LITTLE ROCK — It’s not often you can watch a prophet at work, especially on a Monday night. Well, make that a Prophet, Chuck Prophet, to be exact, an esteemed singer-songwriter-guitarist with roots that go way back.
How far back? He and Dan Stuart were the frontmen of Green on Red, a mid-1980s band that began in Tucson, Ariz., before heading west to Los Angeles and a career as a literate punk/country rock band with a cult appeal that lasted into the 1990s. Then came the inevitable drifting apart, with Prophet opting for a solo career, wrapped around work as a hired sideman, songwriter, producer and leader of his own band, The Mission Express, named for a bus line running through Prophet’s San Francisco neighborhood. The band includes Prophet’s wife, Stephanie Finch, on keyboards and vocals.
He’s coming to central Arkansas this week for what he reckons will be his first show in the Land of Opportunity, despite wide-ranging tours the past quarter-century.
“I’ve been to Memphis a lot, but somehow I missed Little Rock,” Prophet says. “And I was a big fan of Jim Dickinson, who was born in Little Rockand produced a lot of great music, including some of my first band’s [Green on Red] records, one of which was The Killer Inside Me.”
On his website, Prophet gathered tributes to Dickinson, who died a year ago. In addition to his own reminiscences, Prophet included one from Dickinson’s son, Luther, wellknown for his music in The North Mississippi All-Stars.
“‘I’m just dead. I’m not gone,’” the young Dickinson wrote for his father’s epitaph as he thanked Prophet.
Prophet, 47, is on the road promoting his latest release, the critically praised concept album, Let Freedom Ring, an indictment of Wall Street and its role in the failure of the American dream for some. The album has another Arkansas connection. The first cut on the album is “Sonny Liston’s Blues,” named for the Forrest City-area born boxer who captured the world heavyweighttitle before falling victim to various personal troubles and Muhammad Ali’s right hand.
“Yeah, Sonny was the embodiment of the American dream,” Prophet says. “He was part myth, part reality.”
Let Freedom Ring has been hailed since its 2009 release. The Village Voice called it “A Born in the U.S.A. for our time” and No Depression described it as “A new American anthem for the post-9/11 world.”
Prophet says the album is a collection of “political songs for nonpolitical people.” Looking for a challenge, he and his band decided to record the songs in a nondigital studio in Mexico City. They arrived in the midst of the swine flu epidemic, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake and the ongoing drugwar violence.
“We wanted an adventure, but we couldn’t have predicted the flu would break out,” Prophet says. “So we wore our blue masks for the 10 days we were there. It was a state-ofthe-art studio - for 1957.”
Prophet - whose voice has been compared to Tom Petty and Todd Snider and whose guitar prowess has been likened to Keith Richards and Richard Thompson - got another career boost earlier this year when he was one of the central figures mentioned in Steve Almond’s book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, a book Almond says was inspired by those “drooling fanatics” who idolize musicians such as Prophet. Almond hailsProphet’s 2003 album, No Other Love, and its central song, “Summertime Thing,” and how it brought the author and his ex-girlfriend back together.
“Yeah, I remember talking to the guy,” Prophet says, noting that his shows now always include “Summertime Thing.”
Besides his nine solo albums, Prophet is also known for his work as a producer for Kelly Willis and Alejandro Escovedo, with whom Prophet also cowrote many of the songs on Escovedo’s latest two albums, Real Animal and Street Songs of Love. He has also sung, written for, played with or otherwise collaborated with Lucinda Williams, Warren Zevon, Cake and Jonathan Richman. These days Prophet is concentrating on his own career.
“Mostly I’m out playing, writing and looking for something juicy to sink my teeth into,” he says. “And I get excited about going home whenever we can work that in.”Music Chuck Prophet
8:30 p.m. Monday, Sticky
Fingerz Chicken Shack,
107 Commerce St., Little
Rock
Admission: $8
(501) 372-7707
Style, Pages 59 on 10/24/2010