One of San Francisco’s great pop bards, Chuck Prophet, slid into town through the thick of our late-January malaise to turn the new, slightly larger Natalie’s into a Chinese lantern, illuminated by his complicated, sweet, melancholy light.
Best known as a blistering guitarist and an undersung bandleader, Prophet left his crack band, The Mission Express, at home. Prophet arrived wearing a suit and his troubadour hat, winking at the classic beatnik uniform and cutting down any accusations of self-seriousness. He also made use of an amp and two mics, one for effects, which felt like a poke at the purity and faux-authenticity fetishized by a certain stripe of Americana fan.
But his primary weapon was that supple, sneaky voice, and one acoustic; toward the end of the night, Prophet said, “I played Oklahoma City a while ago for the first time. Woody Guthrie was from Oklahoma and his guitar killed fascists. This…” holding it up for inspection, “Is harmless.”
Prophet combines a soaked-in-history love of music with the same molten, encompassing love of people in all our fucked-up-ness. Every time he hits the stage, it’s a conversation. That same sensibility infuses his eye as a writer. The best of the new songs, a story about a couple in “an SRO on Polk Street,” living for the moment when they turn Metallica up so loud the neighbors complain and they sing “Love me like I want to be loved,” found a melancholy sweetness in these two people drawn with ample spaces and a fine pen.
That vein of clear-eyed sweetness traced from the characters from No Other Love classic “Storm Across the Sea” through the shambling chin-up narrator exhorting the world to “Wish Me Luck.” That vulnerability reminds us why “You could make a doubter out of Jesus,” works as an all-time killer pickup line and saves “Would You Love Me” off Soap and Water from a watery, syrupy death in lesser hands.
Prophet also conjures barbed irony – sometimes seemingly lost on part of the audience. The grim, acidic parallel “Nixonland” plays with big, major chords to milk applause like a gladiatorial match asking the audience “live or die.” But his sweet spot is a touch of mourning for a monoculture gone with a knowing smile that it was never as good as people like to remember: the soaring chorus of the new song “High as Johnny Thunders;” the final encore of perhaps his final song, “Willie Mays is Up at Bat” remembering the world of his youth where Bill Graham and Jim Jones rubbed elbows, maybe the best center fielder of the game was walking up to the plate, but still “Nobody knows who’ll make it home tonight.”
Prophet’s refined the lessons of his life and stands as a shining example that getting older doesn’t have to make you exhausted and small. Time changes everything but it doesn’t have to make any of us cruel or sick. That middle of the week, unvarnished, acoustic performance reminded us of the power of song and the power of empathy.
Screen of Distance 