Chuck Prophet – The beating heart
Quickly, though, the band’s sound began evolving in unexpected directions. “I’d always thought that [House Of Pain’s 1992 rap hit] ‘Jump Around’ was like a ’90s equivalent of ‘Louie, Louie.’ And I loved Cypress Hill, New Kingdom; I also dug Eminem in the way I dig Randy Newman,” Prophet says. “But I didn’t really understand how they worked. I wasn’t able to reach my hands inside the speakers and take those records apart.
“But then Go Go Market started working with this guy named Mark ‘Ill Media’ Reitman [who later played some with Tom Waits], who had brought along a couple of turntables,” he continues. “I just hovered over that guy to figure out what he was doing. That night I went home and grabbed a bunch of my records and brought them in.”
“I turned to Mark one time and asked, ‘Is this hip-hop?’ He just shook his head and laughed at me and said no. So it was just our own retarded version of these worlds colliding.”
Produced by Prophet, Go Go Market’s debut, Hotel San Jose, has just come out on British label Evangeline; Innerstate will release it in the U.S. later this year. Finch, who sings lead throughout and co-wrote the songs with her husband and klipschutz, terms the album “housewife Goth,” an approach she says was inspired as much by Dusty Springfield’s “Breakfast In Bed” as anything else.
“We tried to make it old and modern at the same time,” she says. “We wanted more direct songs, almost striving for Carole King type stuff, but maybe with a little Blondie in there too.”
Surprisingly, the Go Go Market album includes little of Prophet’s experiments with turntables and other electronic effects. But Go Go Market’s breakbeat origins weren’t tossed aside; rather, they had already found a home on Prophet’s next solo project, 2000’s stunning The Hurting Business (on HighTone). Prophet’s earlier solo work was respectable enough as twangy, stripped-down roots-rock. But The Hurting Business rose to another level entirely.
This was due, in part, to a shift back to the broader conception of roots music exhibited by Green On Red’s best music — an approach that embraced not just Neil Young and Hank Williams, but gospel, blues and soul. On The Hurting Business, Prophet once again foregrounded blues-derived source materials by making sure his evocative lyrics rode a groove. But he updated them, too, with distressed turntable beats and looping DJ samples.
Prophet isn’t the first former folkie to get funky of late, but he staked out his own territory. The Hurting Business was catchier than the similar recent recordings of Joe Henry, and more traditionally song-driven than most anything Beck has attempted.
Prophet’s rediscovery of a blues and soul past, via 21st-century technology, provided his songs with fresh and compelling soundscapes. The Hurting Business evoked the feel both of the blues and Prophet’s old suburban AM radio favorites, while capturing a corrosive and contemporary sense of aimlessness and loss.
The result employs computers to better achieve that most human of enterprises, the creation of meaning. Prophet gazes at a grasping, superficial, media-dominated America and then, forever on the lookout for lucky sonic collisions, assembles those stumbled-over sounds and disconnected images into music of startling empathy.
No Other Love, Prophet’s new album, continues this up-to-date approach. Indeed, it may be even more musically arresting than The Hurting Business. Whether smirking from a smartass distance (“Like a kid on a jungle gym/I watched her climb all over him”) or moaning some inchoate mix of in-the-moment anguish and hope, Prophet makes sure each observation or wisecrack is underlined by a deep, rolling groove — and captured in a mix where each instrument is intensely present.
The results are often as unexpected as they are uncategorizable, with beats as in-the-pocket deadly as the American Studios house band. The Elmore Leonard-inspired “Run Primo Run” draws both from Highway 61 Revisited and Herb Alpert. “I Bow Down And Pray To Every Woman I See” crosses Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode To Billie Joe” with Smashmouth’s “All Star”. Depending on the point of view you bring to the party, “That’s How Much I Need Your Love” may sound like either a lost Mavericks track or a forthcoming Gorillaz single; the cut’s reverby guitar and restless, circling beats drive home the lyric’s spiraling proclamations of devotion.
“The thing about making records,” Prophet says, “is you take the songs and whatever you’re interested in, whatever the songs ask for, and you bring it to a boil and see what floats to the top. I always try to look forward, but I also always have one eye in the rearview mirror for something that might sneak its way into the process.
“When you think of records, you think of the fuzz guitar at the beginning of ‘Satisfaction’ or the theremin at the beginning of ‘Good Vibrations’. I mean, you hear that ‘Whew-eww-ew,’ and you know something’s about to go down. The fun part is casting the songs and making a record as opposed to just a recording by a singer-songwriter. I mean, the fun of it, the meaning, aren’t just in the words.”
Sometimes that meaning is just a mood, paranoid or romantic or joyous as necessary. “Summertime Thing”, a prequel of sorts to “Dyin’ All Young”, is an extolling of hot-weather virtues such as skinny-dipping, family reunions, and road trips: “Ask your dad for the keys to the Honda,” Prophet sings, “put the Beach Boys on, I want to hear ‘Help Me Rhonda’.” As his voice flows over an easy bass-drum groove, a hazy pedal steel lick eases into a mile-wide grin.
The centerpiece of No Other Love is its title track, in which a lazy Roland rhythm machine high-hat and a hushed acoustic guitar are joined by Prophet’s band and a string section. “No other love, Mama I’m flying,” Prophet sings, his tenor either aching or at peace. “I can go, I can go anywhere/No other love can take me there.”
The song has no other words. Yet as it climbs through several key changes, new instruments entering along the way, the strings soaring and Prophet’s voice surfing above it all, the great big music of it sweeps us forward. Lyrics give way to the wisdom of pure sound, and we’re pulled mysteriously along, riding these waves to a place mere words could never go.
ND contributing editor David Cantwell teaches English and writes about music from his home in Kansas City, Missouri. In college, he passed up an opportunity to see Green On Red during the group’s Gas Food Lodging tour and has regretted it ever since.