it came time to record a new album, Chuck Prophet packed up his guitars and headed south of the border for a Mexico City studio that was state-of-the-art circa 1958.

The result: “¡Let Freedom Ring!” is one of the most honest snapshots of troubled times to reach listeners in 2009.

From the stark opening riff of “Sonny Liston’s Blues” (admittedly a rip-off of The Clash’s “London Calling” intro without the morse code) to the striving strum and hum of “Leave the Window Open,” it’s chock full of heartache, despair and the occasional breath of hope.

The Village Voice called it “a ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ for our time.” No Depression christened it “a new American anthem for the post-9/11 world.”

The San Francisco folk-rocker with the Tom Petty drawl and the wry sense of humor (2010 resolution: “Start smoking again and stop working out” ), Prophet keeps telling everybody “they’re political songs for non-political people.”

Two decades after he split with Green on Red, the wide-eyed dreamer who fled Whittier for San Francisco is firmly entrenched as one of the most observant and honest songwriter’s songwriter plying the trade today.

Maybe it’s because he finally got his “breakthrough hit” out of the way back in 2002 with “Summertime Thing.” Or maybe it’s because he kicked drugs and alcohol 11 years ago. Or his storied collaborations with Alejandro Escovedo, Cake, Warren Zevon, Jonathan Richman and Lucinda Williams.

Or maybe it’s the way he pauses midway through the interview to ponder, “I know I don’t have a job, but I’d have to think about whether or not I’m actually making a living.”

There’s something about Chuck Prophet that begs to be studied.

Before the 46-year-old survivor takes the stage with his wife, keyboardist Stephanie Finch, and the rest of the Mission Express at the Mystic Theatre on Jan. 22, he took time out to talk.

Q: How’d you wind up in Mexico City in the middle of the swine-flu epidemic?

A: Well, we didn’t plan the swine-flu part. But I had a batch of songs and I wanted to record them somewhere energized. The whole process of recording these days has gotten so complacent with all this technology being available to so many people. And I just wanted that feeling of recording like your life depended on it. So we got it.

Q: How much of a bonding experience was that with the power going out repeatedly and the mass hysteria going on outside?

A: That was actually cool because every take that you hear on the record there’s a sense of triumph at the end. That kind of reminded me of the records I made as a teenager. We’d book a studio, like Hyde Street in the Tenderloin. We used to book the midnight sessions.

Q: How much do you think you paid for that back then?

A: A lot of money actually. Probably like $300. You can still get a lot of studios for $300 today lemme tell you. That’s one of the things that hasn’t changed. A good gig back in 1985 was $500 and a good gig in 2009 is still $500.

Q: That’s your New Year’s resolution — to get a $600 gig.

A: Or at least string together a few of them.

Q: Was there a moment in Mexico City when you thought, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?”

A: I can’t say that I was scared, but there were nights when I was staring at the ceiling, thinking, “Oh boy, what have I done?”

Q: If I throw out a song title, can you tell me what comes to mind?

A: Hopefully.

Q: “Sonny Liston’s Blues.”

A: To me, he’s the perfect analogy for the American dream. He’s part reality and part myth — always just out of reach. He had to open the record. There was a myth people had that they were going to be able to comfortably retire and they woke up one morning and realized that reality was not quite what was sold to them.

Q: What about “Barely Exist”?

A: Steve Earle once told me, “It’s your job to keep your antennae up and find things that are absurd.” For me, the fact that we’ve spent a billion dollars building a bigger wall around this country and thousands of people die every year coming up from Mexico only for the opportunity to clean our toilets is just absurd.

Q: You haven’t been a super-political songwriter over the years, what was it about the issues that got to you this time?

A: Well, I can’t really say that this is some kind of battle cry. I’m not really a political guy. But what happened is I just kind of stood back and squinted and realized that all the people in the songs had one thing in common — that they were living in a particularly anxious, raw time. I mean I’m just a photographer. I just kind of shine a light on things.

Q: You’re taking snapshots.

A: Yeah, in my own way. I just try to stay as truthful to it as possible.

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 707-280-8014 or href="mailto:">.

Chuck Prophet’s old band, Green On Red, enjoyed a cult following in the ’80s and early ’90s, and the same can be said of the solo career he’s maintained since 1990. The San Francisco songwriter may not have tons of fans, but the ones who continue to follow his eclectic path were rewarded with 2007’s Soap And Water and the recent Let Freedom Ring, an album title that’s meant to be taken with a grain of salt, given its protest-as-patriotism lyrics.

Chuck Prophet likes to wax sarcastic in between songs. His first wisecrack during a monster Saturday set at the Continental Club — the second of back-to-back nights — was a riff on virtual reality.

“Go home tonight and check your Friendster page,” Prophet said. (Don’t you mean Facebook?) “How many friends do you need? How many people would actually pick you up at the airport? Now, get rid of the rest.”

Then the San Francisco slacker and his four-piece band, including wife Steffie Finch on keyboards and backing vocals, laid into a cover of Alejandro Escovedo’s “Always A Friend,” which Prophet co-wrote, along with the majority of Escovedo’s triumphant “Real Animal” album.

Prophet is perhaps better known for his collaborations with other musicians, including Austin’s Kelly Willis, than he is for the nine solo albums he’s put out. But “Soap and Water,” from 2007, yielded an appearance on David Letterman, and this year’s “Let Freedom Ring,” a 25th anniversary update of the American Dream proffered by Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” has garnered critical acclaim.

Prophet played heavy doses of both albums Saturday, in a dynamite display of workmanlike rock. Prophet stabbed his trusty Fender Squier like a hoodlum in a knifefight, as he grunted and winced through his character-driven songs, vacillating between a traditional mic and one that made his voice sound like it was amplified through a blowhorn.

“Steve, who I guess is head of security here,” Prophet said, presumably referring to Continental owner Steve Wertheimer, “says there’s been a lot of bootlegging lately. I’d only ask, because this is how we make our living,” Prophet continued, feigning seriousness, “that you film this one. Because no one likes new songs.”

That disclaimer about identity theft was followed by “Hot Talk,” a song about a shady impersonator, with Dire Straits undertones. Meanwhile, “Doubter Out of Jesus (All Over You),” about a treacherous vamp, conveyed double-meaning when Finch repeatedly sang the outro at Prophet, “You could make a doubter out of Jesus.”

But for my money I’ll take the opener, “Sonny Liston’s Blues,” wherein Prophet echoed the words of the boxer in the lead up to his memorable bout with Muhammad Ali. Prophet sang them as if to dupe you into thinking he wasn’t the smart aleck he seemed: “I’m a man of few words, baby/ I think by now you’ve heard ‘em all.”

Chuck Prophet has been making terrific records since he started out with the raw-and-ready L.A. band Green on Red nearly a quarter century ago. Let Freedom Ring is the latest in that long line, and it takes a place of pride. The title tells you that, once again, this album centers on Prophet’s favorite subject: America. He recorded the album amid the quotidian chaos of Mexico City, but guess what: One side of the border turns out to be not that much different from the other. If it’s chaos you’re after, Prophet understands that you need look no further than the local news. In his own good-humored, ramshackle way, Prophet earns his last name.

Chuck Prophet has been releasing solo albums for two decades, but little in his past prepares the listener for this powerhouse song cycle. Particularly since that past has often relegated Prophet to the role of catalyst, midwife or sidekick, submerging his artistic identity within someone else’s.

Recently he served as most valuable player on Alejandro Escovedo’s Real Animal, co-writing all the songs on an album that served as Escovedo’s musical memoir. Before that, he collaborated with Kelly Willis on Translated from Love, where he produced and played guitar as well as sharing writing credit with her on half the material. Even in Green on Red, the 1980s band that first earned Prophet some attention, he was overshadowed by founding frontman Dan Stuart.

At the point in a veteran journeyman’s career where one doesn’t expect surprises, he has delivered a knockout, a “State of the Union” album that combines self-assured swagger and bittersweet vulnerability in equal measure. It’s a musical meditation on a particular time, and a particular country. And that country is this one, though, as the punctuation of the title suggests, Prophet and band (including former Springsteen drummer Ernest “Boom” Carter) recorded the project in Mexico City, during a time of drug wars, swine flu and even an earthquake.

With co-producer Greg Leisz (the guitarist who has so often played the MVP role that Prophet has for others), the band entered what that songwriter describes as “a state of the art studio (for 1958 or so).” There’s an immediacy to the interplay that transcends technological limitations and a perspective on the American condition reflected from the vantage of another culture. Not only does distance lend perspective, but sometimes you need to shake things up to see things straight.

The flurry of guitar jabs that open the album with “Sonny Liston’s Blues” shows the music coming out swinging from the outset, though the song’s tender interlude suggests the emotional extremes the music will continue to encompass. It’s a love song of sorts, sung “in ways I just cannot express,” to a woman who has fingered the fallen champ in a lineup—mistakenly he claims. Such a jumble of emotion, such an ellipsis of detail, such a storytelling richness from the perspective of a narrator who describes himself as “a man of few words.” Such brute force. Such open heart.

The title cut and “American Man” suggest the album’s all-American anthemic sweep, yet this America sounds most like Los Angeles, where the gap between the fantasy and the reality runs particularly deep. You can hear echoes of Tom Petty, Joe Henry and particularly Randy Newman in Prophet’s phrasing—three artists who came to L.A. from somewhere else, yet have come to musically embody the city in distinct but interrelated ways.

Like theirs, Prophet’s music has both a hard-edged irony and a soulful empathy, a way of inhabiting characters from the inside out. Take the title track, where the Stonesish riffing and rhythmic propulsion suggest a patriotic fist pumper, but the social Darwinism of the lyrics deflates such jingoism: “Let there be markets, let ‘em run wild, as the sisters of mercy just laugh. All the lost brothers can drink themselves blind, while good fortune breaks hard work in half.”

These are songs of lost brothers and sisters, of lives lived in the margins, in the shadows. Where the uptempo songs that sound heroic on the surface often mask a darker thematic underbelly, the warmth of the album’s balladry frequently carries a sucker punch. “What Can a Mother Do” has the sweetness of a country melody, punctuated by fiddle and vocal harmony from Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek), yet the turn of a phrase about a young girl “unwanted in seventeen states” belies the music’s carefree spirit.

Similarly, the waltz of sad perseverance in “You and Me Baby (Holding On)” and the unflinching tenderness of “Barely Exist” (which would have fit just fine on Escovedo’s album) hit even harder than the uptempo fare, while more raucous rockers such as “Where the Hell is Henry,” “Hot Talk” and the retro/New Wave “Good Time Crowd” have a jittery urgency, a brittleness beneath the power riffing. There’s a tension throughout between the literary command of the lyrics and the electric crackle of the arrangements, as if the album took a lifetime to write and a couple hours to record.

Ultimately, it’s a work that demands to be heard as a whole rather than a selection of cuts to download. And it ends on the perfect note of grace with “Leave the Window Open,” a nighttime benediction after a long day’s journey. “Life is only so long,” sings Prophet. “Don’t let it rub you raw.” Words to live by.

End Of the World Blues: Chuck Prophet at the 8X10, Nov. 30

By Geoffrey Himes | Posted 12/3/2009

If Randy Newman had grown up not as the heir of Hollywood composers but as a scruffy garage rocker and had recorded an album about the United States in 2009, that record might have sounded like Chuck Prophet’s Let Freedom Ring. It would have had the same untrustworthy third-person narrators and bitterly comic commentators; it would have had the same perky melodies arranged in the same passed-by styles of the past; it would have had the same sharp powers of description and the same barely constrained outrage.

Whether he’s singing through the persona of a barely articulate boxer, the mother of a foolhardy child, an unemployed husband, the ominously quiet kid at school, or the couple on one last credit-card spree, Prophet inhabits each character with just the right diction, just the right guitar riff, just the right mix of anger and hope.

It’s one of the year’s best rock’n'roll albums, and it brought out a good-sized crowd to the 8X10 to see Prophet on a Monday night. The tall singer-guitarist, with his scarecrow hair, baby-cheek face, and black blazer over a black vest, began the night banging out garage-rock chord changes on his cream-colored Telecaster. He took his time getting to the vocals; assuming the voice of Sonny Liston, he finally mumbled, “I’m a man of few words, baby,” allowing his strangled guitar to say what the boxer couldn’t. Then suddenly all the noise fell away and the mumble landed on a lovely melody as Prophet/Liston sang, “What I’m trying to tell you is how much I loved you in that dress.” This moment of grace was soon swallowed up in amplifier distortion again, but its memory lingered.

So it went all night, moments of unguarded feeling and melody would surface amid the roiling waves like strange deep-sea creatures, only to submerge again. His choice of cover songs included Iggy Pop’s sardonic “I’m Bored” but also Bruce Springsteen’s valentine, “For You.” His choice of his old songs included both an anthem of alienation, “Automatic Blues,” and an anthem of possibility, “Age of Miracles.”

The selections from the new album included the dystopian title track, a vision of capitalism run amok: “Let there be markets,” he snarled over a knotty guitar riff, “let ‘em run wild/ all the lost brothers can drink themselves blind.” But he also sang the new album’s best song, “You and Me Baby (Holding On),” named after a Newman number and borrowing Newman’s curdled Tin Pan Alley delivery. Prophet began bleakly, “Marriage on the skids and the folks ain’t doing well,” but rallied for the chorus, singing, “We can still dream like it’s Saturday night/ we’re holding on,” to a major-chord glimpse of sunshine.

The evening was marred by Prophet’s constant bickering with the soundman about the monitors, but his backing band (guitarist James DePrato, bassist Kevin White, drummer Todd Roper and keyboardist/singer/wife Stephanie Finch) sounded terrific in the house speakers whenever a song finally started. The highlight of the evening came early: a rampaging, hook-laden version of “Always a Friend,” the tune Prophet co-wrote for Alejandro Escovedo’s album last year—the best Rolling Stones song of the decade.

“Help me” yelps Chuck Prophet, midway through the opening song, And while the strutting, stomping, tremolo-strafed “Sonny Liston’s Blues” is ostensibly about the fallen boxer, it’s images of a man on the ropes and possibly at the end of his rope, too (“What I’m trying to tell you is how much I love you”), are universal. A sense of unease and uncertainty leavened by a self-styled pugilists natural defiance, courses through these tunes. In particular, on the anthemic, glammy “American Man” the narrator has “blood on his lips and milk in my eyes” as he watches The Dream slip away; while on “Leave the Window Open” a luminous slice of jangle ‘n’ twang, Prophet tries to hold on to a different sort of dream as he begs his woman, on both literal and figurative level, to “leave the window open, I want o take in this view and live this life before it’s gone”. Part narrative, part confessional, “¡Let Freedom Ring! is the sound of an artist at the top of his game.

“As the rivers run over their banks . . . there’s nowhere for a poor boy to hide,” Chuck Prophet sings over the Stonesy riffage of the title song of his new album. This poor boy’s answer to tough times is to keep rocking, which Prophet has done with distinction since the ‘80s, first as guitarist for the great Green on Red and now on his own. ¡Let Freedom Ring! is Prophet’s personalized take on the state of the nation, mixing bracing guitar-rockers and soulful, contemplative ballads. With numbers like the wrenching immigrant’s tale “Barely Exist,” it’s not always a pretty picture. Prophet, however, still manages to end on a hopeful note with “Leave the Window Open,” his unabashed appreciation for life matched by the meaning he gives it with his sharp, unsparing music.

Chuck Prophet’s ¡Let Freedom Ring! is a Born in the U.S.A. for our time. Not that the Californian troubadour and self-described “hustler” behind this 25th-anniversary update of Bruce Springsteen’s ode to the irony of the American Dream deliberately set out to cop the Boss’s monumental mojo, but the similarities between the two records are uncanny. Both are concept albums of sorts that manifest patriotism through disenchantment, and both rely heavily on marginalized characters to expose socioeconomic woe.

“I’ve been saying they’re political songs for non-political people,” Prophet explains over the phone from his San Francisco home. “But what I really mean is that I’m not a particularly political person, but the characters in these songs are all living in a kind of anxious time.”

¡LFR!‘s title track—a nod not to the Liberty Bell but to the NYSE—exemplifies that anxiety through retirement-plan decimation. The buoyant, power-pop music deceptively suggests a feel-good anthem, but once the lyrics unfold, a Social Darwinistic tale is told, of Bernie Madoffs leeching off Average Joes—“The hawk cripples the dove,” as Prophet puts it—who reduce their victims to blind-drunk poor boys. Elsewhere, “Barely Exist” continues the Springsteen parallel, with Prophet replacing the Boss’s struggling blue-collar worker with a struggling Mexican immigrant. Over a fragile beat and sparse guitar notes, he sums up the day laborer’s plight: “You gotta be strong/But when you got asbestos in your Kool-Aid for breakfast/There’s no good way to look alive.”

“I think we go too far out of our way to define ourselves by our borders,” Prophet says. “Hundreds of people die every year trying to get into this country, just for the opportunity to clean our toilets and change our babies’ diapers, and if it’s somebody who’s just trying to provide for their family, how can you criminalize that? And, really, isn’t that the least of our problems right about now?”

The beauty of ¡LFR! lies in its raw, no-frills approach. Lightning-rod guitars spark a combustible rhythm section. Songs of radio-friendly length emerge from only a couple of live takes. Down-tempo and uptempo numbers play well in the same sandbox. Witty lyrics with rich imagery—it’s hard to shake “By the time her shoes wore out/She was giving blood” from “What Can a Mother Do”—demonstrate a mastery of language, like the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of folkie Todd Snider as delivered through Tom Petty’s voice were it even more reliant on stoner/surfer cadences. Other gems include “Sonny Liston’s Blues,” a riff on the monstrous former boxing champ’s loss to Muhammad Ali as symbolic of good over evil (replete with air-guitar-inspiring passages on a Gretsch that Prophet says was “strung up heavy”), and “Where the Hell Is Henry?,” a 2’17” identity-theft gut punch about a con artist masquerading as a Kennedy.

Prophet recorded ¡LFR!—his ninth solo album in a career better known for its songwriting and producing contributions to the oeuvres of Alejandro Escovedo, Kelly Willis, and Warren Zevon, among others—in Mexico City, in a state-of-the-art (circa 1957) studio. The conditions were less than ideal (swine-flu mania, earthquakes, drug wars on the periphery), but Prophet says the duress made a band out of the ragtag crew. “One thing I could never have predicted is that in Mexico City, the power goes out, like, five times a day,” he says. “And, of course, every time it would go out, it would be in the middle of a completely magical sort of Marquee Moon moment. And so every take you hear on the record, there’s, like, triumph at the end of it.”

Chuck Prophet plays the 92Y Tribeca November 27