Probably best known—“if at all,” as he jokes—as the white-hot guitar slinger for ‘80s Paisley Underground turned alt-country avatars Green on Red, Chuck Prophet finally seems to be carving his own niche in the rock world after 20 years of scuffling. With a résumé that boasts collaborations with everyone from Cake to Kelly Willis and a string of exceptional albums under his belt, Prophet’s name is begging to be uttered in the same breath as a cult of similarly styled, soulful storytellers: Dan Penn, Ry Cooder, and his spiritual mentor, Jim Dickinson.

Beginning his solo career at the dawn of the ‘90s with the country quaint Brother Aldo—a modest collection of late-night demos made for just a few hundred dollars—Prophet spent the next decade recording a succession of accomplished platters that won him acclaim throughout Europe but earned little attention in America. His stateside profile finally received a much-deserved boost with the release of 2000’s The Hurting Business—a stirring mélange of new technology and old soul that earned raves across both continents. This year’s equally ambitious follow-up, No Other Love, has pushed his burgeoning popularity even further, spawning a single, “Summertime Thing,” that landed in the upper reaches of the AAA charts.

On the eve of his two-night Seattle stand, we caught up with the always engaging Prophet on the road in Minnesota, in the midst of a tour with the Mission Express—his crack backing band featuring wife Stephanie Finch (see main story) and longtime Bob Dylan drummer Winston Watson. A gifted raconteur and doyen of deadpan, Prophet weighs in on a variety of topics, from his long overdue success, to working with Warren Zevon, to his envy of Keith Richards’ appendage.

Seattle Weekly: So the last time we spoke back in June you were getting your first bit of real exposure with “Summertime Thing”—which ended up becoming something of a hit.

Chuck Prophet: Yeah, it’s been a weird summer, man. David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar made peace, Chuck Prophet had a song on the radio after 20 years in the business, . . . and we’re going to war. You know, it always comes in threes.

Have you seen any change in the audiences at shows because of the airplay?

Yeah, I’d have to say it’s had a profound effect on things. There seems to be an increase in the ratio of shapely young ladies to men with beards down in front. Of course, nobody’s complaining about that—not even my wife.

I mean, it’s just exciting for me to have my skinny foot in the door of pop culture. It’s such a little sliver, but to go into, say, a supermarket like Whole Foods—or as we in the band like to call it, Whole Paycheck—and hear my voice coming out of the speaker above the salad bar, it’s a total thrill.

You’ve also got your first big national TV appearance coming up (Oct. 8, on CBS’ Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn).

Yeah, we just confirmed that. That’s sent everybody in the camp here into a whirlwind of activity. Everybody’s arguing about what they’re going to wear. So it’s chaos. We’re actually gonna play the second single: the song with the uncompromisingly long title of “I Bow Down and Pray to Every Woman I See.” Hallelujah!

Speaking of women, in addition to your wife, you’ve had great working relationships with a number of female artists—Kelly Willis, Kim Richey, and Lucinda Williams, who you recently opened a tour for.

Yeah, it would be impossible for us to even invent a better tour to be part of. Lucinda’s got such a great audience, a really astute audience. And also, there’s some kind of mysterious, magnetic, charismatic thing to Lucinda. It was just a joy to watch her every night. It was like going to church. Or going to school. Or both.

It’s a weird coincidence but I was planning to ask you about working with Warren Zevon (Prophet played guitar on Zevon’s 2000 album Life’ll Kill Ya) and then news just came out that he has a terminal case of lung cancer.

I heard about it yesterday. (Long pause). I . . . I don’t . . . words kinda fail me on that.

Working with him, though, he was intimidating in so many ways, but also astonishingly intelligent. It was just incredible to be around him. [laughs] He must’ve drank about a case of Mountain Dew a day—and you didn’t want to be around when he ran out.

He really is one of the sharpest, funniest, wittiest people I’ve ever been around, and he truly intimidated the dog shit out of me. I tried to just kinda of blend into the wall when we were in the studio. But as acerbic as he is and as surly as he can be, he’s also one of the sweetest guys, too. I don’t know . . . it’s tragic.

He’s also a guy who didn’t lose his edge when he had a taste of success. Obviously, yours is on a much more modest level, but has the relative success you’ve enjoyed with the last two albums changed the way you approach things at all?

It’s taught me to follow my instincts. Because the way I’ve been making the last couple of records . . . I didn’t go in with any expectations. More and more, I’ve found people who let me make my records—for better or for worse—and there’s been very little meddling by anybody in the process. And I think that meddling has really fucked me up in the past.

But there must be some pressure on you as you look to write the next record?

It’s funny, Dan Penn said that after he got his first song cut, he was never ever really happy from that moment on. He said, “I might be out swimming or waterskiing or on a boat somewhere, but I’m never really quite happy unless I’m in the process of wrestling a slick idea to the ground.” And that’s kinda what songwriting is all about. For me, as much as this [new] record has made a little bit of noise, you’d think it should give me some confidence. But the reality is, I’m such a superstitious, neurotic, irrational motherfucker that now I’ve got this constant low-level anxiety of “Where’s the next one coming from?” [laughs]

And I hear people like Keith Richards do interviews and say [copping an English accent], “It’s like you put up your antenna and the songs just come to you, man.” And, I’m like “Damn, I gotta get one of those antennas.”

There’s been lots of water under the bridge since Chuck Prophet’s band Green On Red tried to take the airwaves by storm in the 1980s. They wrote the right songs, had the right look, and performed a kick-ass live show. Big record labels rolled out the red carpet and extended Big Time contracts. But things just never panned out. Chuck quit the band, cleaned up his act, and throughout the ‘90s released critically-acclaimed, slim-selling CDs. But suddenly, Chuck Prophet’s on the radio. “Summertime Thing” is a hit, and finally, finally, America’s getting a taste of the genius of Chuck Prophet.

Jeff Troiano: What’s happening, Chuck?

Chuck Prophet: Not much shaking here. I finally resurfaced after about six months of submarine duty.

How long have you been home?

I guess for about a week. I went to Nashville and did some work after the tour ended.

How do you like that Nashville scene these days?

Well, I dig it, you know, because for me as a writer, well, for a number of reasons. I don’t really party anymore, so that’s what’s left of my social life-writing with other people. And Nashville is the last vestige of any sort of Brill Building spirit.

What kind of building?

The Brill Building was a place in New York where Carole King and Doc Palmis and Gerry Goffen wrote songs. If you got lucky, somebody might record one.

You’ve had some luck in that regard lately. Who’s been cutting your tunes?

Well, I’ve had a bunch of obscure records over the years, but last year I did have a top-40 single by a girl named Cyndi Thomson. It caught on. Cyndi’s a nice Christian girl, farm-fed, centerfold material. My friend Kim Richey and I wrote a song called “I’m Gone,” actually upstairs from the Red Vic on Haight Street. It’s kind of a ‘60s Tommy James kind of song. We made this real ghetto demo of it in this crappy studio with a cement floor, and we played it and cut it and put a few things on it, and we decided it needed bongos, and a year later it comes out on the Cyndi Thomson record-with bongos.

So they stayed true to the Haight Street feel?

Getting a song cut, even if the version strays off from what you had envisioned, is amazing. There’s no such thing as a bad cover version of a song. It’s a good day.

How do you get compensated when someone else makes a hit out of your song? Is that big money?

Well, yeah, there’s sort of a bittersweet ending to that story that I’m not going to bore you with, as far as making bad business decisions. On a record like that, you should make some change. You get compensated for every time it’s sold; you get your pennies for every time it’s played on the radio. It’s all gravy.

The reviews have been very positive for your new CD, “No Other Love.” How’s it selling?

This record was pretty rare. There was probably less blood on the floor after we finished this one than any of the others. We caught a little bit of a wave with the single on the radio. And for so many years we had just ignored North America, hoping it would just go away. Not that we were selling out stadiums or ballrooms across Europe, but Europe has always been good to us. Our single has allowed us to infiltrate pop culture, just a skinny little foot in the door. I heard it coming out of a little speaker in a salad bar in Philadelphia, which was rather cool. That helped a lot. And Lucinda Williams took us out on tour all summer; that really helped with record sales.

How did that happen with Lucinda?

My A&R guy, Peter Jasperson, is an old friend of hers. He played the record for her, she liked what she heard, looked up and said, “Do you think he’d come out on tour with me?” That was it.

How many shows did you do with her?

It might have been 20-some odd dates with her. She only plays three or four times a week, so we were out there for a couple of months in the Midwest and the East Coast.

What did you do with all of that downtime on the road?

We did everything we could do to keep up with her two buses. I tell ya’, man, I mean sometimes there might be 800 miles between gigs, and I have an ‘88 Dodge Ram, so we spent a lot of time sucking her diesel, as they say. But the highlight of the whole thing for me was when we had this show at an amphitheater, and the weather was beautiful, and these beach balls were bouncing everywhere. Lucinda just kept looking at these things while she singing like a puppy, and she said, “Heck, I don’t know. It’s a summertime thing.” But there were many nights when we’d play the gigs and we’d gather around the catering, and we’d have an official band meeting, and we’d say, “Okay, tonight, after we finish our set let’s load up the van, get the union guys to help, and get the fuck out of here, and try to get in four hours tonight. So we’d make the grandiose plans and then, inevitably, when the time arrived, I’d look around for everybody and they’d be glued to the side of the stage watching Lucinda’s first encore. Night after night, watching Lucinda is like going to church or going to school or both.

You tasted success in the past, during the Green On Red days. Did you ever have the big tour bus?

There were times. I mean, somebody else was paying for it. Yeah, we tasted success, but we were always well under the radar. We had a couple of major deals with labels, but we were always kind of stowaways for those labels. Eventually they’d have a board meeting and say, “Who the fuck are these guys?”

The new stuff seems to have lots of interesting influences. I hear a bit of hip-hop, some Middle Eastern, some sampling, and of course the roots-based stuff. How’d that happen?

As a songwriter, I’m a slave to traditional song craft, whatever I do. I mean, my heroes are still going to be Dylan and Carole King and Hank Williams. But for me, the process of making new records is a matter of constantly seeking new ways to cast the movie. I’m turned on by people like Moby and DJ Shadow, and I appreciate what those guys have been able to do by bending traditional song structures. As much as I admire that stuff, I’m still a “first verse, first chorus” kind of guy. I see some people out there taking some sort of modern approach and trying to shoehorn it into their songs, but that doesn’t really work. You’ve got to listen to the song’s needs and go with that.

How do you categorize your sound these days?

What I do is “American” music. You might call it “Americana.” I just do what I do, throw in what interests me, what I gravitate toward, throw it into a pot, bring it to a boil, and I see what floats to the top. The European tradition of music is that you play music as it’s written on the page; I’m not part of that tradition.

Which radio stations are playing “Summertime Thing”? What do you call that format?

There’s a format called AAA-WXRT in Chicago; KFOG here in San Francisco; there are a lot of them, kind of like KFOG. KFOG has had an incredibly profound affect on the things here at Chuck Prophet, Inc. I mean, I’ve got my ‘88 Dodge Ram van with 250,000 miles on it; I’ve got a five-piece band; I’ve got a drummer with a teenage daughter, and radio has really helped. I’d heard about good things like this happening, and I’d read about it. It’s just wonderful.

I heard something about a national TV appearance…

We did the Craig Kilborn Show. It was pretty exciting, pretty nerve-wracking. We had a rehearsal to set the camera moves and stuff, and you play it once through for the audience and that’s it. It was cool. Craig is not at his best when you’re playing, but I kept pointing over there and yelling at him, “Yo, Craigy, ‘I bow down and pray to every woman I see. Can you feel me?’” So that was sort of my inside joke. But he was pretty cool. He tracked me down into my dressing room and said, “I’m hearing a little Iggy Pop in there.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “I’m hearing a little bit of Dylan, a little Beck,” and I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Who are you listening to these days?

“Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits;” David Holmes’ Organization; I like the new Cornershop record. I like a little bit of the new Dixie Chicks’ record. I listen to a lot of old music and as much new stuff as I can. When it comes to songwriters, it’s still Warren Zevon, John Prine, and Randy Newman for me.

What’s it like doing what you do from here in San Francisco? Is it awkward sometimes? I mean, do you ever want to be in L.A. or living in Nashville?

No, I love it here. There’s just something in the air here. It sounds kind of corny, but there’s just a certain spirit and a certain quality to the light that I love. I moved here to go to college, and it has just always seemed like a place where people were waving their freak flags high. I’ve always been able to find a place to play and to work with some great musicians. And it’s not an industry town; it’s a town for freaks.

Who would you recommend that we listen to locally these days?

There’s a guy in the Mission from Detroit, Kelly Stoltz. We played a gig with him, and he gave me a vinyl record that he’d recorded on his 8-track. It’s probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard-that I can ever remember hearing. I’m all for Kelly Stoltz.

I’m going to throw a few names at you. In 10 words or less, tell me what you think. Here’s the first one: Eminem.

Stone cold genius.

Joe Henry.

Madonna’s brother-in-law.

Ryan Adams.

He’s just an exceptionally talented puke.

Britney Spears.

No redemption there.

Bruce Robison.

Oh, writer of perhaps the best song to come out in 2002-“Traveling Soldier”-as covered by the Dixie Chicks. If it doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, then just check yourself for a pulse.

Gram Parsons.

Beyond country rock; beyond rehab.

And last but not least, Mr. Bob Seger.

Vastly underrated.

Kelly Willis made the following quote about you: “If I could sing like anyone, I’d sing like Chuck Prophet.” What do you think of that?

She was confused but I’m not gonna call her on it.

Do you care what anyone else thinks about your music?

I can’t afford to care too much. I had a conversation with a friend the other who said, “Well, I guess everybody’s happy now, now that the record’s doing well.” What do I fucking care? I’d never get anything done. And that’s the kiss of death to start to care too much. Don’t get me wrong-I want the love. But I don’t wanna have to work to hard for it.

Chuck Prophet may be best described as a new traditionalist - or a traditionalist for the 21st century. He works happily within the constructs of American roots music’s structures and sounds, but sets them on their ears with clanking, roiling rhythm sections and lyrics that sketch images in bold outline but leave the details blurry. With his considerable guitar skills, murky grooves and growling delivery, Prophet can twist a conventional song into a gritty, hungover animal that will let you pet it, but may bite your hand off if you ain’t careful. The artist who cut his teeth as guitarist for Green on Red in the ‘80s has grown, over the past decade, into a formidable writer with a distinct vision. As he tells The Rage, ‘The challenge is that you want songs to make sense, you just don’t want ‘em to make too much sense. So, there’s a slightly abstract expressionist approach to it.’

And expressionist he is on his sixth and most recent solo release, No Other Love. With 11 snarling, swooning songs and a no-b.s. delivery, Prophet is at his finest. The sonic corners of the record are filled (but not overstuffed) with wonderfully skewed details - tape recorders, omnichords and accordions peer out from the shadows. ‘For me,’ Prophet explains, ‘records are defined by things like the theremin at the beginning of Good Vibrations or the fuzz guitar on Satisfaction or the fact that somebody was smart enough to tell Roger Daltrey to stutter when he sang My Generation. Those are the little things.’ Laughing, he adds, ‘Sometimes they just appear, other times you gotta go around with a flashlight in the dark looking for them.’

With his gruff delivery calling to mind Greg Brown and hinting at Tom Waits, Prophet’s lyrics are especially effective. At his most tender, Prophet still comes off rough and ready. He also shares much in common with Lucinda Williams, for whom he opens at the debut Miller Lite Uptown Mix on Wednesday, July 3. Both artists manage to be simultaneously conversational and otherworldly in phrasing and in lyrical content. As Prophet explains, ‘I’m a traditionalist at heart in terms of songwriting. I’m a verse/chorus/verse/chorus kind of guy. The challenge for me has always been finding new ways to turn it sideways. My songwriting heroes are still gonna be Carole King, Dan Penn, Hank Williams. But it’s interesting, in a lot of modern music like DJ Shadow or even Moby, how they’ve sort of thrown a lot of traditional structure out the window. I like that from a distance, but I guess that’s the challenge, to find ways to turn verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge inside out a little.’

Although Prophet consistently overcomes that challenge, it’s not always easy. ‘For me, right around the middle of [making] the record I feel like one of those Goya etchings with bats coming out of my head. This record was no different. Individual songs ... some of them are more stubborn than others. Some, you try to wrestle to the ground and they end up wrestling you to the ground. Some come on the first take, and others you gotta put them up on blocks and rotate the tires and you gotta cut them 10 times.’

Now the songs that compose No Other Love are back off the blocks and on the road, which is where Prophet, partner and collaborator Stephanie Finch and Prophet’s exceptional band pretty much stay. That’s the strategy for the year, Prophet says. ‘The plan is to go out and play and see where it takes us. Play every last f—king burg and city that’ll have us, and most of ‘em twice.’

Rise

At first it was called ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, but you haven’t been able to call a song that for several hundred years. That’s Stephie Finch cast in the role of the wayward child. It’s a little like Tony Joe White piggybacked over a Turtles breakbeat or a trip from San Francisco to San Antonio in less than three minutes.

The Hurting Business

Mike Tyson said it first. Presumably, he meant it literally. Biting off years and breaking hearts is all in day’s work for some showfolk. I think I was under the influence of ? and the Mysterians and Sir Douglas Quintet at the time. Maybe Jerry Springer will pick up on it as a theme song. It’s all in there.

Apology

Randy Newman meets Glen Campbell in a wine bar and they start arguing about the south. In comes El Vez, who neither one has ever heard of; a young lady on each arm and a spare bringing up the rear. All of them seem to know exactly who he is. He introduces himself and Randy opines, “You’re not even the king of bottled beers where I come from.” Things get unprofessional. Before it’s all over, everybody wants an apology. Sensitive to insensitive and back again. Conn organ metronome “count off’ preserved on cassette and reproduced by Jacquire King.

It Won’t Be Long

Trailer park trash, carpetbaggers with high Arbitron ratings. The sad beauty of freak encounters recollected, last chances cheerfully blown, Waterloo sunsets digitally altered by faceless electromagnetic collectives. Put your Business in the street and the heartland takes a bow. Jenny Jones nightmare appearance hangover recounted in three verses.

Shore Patrol

Old movies. Anti-heroes. A tribute to Jack, Hal and the generation who took Hollywood by the balls and held firm for a while. Not nearly long enough. Before the French reclaimed it and Auteur became nothing more than another post modern band moniker. And by the way, that’s the pride of Daly City, DJ Rise on turntable. Rise and I have been chipping away at our own record for a while. Stay tuned.

God’s Arms

A story within a story, based on a line from a romance magazine. Reincarnation, shape-shifting, Bobby Gentry strings blowing in from the east. Buddy Holly on opium. Resurfacing on a rehab collection plate.

Diamond Jim

Who the hell is Diamond Jim? There’s a finders fee, but not a big one. I found a stack of 45’s at a flea market. Watt’s One Hundred and Tenth Street Rhythm Band, James Brown, Lowell Fulsom, Inez Foxx, Bull and the Matadors and the like. I added them to my swelling collection. I lived with them till they got under my skin and stayed there. I would’ve loved to have come up with a new post millennial dance step, but this is what came out the other end of the Cuisinart. Without Diamond Jim, the BBQ is just row after row of sizzling meat and the announcer wont say “play ball.” Diamond Jim is the patron saint of the Apocalypse. Until he comes back, traffic lights will blink incoherently. Fowls will fill the air, rivers will change directions, my laptop will go up in digital dust.

Bring it on.

I Couldn’t Be Happier

Here Comes the Bride? Having recently gotten hitched, I got to thinking someone should write a song for the grooms. Where lovers sway in the key of A minor. I never got around to finishing this song. The first time I ever sang it is the version you hear.

Lucky

Revenge is a dish best served cold. This guy steals your band and marries your girl and you end up running his sound board and taking her dog to the vet. We wrote it thinking it might be perfect for Johnny Cash. It turned into this, which might not be so perfect for Johnny Cash after all. Who wouldn’t like to get lucky?

Dyin’ All Young

Major 7th chords and a towel over the snare. Who’s gonna count the song off now?

Statehouse (Burning In the Rain)

Its bound to happen. Everything will. I play the patsy, the guy who just wandered by and took the fall. Farfisas provide the stabbing punctuation. Even the buildings built to last forever don’t. In Havana as elsewhere, sometimes people cheer for all the wrong reasons.

La Paloma

On the road again. California is so close to Mexico that whenever we mention it someone is sure to remind us we stole it. J.J. Cale locked in the research department of Mattel Toys.

Ex-Green on Red mainstay Chuck Prophet continues his solo metamorphosis with The Hurting Business

Prophet comes clean: “Rock ‘n’ roll has just gotten too precious.”

The first thing you notice talking to Chuck Prophet, naturally, is his voice. Not so much the way it sounds—a raspy, unfettered bark—but the attitude it projects. His is the tone of a polite cynic—filled with gallows humor, self-deprecation and a world-weary indifference. The kind that seems logical given a lifetime of cult success and junkie excess.

The L.A.-born Prophet spent nearly a decade with ‘80s psychedelic cowboys turned roots avatars Green on Red, most of it riding shotgun with partner/singer Dan Stuart. By the time the group ground to a halt some nine years and 10 albums after it had begun, GOR had yielded a rabid underground following (especially in the U.K.), a vaunted critical legacy and little in terms of tangible success.

Meanwhile, Prophet had become the victim of the clichéd rock ‘n’ roll existence, plunged into the depths of a herculean heroin habit that left him at death’s door.

But by the mid-‘90s, life found Prophet clean, married and in the throes of a fruitful, if overlooked, solo career.

Terminally deadpan, the lanky guitarist brightens when discussing the genesis of his fifth and latest album, The Hurting Business—a radical and triumphant departure from the journeyman country-rock of his past.

The idea for the record was hatched after Prophet returned home from a lengthy tour in support of 1997’s Homemade Blood. In his mind, he had already conceived a loose-knit concept album which would take an aural shift away from the innately folkish charm and Exile-era Stones aphorisms that had marked his previous work.

“I had a sound in my head,” recalls Prophet. “And I wanted to take a cinematic approach with it.”

Prophet’s primary influence in creating The Hurting Business wasn’t musical, but rather inspired by Danish director Lars Von Trier’s “Dogma 95” film movement. Stylistically rooted in naturalism and realism, Von Trier’s pictures (most notably Breaking the Waves) focus on the vagaries of contemporary life, filmed without effects, using natural lighting and jarring movements provided by hand-held cameras.

To help him achieve a similarly original and vertiginous feel on wax, Prophet hooked up with Jacquire King, an engineer and desktop recording wizard who helped shape Tom Waits’ grim-and-grand weeper Mule Variations.

“Part of working with him was a desire to get out of the normal staid studio recording process. We just kind of took my original four-track sketches of the songs and loaded them into the computer and were able to go in and add and cut stuff wherever we wanted.”

Prophet also strove to match the organic feel of the Dogma style by capturing a natural ambiance on his vocal tracks, recording them everywhere from the front seat of his car to a bathroom stall. “I’ve never been one to require mood lighting or candles when I sing,” he notes with a chuckle. “But sometimes you do feel the need to extend the mike cable a little bit so you can get that same feeling you get when you’re sitting there singing by yourself.”

To complete his vision, Prophet decided he needed something more than the jagged guitar chords he’d long relied on. He found what he sought in the lexicon of electronic music—the stutters and starts of turntables and elasticized grooves of machine-made beats.

“That was definitely inspired by a lot of things I’ve been hearing,” says Prophet, rattling off a list of names that range from hip-hop eclectic Dr. Octagon to neo-blues experimentalist Jon Spencer.

“It’s at the point where people are taking traditional songwriting or traditional structures and figuring out ways to twist and turn them sideways. That’s always the fun part—kicking the song around and wrestling with it. Seeing how much you can beat it up beyond recognition before it gets worse.”

Much of Business is augmented by loops, scratching and the occasional sample—the bulk of them provided by prominent Bay Area turntablist DJ Rise. The album’s cut-and-paste fusion teems with an overall quality that mimics the laid-back jazz cool and foreboding sonic textures of Portishead and the Sneaker Pimps.

While the move may smack of an aging roots-rocker’s bid for postmodern relevancy, Prophet incorporates the subtle electronic touches so deftly, they seem less an intrusion or distraction than just another instrument at his disposal.

If anything, the songs lend themselves to such tinkering as Prophet’s effort comes off more memorably than Joe Strummer’s Rock, Art and the X-Ray Style, and more genuine than the Stones’ Bridges to Babylon flirtations with the Dust Brothers—both forays by traditional rockers into similar loop-and-sample territory.

But beyond modern accouterments, the foundation of The Hurting Business is rooted in a bedrock of deep soul sounds—black and white, North and South. Songs that draw on greasy R&B, from Muscle Shoals to Harlem, and a strain of late ‘60s country/pop that Prophet calls “housewife goth.” “Bobbie Gentry, Tom T. Hall, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Webb—all the great story songs from that era.”

Consequently, there is a heavy emphasis on craft. Half the album’s 12 songs clock in at three minutes or less, a structure that Prophet regards as vital to the essence of his work.

“Rock ‘n’ roll has just gotten too precious. I hear records nowadays and the fades are like a minute. If you go back and listen to James Brown or Charles Wright, Betty Harris, Lee Dorsey, any of the stuff I was soaking in the couple years where I was working toward this record, they’re like two and a half minutes long—that’s it. And when they’re over, all you want to do is put the needle back to the beginning. That’s the kind of record I wanted to make.”

Prophet should take heart; The Hurting Business is exactly that kind of album, one that invites frequent and repeated listenings, yet provides new revelations with each spin.

Kicking off with the funky Ennio Morricone-influenced opener, “Rise” (“A change, a change is gonna come/Those very words once left me numb”), Prophet fashions a sometimes dark, often funny narrative of modern life, seething with urban tension, and sprinkled with caustic insights and pop culture references.

The title track, an insistent farfisa-maraca number that hints at Beck, were Mr. Hansen in the midst of a serious Sir Douglas Quintet jag. A he-did/she-did tale of fraught relationships and bruised romance (“You hurt me, baby, and I hurt you/Sometimes we fake, sometimes we jab/Sometimes we bounce right off the mat”), it takes its name from the unlikeliest of sources, a Mike Tyson quote.

“It was during a press conference after he bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. They asked him if he wanted to apologize, if he felt any remorse about what he did. His reaction was just belligerent and insolent: ‘You understand, I’m in the hurting business, that’s my job,’” says Prophet in sotto voce, imitating Tyson. “He thought he was doing his job in there. I liked that. I don’t know how it relates to what boys and girls do to each other, but it ended up in my notebook.”

Prophet’s vocals—which normally split the difference between Tom Petty’s redneck whine and Kurt Wallinger’s British drone—take on a variety of hues here: the somber baritone of “Rise”“; the funky drawl of “Diamond Jim”“; the angelic croon of ‘Dyin’ All Young.”

On “It Won’t Be Long,” Prophet’s singing recalls Iggy Pop’s dry, craggy tone. Ironically, the song is a more successful stab at the kind of moody string atmospherics that the middle-aged Stooge attempted on last year’s career nadir, Avenue B.

The song’s theme, like much of Business, is imbued with a sense of irreverent topicality—in this case, it’s the world of the confrontational daytime talk show. “What we were trying to imagine was what the mother lode of all hangovers would be like if you stood naked on Jenny Jones and embarrassed yourself in front of a whole nation,” says Prophet, breaking into a coarse laugh. “What would the morning after that be like, when you realized what you’d actually done?”

Peter Anderson

Pills and booze: Prophet (left) and Stuart with Green on Red in 1989

While the subject matter may be bleak—Prophet characterizing it as “trailer park trash with high Arbitron ratings” and “the sad beauty of freak encounters recollected”—the song retains a light, almost absurdist lyrical quality: “I like T-Bone Walker/I like Wonder bread/I like to quote back in your face/All the things you never said.”

Elsewhere, Hammond organ colors the deathly revenge anthem “Lucky” (“I’d like to get Lucky/Get my fingers ‘round his throat”), its dark, smoky verses and skewed sonics surrendering to a chorus that arches up toward classic pop territory.

Not surprisingly, the record does stumble upon some of Tom Waits’ patented gruff ‘n’ clang, with the jagged blues and vocoder/megaphone intonations of “La Paloma” and the funky “Shore Patrol” (another vaguely Beck-ish sounding number).

At his best, Prophet seems capable of synthesizing his many influences—musical and lyrical—into a uniquely original vision. When he does, the results are the apogee of understated brilliance, as on the album’s centerpiece, “Apology.”

A languid mesh of warm bass and Mellotron, the song takes the universal human need for forgiveness and turns the concept on its ear with a litany of comical examples: “CBS from the MTV,” “the shoulder from the road,” “the Cancer from the Scorpio.”

But the moment that best captures Prophet’s ironic worldview comes after a verse in which he opines that “someday soon the Vatican is gonna call”—an allusion to the recent papal apology for the Catholic Church’s toleration of the Holocaust. Prophet follows that heady reference with a bridge that asks, “How can I swallow every little thing she says?/She don’t even know Elvis from El Vez.”

It’s the kind of uncommonly literate moment that bridges hard-edged romanticism and precise musical syntax, while plumbing the depths of pop arcana.

“When you start talking about when the Jews are going to get an apology form the Vatican, you can’t follow that up with anything too heavy,” says Prophet. “You gotta get into something as pathetic as falling out with a girl because she doesn’t know the difference between Elvis and El Vez. Some people, man, that’s how small their world is.”

Surprisingly, Prophet’s signature guitar work is downplayed on The Hurting Business. The album boasts few traditional solos, as the instrument is more a character actor than a featured star in Prophet’s wide-screen production. His twangy runs and subtle fills are still there, but they never rise above the songs, married instead to a bed of keyboard sounds, clipped percussion and ghostly background vocals (provided by a studio cast that includes Prophet’s wife, singer/pianist Stephanie Finch; bassists Roly Salley and Andy Stoller; American Music Club’s Tim Mooney; and longtime drummer Paul Revelli, among others). For Prophet—a man who made his early reputation as a six-string hot shot—the lack of over-the-top fretwork isn’t a problem.

“My tendency is to turn the guitars down. I hear that sometimes with Lindsey Buckingham or J.J. Cale—where it sounds like they’re just a little bit underneath everything. I don’t know why, that’s just where my sensibilities lie. It’s not that way onstage, though,” he says.

Like a number of his fellow roots-rockers, Prophet has long faced an unusual career quandary; all but ignored in his home country, he’s maintained a healthy following—even minor star status—overseas.

“I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Europe. I mean, I enjoy the success we have over there, but I’m not making this music thinking what someone in Paris would like. I’m making American music,” he offers adamantly. “After a while, you start walking around thinking you’re crazy because you’re not connecting with more Americans. But I think we’ve sort of turned that around with this record. It’s been really gratifying to go to shows and see a lot of people, especially when they speak English.”

Since its January release, The Hurting Business helped boost his profile in the U.S., earning the kind of breakthrough hosannas from critics that Prophet supporters have long demanded. Despite that, his sales remain modest, a situation that he feels will be remedied over time.

“The thing about being a solo artist is you tend to get discovered and rediscovered. I think the real challenge is building a nice body of work that people can tap into anywhere along the line.”

Prophet’s solo catalogue is impressive, running from 1990’s country quaint Brother Aldo, through the Cosmic American muse of 1993’s Balinese Dancer, continuing with 1995’s unassumingly retro Feast of Hearts and up to his previous long player, the suburbia study Homemade Blood.

Unfortunately, the bulk of those titles are hard to find on these shores. Only Business is readily available, and it was originally recorded for the U.K.‘s Cooking Vinyl label, only later to be licensed for American release by Hightone.

Still, Prophet’s popularity is flowering in many quarters, thanks in part to the cult surrounding Green on Red, one that continues to grow on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1995, China Records released a GOR best-of; in 1997, Germany’s Normal issued Archives Vol. 1, a retrospective collecting demos, B-sides and live tracks; in 1998, Edsel U.K. put out the group’s last four albums as a pair of special-edition two-fers. And later this year, Restless Records will issue an expanded, remastered version of 1985’s alt-country pioneering Gas, Food & Lodging.

Prophet (who hooked up with the originally Tucson-based Green on Red in L.A. in the mid-‘80s) looks back at his time with the group fondly. Still, he has no regrets about GOR’s 1992 demise.

“You can only drag your adolescence so far into your adulthood. Being in a band is like living with your parents. You gotta move out of the house before people start talking—‘How old is he? 35 years old and he’s still living at home!’” he says, amid gales of laughter. “It’s just natural to get out of it. Plus, nobody can break me up. I’ve tried. Believe me, I tried to break myself up and it’s hard to do.”

While the arc of his work clearly proves that Prophet has benefited from solitude, he hasn’t remained cloistered. On the contrary, he’s been an in-demand collaborator on projects ranging from alt-country sweetheart Kelly Willis’ 1999 comeback LP What I Deserve (Prophet plays on the album and co-wrote its “Got a Feeling for Ya” with Southern soul composer Dan Penn) as well as hired gun for alterna-rockers Cake and Hollywood songwriter cynic Warren Zevon.

“It’s always flattering when the phone rings,” says Prophet. “Sometimes you do it just to pay the utility bills and sometimes you get lucky and get to work with somebody like Kelly Willis out of the blue, and it ends up being really rewarding.”

Prophet also recently returned to the group fold, with an all-star contingent known as the Raisins in the Sun. Featuring legendary Memphis pianist/producer Jim Dickinson (Replacements, Big Star), knob-turning tandem Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie (Uncle Tupelo, Radiohead), singer/songwriter Jules Shear, and Dylan rhythm foils Harvey Brooks and Winston Watson, the group convened in a Tucson recording studio for two weeks in May 1999, with the notion of writing and recording an album from scratch.

“That was a leap of faith for everybody,” says Prophet of the sessions. “I think we were all prepared to go down to Tucson and come away with nothing.”

Instead, the collective came away with a self-described “10 slices of rock and soul” that are tentatively scheduled for release on Rounder Records.

Prophet’s immediate plans include the long-delayed completion of the debut album from Go-Go Market, a collaboration with wife Finch that he describes as “fulfilling a Brill Building jones.”

A follow-up to Business is also in its early stages. Instead of again taking the redacted studio route, Prophet plans to write and record a more ornate and traditional album, one that will feature fleshed-out arrangements, horns and a string section.

It’s hard not to marvel at Prophet’s versatility and output. It seems especially remarkable for a man once regarded as the epitome of wasted, junkie cool. The same Chuck Prophet who once denounced “rehab” as artistic immolation on the pages of Melody Maker.

“In a lot of ways I feel like I’m crazier now than I was back then—I’m just not on drugs anymore,” he says, laughing. “I’m off my medication and I feel like I’m much more dangerous now. I really do.”

The Hurting Business

Chuck Prophet’s earlier solo work was likable enough: twangy, stripped-down roots rock that, released nowadays, would immediately get him pegged as yet one more exponent of alternative country, singer-songwriter division.(Think Tom Petty without the Byrds infatuation and recording budget.) The Hurting Business, though, rises head and torso above his four previous albums and includes Prophet’s best work since his days as a kid guitar-slinger for the too-soon-gone Los Angeles band Green on Red.

The superiority of The Hurting Business can mostly be attributed to a shift in direction, away from Prophet’s previous roots-rock recordings—in the whitest sense of that term—back to the broader conception of roots exhibited by Green on Red’s best music, a vision that embraced not just the Stones and Hank Williams, but gospel, blues and soul, as well. With The Hurting Business, Prophet puts these R&B roots in the foreground by making sure that his evocative lyrics ride a groove; he then modernizes them with distressed turntable beats and looping DJ samples. Prophet isn’t the first former folkie to get funky lately, but he stakes out his own territory. The Hurting Business is catchier and more accessible than similar recent recordings by Joe Henry and more traditionally song-driven than most Beck.

Prophet’s rediscovered soul provides a fitting soundscape for the album’s corrosive sense of loss. A family beset by a tragedy of its own device finds itself on the local news, then abandoned—“in rags, with a summer to kill”—when its fifteen minutes are up; a loser wants to get lucky, and then we realize that Lucky’s the guy who stole his girl [“Lucky” 237K aiff]; a man leaves us wondering if “I couldn’t be happier” [“I Couldn’t Be Happier” 248K aiff] isn’t just about the most depressing thing someone could possibly say. Most powerful is “Dyin’ All Young [267K aiff],” in which Prophet’s newfound grooves console a grieving mother even as they push her to tears.

You won’t find “homemade blood” in the dictionary, or in any lab manuals. But with the release of Chuck Prophet’s Homemade Blood, look for the term to show up in the next editions. “It was a song first,” explains Prophet. “I guess the words somehow floated to the top of the pool. I just like the way they sound, kinda plain. Plus at the same time, maybe something’s going on underneath. Life and people are like that anyway.”

Homemade Blood is Prophet’s fourth album, his first for Cooking Vinyl, which is issuing it simultaneously in Europe, where he enjoys a semi-respectable cult following, and in the US, where the tangled relationship with his former label kept his last record (Feast of Hearts) from being released Stateside.

It was recorded in ten whambam days last Fall at San Francisco’s venerable Toast Studios with producer Eric Westfall (Giant Sand, Sidewinders), and mixed at Ft. Apache by Boston-based console wizards Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade (Dinosaur Jr., Morphine, Hole, Radiohead) in an equally improb-able 72 hours. Hardly the prepackaged stuff of contemporary record making. But then, Prophet’s rarely gone with the conventional wisdom. Prophet says, “The only way I ever got anything done was to slip through the side door when nobody was looking. Right now I don’t have the patience for this whole ‘Orson Welles with a home video camera’ process that’s going on in pop music today. I’ve seen people drown in that process.” Applying that attitude to the making of Homemade Blood, Prophet cut it live: Warts, happy accidents and all. Capturing what he calls “those ‘conversational’ things” that find their way into music when people are playing together live and reacting to one another. “It takes a lot of work to set up live and get five musicians on tape simultaneously,” Prophet admits. “But recording is such an elusive thing anyway. It always comes back to capturing that energy and spirit in the room at that time, you know?”

As for Homemade Blood’s whirlwind mixing marathon, Kolderie and Slade were going through a stack of tapes when they came upon Prophet’s. After listening to it, they got on the phone. “‘How about we mix the record? When can Chuck fly out?’ is what they said to my manager,” recalls Prophet with a laugh, “so I flew out to Boston where we managed to fly well under the radar of normal industry demands. “I think I said to them, ‘Hey guys, we’ve only got three days to do this, but don’t let that keep you from breaking out your Buzzbin-voodoo-fairy dust!’”

The twelve songs on Homemade Blood all go to lyric or sonic extremes—usually both. From the infectious, swaggering kickoff, “Credit” (“Get your hands out of my pockets/ You’re not my Uncle Sam”); through the minor-key lovers’ apocalypse title track (“You’ve got seven scarlet veils/ I’ve got a hammer and I’ve got nails…Pretty soon I’ll be fallin’/ I can hear my own voice callin’/ Drowning in a sea of homemade blood”); to the half-time pulp spiritual, “The Parting Song,” that closes out the album (“Sailor won’t you take me to the shore now/ Let me drink my fill/ Lyin’ down it feels just like a chore now/ Dyin’ ain’t no big deal”); Prophet’s in the driver’s seat on ride after ride.

He takes you to musical terrain at once familiar and unsettling, haunting and haunted. Along the way, you encounter characters exiled to suburban gothic cul-de sacs crammed with condos, mini-malls, and flophouses, and souls trapped in the black vinyl grooves of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night attempting to serve up chunks of desperate wisdom and sodden humor. “Tonight’s The Night? I can only aspire to something like that,” confesses Prophet. “I came from a real nowhere place, and when events forced me back, I had to deal with all that boredom and creepiness that drove me away in the first place. I found myself bumping into a lot of ghosts out there. I guess those ghosts eventually found their way into the songs.” Having spent the better portion of two years collecting songs, Prophet had nearly 100 to choose from, (“Well, they weren’t all finished”) when it came time to record. “I wrote by myself, with my friend Kurt, some well-known misfits and even an unknown celebrity or two. Twelve songs found their way onto the album. The worst of the rest, I think I got rid of the cassettes as blanks at a garage sale.” During that time, Prophet and his band—Max Butler (guitars, mandolin, pedal steel), Anders Rundblad (bass), Paul Revelli (drums) and Stephanie Finch (keyboards, accordion, vocals)—also did hit and run tours of the US and Europe, resulting in the group telepathy that ultimately made the unique recording circumstances of Homemade Blood possible. “Kicking songs around onstage every night is like taking your kid out in the backyard every afternoon and hitting grounders to him,” is Prophet’s proud summary, who further brags that “this band is the best one I’ve ever had in any price range. So far I’ve kept them all merely with my charm school style and a batch of IOU’s I print up down at Kinko’s.”

You can hear the strain of triumph ringing in every line, note and breath. Monster stuff!!

essential listening for fans of Americana

Chuck Prophet is literally livin’ large, so we arrange to meet for coffee with one caveat: “It’s got to be the right place, because I take up a lot of space,” he said. That’s ok. The guy has plenty to shout about.

His fourth solo album, “Homemade Blood,” shows off his stunning songwriting, guitar playing and vocals—a traditional, rootsy, raw, and heartfelt stew that digs for the source but comes out “sideways.” He has a new label, Cooking Vinyl and he’s been to Europe twice since the first of the year; he’s off again this Summer for four European festivals and a U.S. tour with his mighty band—Max Butler; guitars, Anders Rundblad; bass, Paul Revelli; drums and Stephanie Finch; keyboards and vocals. He just saw the release of a live collaboration with buddy and Memphis music legend Jim Dickinson and he remains happily ensconced in his San Francisco digs with his band mate and partner, Finch.

Though his struggle with hard drugs could make a case for the contrary, nonetheless, Prophet appears to finally be comfortable in his own skin. He looks like rock and roll personified—tall and thin, hair that looks like it’s never been washed, a cigarette dangling from his lips—the kind of musician they don’t make too many of these days.

Eleven years is a long time for anybody to sustain the kind of musical career Prophet has (without ever holding a day job), particularly when one’s music supersedes trends. His lyrics will often fuse the honesty and artfulness of Bob Dylan with the tunefulness of say, Tom Petty. For more contemporary references, you could pigeonhole him in the same place Pete Droge, the Jayhawks and Wilco reside (Americana/No Depression-land), but that would be doing Prophet a big disservice as belongs in a class by himself. He was simply born at the wrong time.

Had he been born earlier, his keen sense of rock history, his continual search for “the source” probably would’ve earned him the accolades of an Eric Clapton or Keith Richards. Had he been born later, he would be as lauded and adept at deconstructing rock as Beck. But Prophet belongs to that middle generation who live in the shadow of boomer musicians and fans and precede X-ers who don’t always care much about the source.

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I got way too many miles on me, man,” he said. “I wish I had a generation. I would’ve made a great slacker, but I’m just a little bit old and I wanted to do things,” he said.

His song “You’ve Been Gone,” from the new record perfectly explains that kind of lost weekend lifetime of experience: You’ve been gone, you’ve been gone, clouds make rain and days make years…I think you’ll find some changes here.

“The line, Sweet Lorraine’s on SSI, her mind walked off before she said goodbye made me think of all my drinking buddies at the Albion,” he said, referring to a 16th Street watering hole. “All of those guys were on SSI. I swear it’s gotta be more work than working, but I wouldn’t know.” Somehow, time slips away.

With the songs presented in a down-home style with none of the artifice that is currently fashionable (i.e. the lamest band on the charts that uses mandolin and accordion you can think of inserted here), since his days as the teenage guitarist in LA’s Green on Red, commercial enthusiasm for Prophet has never reached critical mass. But he’s a survivor and possesses a certain wisdom well beyond someone of his 30 some-odd years.

“Part of being real is what you learn from good literature, like Raymond Carver poems. They’re really plain and the way people talk is really plain and it’s so plain it hurts because it’s not glamorous. If you get real you get closer to the truth and if you get closer to the truth you get closer to God and that’s art. If there’s a just God, those people who are pretending are going to get busted anyway,” he said.

Funny that a man who looks to rock’s poet laureate, Dylan, as king songwriter would be espousing the pleasures of plain.

“Most of Dylan’s greatest songs are painfully plain,” he asserts. “Even though ‘In the Garden’s got the most complicated chord structure I can think of, it’s really a straightforward song as is ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. You know what he’s talking about. Anybody can tie a bunch of lines together, but if you know where you’re going with it, then it’s a lot harder.”

“I could’ve dressed up the songs on the album in all kinds of gothic shit, and I didn’t. People don’t need to come to me for that,” he stated matter of factly. “You can’t find a source for this music. It comes from some guy strumming a fence on barbed wire. The Stones took traditional music and turned it sideways and that’s what I’m trying to do,” he explained.

Prophet’s “plain” songs for his fourth solo album were inspired by a detox-break he took last year at his parents suburban East Bay home, while he weaned himself “from sucking the glass dick,” as he refers to the crack pipe.

“I went back home and I realized it was the last place I’d been before I was kind of fucked up and I could smell everything and it was weird and brand new and kind of spooky. That’s where I wrote ‘K-Mart Family Portrait.’ I know exactly what happened. It has a Linda Ronstadt melody from her album, ‘Mad Love,’ that my sister used to have. I got kind of inspired because I got kind of creeped out. I don’t really get that when I walk up and down 16th Street anymore. I’ve strip-mined the Mission. There’s nothing there,” he explained. “And all the rural stuff has been strip-mined too—don’t go there.

Consequently, the album’s deepest vein is that of suburban angst. “I started having dreams about being a kid,” said Prophet. “I’m not precious enough to write my dreams down and think I’m going to turn them into songs, but there was a lot floating around. It was new subject matter to stick into songs—I wanted to stay off the known roads.”

” My favorite Raymond Carver poem is the one where he’s sitting in his driveway in his station wagon drinking a six-pack and he can’t go inside because his family’s in there,” no doubt explaining the car parked in front of the pick-a-suburb home that adorns the album’s cover. When he finished writing, Prophet took his band into the studio to cut the songs live, to give the record the kind of free-wheeling feel that the group has developed as a consistent live act.

“Everything was a reaction to spending too much time in the control room on the last record. I wanted to have some fun with the songs and break out of the singer/songwriter mold.”

Prophet has kept the same line-up for some time which allowed the band to roll with the free-form and immediate recording process.

“I wouldn’t have done it like this if I didn’t have a band. Stephanie can sing around me which isn’t easy to do, but I never had a guitar player till I found Max. If it gets too comfortable, it’s not good, but when we’re on the road, we have these telepathic workouts. He knows when I bend over it means to do this—we don’t have to talk about it.”

As for living with a band mate, “it’s weird. You don’t really want to show anybody a song till it’s done. I got up one night to go to the bathroom and I went and picked up my guitar and Stephanie was yelling, ‘What are ya doin’ in there?’ and I was whispering a song into a tape recorder. I yelled back, ‘I’m writin’ a song.’ When I’m just pulling things out of the air, I don’t want anyone around.”

“Credit” is one of those fantastic songs that came out of the air while Prophet and one of his co-writers, Kurt Lipschutz, were working together. “It’s one of those character songs and a play on words. A song like ‘My Generation’ doesn’t look very good on paper but when he stutters it means so much more. Or like ‘Unsatisfied” by Paul Westerberg when he screams—it means so much. When my friend Kurt and I printed it out and it didn’t look that good, we thought, we’re really on to something now,” he laughed. “And I get to scream in it,” said Prophet referring to the line, “I want some CREDIT.”

“Someone in my manager’s office said, ‘That’s a good double entendre and my manger said, ‘It’s a single!’

Prophet doesn’t really look for outside projects, but often they(itals) find him(itals). He just played guitar on a little-known singer/songwriter, Calvin Russell’s new album.

“He used to walk about ten steps behind Townes Van Zandt,” he said. It was produced by Dickinson and features the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section. “It’s a top 30 album in France, as we speak. And I got to record in Memphis with Dickinson, and that was great.” Last year, he recorded with another songwriter’s sidekick, Dylan’s old pal, Bobby Neuwirth. Prophet spoke of the thrill of recording with yet another legend.

“There were eight guitar players in the room… Steven Soles, Billy Swan, Neuwirth, Rosie Flores…we did a run down of the song and I wasn’t sure who was going to play guitar and Swan said, ‘you take the lead,’ and I got to play my Telecaster with Billy Swan playing rhythm guitar. He played rhythm guitar for Kristofferson, you know?”

He also recently recorded with beat poet Herbert Hunke. “He’s dead now, so no one else is going to get to do that. I’m not the biggest Chuck Prophet fan, so I don’t have 50 side projects where I think everything I touch should be released. I do a lot of things and most of them are invisible and they probably just should be.”

“I’d still like to do a record with Stephanie, but we move at our own tempo,” he said.

Though he may have profited more had been born alongside his spiritual mentors—Dylan, Petty, Springsteen, Young, Dickinson, Van Zandt, Kristofferson, Neuwirth, Chilton and the like, Prophet won’t back down. Plus, he’s already made a couple of marks on the pages of rock history.

“I survived the Paisley Underground—now that was dumb. Some journalist was trying to get me to dis the No Depression movement—I wouldn’t, as long as we understand they didn’t invent it. I actually think Uncle Tupelo were pretty good and I like Wilco,” he said cheerily.

“I’m not nostalgic and I don’t think things used to be better. I think these are the good old days. “