On Chuck Prophet's gripping 2000 album The Hurting Business, one track stood out from the rest. On "Dyin' All Young", amidst a soulful but depressed groove, Prophet sang of a mother's anguish upon discovering her son's fatal drug overdose. "Something pulled him like the tide/Up on the banks of Methadonia," Prophet sings, at once weary and empathetic. "Summer nights ain't ever gonna feel right/Dyin' all young." Then another, deeper voice emerges from the mix, and the hair stands on your neck: "Didn't even get to see the summer settin'."
"I was sitting in with this kind of hip-hop guy, DJ Rise," Prophet explains, over the phone from his home in San Francisco. "He had a 12-inch of this song 'Born To Live', I think, by [Queens-based] rapper O.C. It was an a cappella version and when it came to that line -- 'Didn't even get to see the summer settin'' -- it stuck in my head. Something about his voice sounded like he'd seen it, like he'd really been there and brought back more than the T-shirt."
When it came time to finish the track, Prophet felt the sample needed to stay in. "I learned a lot about litigation and sample clearance," he admits. "A kind of expensive lesson." Still, the samples and scratches rendered indelible Prophet's already haunting song.
Much of today's sample-driven music merely seems like scrambled evidence of Bruce Springsteen's famous "57 channels and nothing on." But the very best hip-hop achieves something greater. That's the energy Prophet's latest work has tried to tap into. Singing over subtle scratches and samples, Prophet reminds listeners of a key addendum to Springsteen's line: Nothing on, but the meaning we make of it.
"The best hip-hop has an ear for the lucky collisions," Prophet says. "I don't put myself in that league, not at all, but it has a real ear for that chance encounter. You know, like when you have your window rolled down at a stoplight, somebody pulls up, and for a split second it's music that just sweeps you away."
Brimming with such fortuitous collisions -- the ping-pong of a rhythm machine bumping against the cry of a pedal steel guitar, for example -- Prophet's new No Other Love, like The Hurting Business before it, offers our currently DJ-dominant century some appealing sonic futures for rock 'n' rollers who still care about songs.
At the very least, the way he's made his traditional song forms surf over bleeps, loops, and samples has given Prophet a new artistic life. Indeed, both No Other Love (released June 18 on New West Records) and The Hurting Business have granted Prophet a surprising sequel to his career's memorable first act -- when he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Dan Stuart in Green On Red, one of the great roots-rock bands of the 1980s.
Charles Prophet IV was born in middle-class La Habra, California, in 1963, a "kind of nowhere place," he says, "that sits right between L.A. and the Orange Curtain." It was, in many respects, a stereotypical Southern California existence. The Prophets lived just three houses up from a McDonald's on Whittier Boulevard, and Chuck spent much of his time at the beach, surfing, or driving around with his parents in the family station wagon, listening to the Beach Boys on the radio.
"I was pretty strung out on surfing from an early age," he recalls, but music was important to him as well. "I had an older sister that was kind of a hipster -- she'd seen Van Halen play at a backyard party -- and she had a record collection with Creedence, the Stones, Zeppelin, stuff like that. And, you know, it was the '70s, so I listened to a lot of AM radio. I loved those kind of made-for-TV story-songs like 'MacArthur Park' and 'American Pie', 'Wichita Lineman', 'Little Green Apples'. Those songs got under my skin and have stuck with me ever since."
By the time he was ready to go to college, punk rock had arrived. "That spirit of let's put on a show really grabbed hold of me," he says. Moving north to attend San Francisco State University ("Really, just out of fear of not knowing what else to do"), Prophet began to play in various punk-inspired outfits, before finally settling on the more roots-rock direction that would dominate his career for the next decade.
"I was in this band called Wild Game," Prophet says. "We were a country-rock kind of band and were thrown onto a bill at this place in Oakland...with these Paisley dudes. And I remember them coming in, carrying their gear, and thinking, 'These guys oughta be operating rides at a carnival.'"
"Then they started to play," Prophet gushes, still a fan two decades later. "Just. Fucking. Great."
The name of the band was Green On Red: guitarist Dan Stuart, keyboardist Chris Cacavas, bassist Jack Waterson, and drummer Alex McNicol. Middle-class Tucson kids who'd originally dubbed themselves the Surfers, they had drifted to Los Angeles in search of punk rock.
By the time they arrived at the close of the '70s, though, the city's original punk scene, inspired by East Coast rock 'n' rollers like the Ramones, was nearly finished. In its place came the louder, faster, angrier rules of hardcore -- the fans of which tended to be bored, aggressive Orange County youth, many of whom were former jocks and, yes, surfers. Knowing where he stood, Stuart, the Arizona band's frontman and chief songwriter, changed the group's name to Green On Red, the pedal-to-the-metal title of one of their earliest songs.
"I'd actually come west fleeing a Pete Townshend-styled, smash-and-grab stolen guitar and amp incident," Stuart recalls, "and the rest of the band followed. Eventually, we started playing with Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, bands like that."
Green On Red was lumped with these groups and others as part of the Paisley Underground, a scene said to favor '60s pychedelia. Yet the Paisley scene was always more of a critic's category than a unified musical movement. What the groups shared, primarily, was an interest in melody and songwriting, and the presence of keyboards. Green On Red's self-titled 1982 debut fit the mold well enough: Emphasizing Stuart's reedy vocals and the eerie, luminescent solos of keyboardist Chris Cacavas, the album sounds like the Doors gone new wave.
By Gravity Talks, the band's sophomore album (released on Slash the following year), Green On Red was sneaking up on a rootsier style. But as Stuart would never exactly be known for his guitar playing ("My gifts are, uh, not musical," he says), Cacavas' synthesizer and organ work remained the group's dominant feature. Then they met Chuck Prophet.
"It's hard to describe how unique they seemed to me at the time," Prophet remembers. "They had all these narrative songs, Dan Stuart was a pretty bent motherfucker, and Chris Cacavas would just weave in and out of these songs....At one point I was down in L.A. and I asked if I could get on the guest list. They just put a guitar in my hands and it ended up being like a five-years-to-life sentence."
"Chuck was an arrogant little prick, as all good guitar players should be," Stuart says, "but he changed our sound. He balanced out Chris' keyboards. Plus, we needed arrangements, and Chuck really helped with that." All told, Stuart believes, "Chuck's main contribution to GOR was that he gave the band a longer lifespan."
On their next album, 1985's Gas Food Lodging on Enigma, the growth was instantly apparent. The album begins as the strangled, solitary twang of Prophet's bluesy electric guitar slowly uncoils. Quickly, the band rushes to join him. Cacavas' organ shimmers like possibility amidst a sturdy, newly soulful groove, and when Stuart shakes his head and announces, "It seems no one has any faith anymore," Green On Red has discovered its distinctive voice.
You can sense everyone involved is both dumbfounded and disheartened by the truth of Stuart's observation -- and that they're determined to hold out. "That's what dreams were made for," Stuart declares, and then Prophet insists to his new bandmates, with an indomitable guitar solo, that they can do anything, go anywhere, together.
Gas Food Lodging is an example of that worn-out rock move, the road album, but it's delivered with craft, conviction and irresistible musicality. What's more, its focus is not on shoegazing musicians, but outward -- on the desperate Americans they meet along the way. The album travels a spare emotional landscape similar to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, except they've brought along a rock 'n' roll band for moral support. It sounds like a camp-meeting cross of Crazy Horse and Creedence Clearwater Revival, a rootsy song-centric approach that, along with the music of Los Angeles compatriots Lone Justice, Los Lobos and the Long Ryders, presaged the rise of alternative country at the end of the decade.
Prophet and Green On Red emerged from the Los Angeles club scene during the Reagan years, when America's haves waged unapologetic class warfare upon its have-nots. Not coincidentally, it was also a time when many musicians (semi-popular acts such as Grandmaster Flash and the Clash, as well as big stars including Springsteen and U2) dared to profess ideas larger than themselves.
Though never a massively popular band -- Stuart estimates Gas Food Lodging, the group's commercial best, sold around 50,000 copies -- Green On Red was part of this earnest grab for meaning. Onstage, Stuart filled the space between songs with passionate mini-speeches about the cruelties of late-20th-century capitalism.
"I was a real lecturing, pompous shit," he says today. GOR's music, however, and especially Stuart's songs, conveyed the band's sociopolitical vision in affectingly human terms. Stuart's lyrics combined austere language and generally working-class themes with the depraved pulp fictions of Jim Thompson (whose chilling novel, The Killer Inside Me, provided the title for the band's next full-length release) and Charles Milliford. Toss in some Springsteen at his most steely-eyed and hopeful, and you've pretty well nailed down Stuart's sensibility.
"When we think of the '60s today," says Stuart, now 40, "we think of the people who were living that countercultural lifestyle. But when I first encountered those ideals in the early '70s, I wasn't out partying; I was driving around with my parents. We forget about my younger generation, people my age and Chuck's, who thought those values were good values, who took Creedence and Marvin Gaye songs to heart -- and who then went out and had their hearts broken by the inequities of the world."
Almost as quickly as Gas Food Lodging was in the record bins, Green On Red signed with Mercury and released No Free Lunch, a marvelous EP that perfected the sound of their breakthrough album with studio spit and polish. It included a memorably bitter version of Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away" and the title track's sarcastic account of the costs of grabbing for the brass ring.
"We ended up getting signed to a major label, but like a lot of bands in that period, there really wasn't any place for us on the radio," Prophet recalls. "That was for, you know, Huey Lewis. But trying to get on the radio took a lot of spirit out of us. There was all this talk about getting to the next level, which was nuts. We were so fucking out of tune, and Dan was like John Candy on Ritalin."
In 1987, GOR released the ambitious but somewhat muddled The Killer Inside Me, recorded in Memphis with producer Jim Dickinson and a small gospel chorus. Despite constant touring and generally good reviews -- "If it wasn't for rock criticism, we couldn't have continued to make records," Stuart laughs -- the album sold poorly, and Mercury dropped the band.
Meanwhile, the pressures of the business and life on the road, the clash of artistic egos, and Stuart's increasingly erratic behavior took their toll. As Stuart and Prophet prepared to return to Memphis to cut another album with Dickinson, Stuart fired Cacavas, Waterson, and McNicol without so much as a thank-you.
"I didn't even have the guts to call them on the phone," Stuart recalls. "My own best friends from all the way back in the Tucson days had to hear about it from LA Weekly or Spin or something....And here I was preaching unity and justice! I knew what I was doing was wrong when I did it."
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."
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.
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