Chuck Prophet – The beating heart
Ironically, 1989’s Here Come The Snakes (on Restless) was a stunning return to form; Stuart calls it the band’s best album. Over the next few years, Stuart and Prophet, now writing together, made a trio of superb albums using the Green On Red name. On the first and best of them, This Time Around, Stuart and Prophet worked with renowned producer Glyn Johns and co-wrote a couple of songs with Muscle Shoals legend Spooner Oldham.
But nobody was listening anymore. “We eventually signed to a British label,” Prophet explains, “and so we spent a majority of our energy over there touring, and by the time it came to do the States, the idea of driving a thousand miles in an Econoline sitting on a twin reverb became less and less appealing. So we just ignored it, hoping it would go away.” In 1992, after releasing Too Much Fun, Stuart and Prophet called it a day.
“The best thing that Chuck taught me is that collaboration is a great thing,” says Stuart, who now lives in Tucson again with his wife. “You need other people, and if you’re collaborating with the right ones, it makes it better. Chuck taught me that what matters is the collaborative effort that’s captured on the record, and then people’s experience of listening to it. That’s all sacred….Art gets released into the world of ideas, then it has its own life, its own death, and sometimes its own rebirth.”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, as Green On Red was fading away, Prophet re-established roots in San Francisco. In particular, he began participating in weekly jam sessions at a club in the Mission district called the Albion.
“We just hijacked the backroom of this dive and played there every Friday and Saturday, kind of like a poker night,” Prophet explains. “After awhile there’d be a line around the block, though since the place only holds about five people that wasn’t so impressive. But it was a real magical time. We had a healthy competition in terms of songwriting, and it was the sort of place where if you wrote a song on Thursday, you could play it on Friday, take it home Saturday, patch up a few leaks, and play it again that night.”
Joining Prophet at the Albion were singer-songwriters Patrick Winningham, Stephen Yerkey and Mark Eitzel, among others. Prophet’s songs from this period, written alone mostly but occasionally with either Winningham or Yerkey, eventually found a home on Brother Aldo, his 1992 solo debut.
The most important collaboration to emerge from Prophet’s Albion stint, however, was his relationship with another budding singer-songwriter, Stephanie Finch. Musical and romantic partners ever since — they married in 1998 — Finch and Prophet shared a suburban Southern California background (Santa Monica, in Stephanie’s case) and a love for late ’60s and early ’70s pop.
“Steffie played piano at the Albion, but she picked up an accordion in a pawn shop so she could stand up with the rest of us,” Prophet remembers. “She was a pretty good bullshit detector for me. And nobody can barnacle onto my vocal like she does. She makes everything sound…believable.”
That’s an assessment born out repeatedly on Prophet’s debut. From the opening “Look Both Ways”, its carefree country-rock disguising some once-bitten-twice-shy advice about the music industry, through the creep-to-a-bound dynamics of the fire-breathing guitar workout “Scarecrow”, to the concluding “I’ll Be Alright”, a lullaby of romantic contentment with piano and organ courtesy of Spooner Oldham, Finch’s vocal contributions to Brother Aldo are so perpetually present and powerful that the album feels more like a duet project than a solo effort.
Finch doesn’t just underscore the point of Prophet’s narratives with sympathetic harmony; she becomes an actor in the drama. Her alternately brooding and effervescent alto expands the meaning of Prophet’s songs in much the way Gram Parsons saw his songs gain depth when shadowed by Emmylou Harris. Or when Buddy Miller gazes across the mike and finds his wife Julie.
Prophet’s songs at that stage of his solo career sometimes tried too hard to sound writerly. “Upon my heart I was choking at the crossroads of fate,” he sings in the album’s closing track. At the chorus, though, his and Stephanie’s voices come together to affirm, plainly and quietly, “I believe I’ll be alright.” With their voices entwined, what should be mere wishful thinking emerges as a promise they intend to keep.
Since Brother Aldo, Prophet has released six more solo albums, including Balinese Dancer in 1993, Feast Of Hearts in 1995, and 1998’s Homemade Blood, a raging, almost power-poppy live-in-the-studio disc. Each of them take full advantage of Finch’s arresting vocals.
Along the way, he’s also written songs with Kelly Willis and Kim Richey, and recorded with a range of artists, including Willis, Bob Neuwirth, John Wesley Harding, Calvin Russell, Warren Zevon, Jim Roll, the Silos, Cake, and the late beat poet Herbert Hunke. He’s continued working with Jim Dickinson as well, joining the Memphis songwriter and producer for a 1997 live album and on last year’s rootsy Raisins In The Sun project. “What I am is a collaborator, really,” Prophet concludes.
Prophet’s most significant collaboration since his Green On Red days has been his and Finch’s work in the band Go Go Market. The project’s half-decade gestation (“a kind of rebelling against the whole singer-songwriter thing,” he explains) eventually provided Prophet a way to combine his increasing interests in hip-hop, club music, and studio effects with his love for the soulful pop sounds of his AM radio youth.
“There’s no question about it, in my mind, that the American Studios house band was the greatest studio band ever,” enthuses Prophet. “From those groovy rhythm-section-based Neil Diamond records to Dusty In Memphis, and especially the Elvis stuff. So, at first, I thought [Go Go Market] would be something like that, a kind of great post-millennial frat-party band, because when I was in high school, there used to be all these great college parties in Berkeley.
“Stephanie and I wound up working together with another songwriter Kurt Lipschutz [credited as klipschutz]. The idea was that the three of us would write together, and the band would use like ’60s boogaloo breakbeats for these Brill Building aspiring songs.”
“Chuck was between records,” Finch adds, “so we’d play gigs when we weren’t on tour, or when the Farfisa wasn’t in the shop. It was a lot of fun. The live shows were real chaotic. Sometimes we’d just vamp on one chord until it turned into a big wall of noise. We sounded like a challenged version of Booker T.”