Interview: Chuck Prophet on “Wake The Dead”, ¿Qiensave? and Cumbia

Credit: Kory Thibault

Being excited by music that makes you feel good and want to sway your body.

It’s been four years since Chuck Prophet released a new album, and in that time he has had to deal with the challenges of the pandemic and a personal fight with Stage 4 Lymphoma. It wouldn’t have been too surprising if his new album, “Wake The Dead”, had turned out to be a dark affair, but while there are certainly dark parts to it, the songs have a surprising joyousness. This is because Chuck Prophet has added more than a touch of cumbia, with its accordions, bajo sexto and percussion, to his usual blend of sounds with the help of cumbia band ¿Qiensave?. American UK’s Martin Johnson caught up with Chuck Prophet at his home in San Francisco over Zoom to discuss “Wake The Dead” and what is behind his interest in cumbia. Chuck explains that it was the fact that cumbia is dance music that has the power to put a smile on people’s faces and make them want to move their bodies. He also explains that the pandemic and his health problems meant that he had time to explore cumbia. The record also includes some of the best songwriting of his career, and Chuck sheds some light on his relationship with Kurt Lipschutz, and his co-writes with Alejandro Escovedo, Aaron Lee Tasjan and Kim Richey. Finally, he talks about the influence fellow San Francisco band the Rubinoos had on the young Chuck Prophet.

You’ve had a rough couple of years with your health and what have you, how are you now?

I’m doing alright, I’ve just played 28 shows in 30 days or something. So I don’t know, if I’m a little tired is it because of my health or simply an age thing.

It’s your age, Chuck.

I know, it’s hard once you hit 30.

Your new album “Wake The Dead” adds new textures to your sound and the songwriting hits new peaks. How did it come about?

A lot of the writing credit goes to me and Kurt Lipschutz and I think we wrote most of the songs together. I know I wrote with Kim Richey and Aaron Lee Tasjan, and I’ve got a song on there that I wrote with Alejandro Escovedo, but we just honoured it. Once we got in a groove and had written a couple of songs we felt good about it, and it kind of energised us. We made the time to be in a room together though we didn’t always write, but we did honour our time together and I think that had something to do with the material. We just refused to sell any wine before its time, or whatever the expression is, as Orson Welles said so poetically. I think about that, and the song ‘Wake The Dead’ had another chorus that was kind of anaemic, just bloodless, and I think Kurt described it as cleaning something off a tabletop in one swipe, and the chorus just hit the ground. We worked at it and inserted a new chorus in there and it just took off like a jet plane. Moments like that give you a buzz when you’re doing it, and we just tied enough of those moments together. The cumbia vibe was pushing it along, and I was excited about music in many ways and that’s what it takes more than anything, just waking up in the morning and thinking about it, you know.

Do you think that the fact you had more time to write the songs helped?

It is a gestation story in the sense that four years between records is an eternity in Chuck years, and I suppose that had something to do with it. It is a gestation story, I write some songs, stepped away and then got interested in cumbia music and I was immersing myself in it, and of course, I had a pretty big health scare in the middle of it all. I’m always a little bit fuzzy on the timeline, but Stage 4 Lymphoma all over my body was not part of my plan.

What made you want to explore cumbia music?

There were just moments, you know. I went down to Salinas and jammed with this group of brothers, ¿Qiensave?, and we ended up getting booked at this hippy festival down there called Hipnic. Something happened, after a couple of songs people came forward and everyone was dancing, and it was such a thrill to be up there playing music that compelled everyone to get on their feet and move. That was fresh, that to me was exciting, and when you ask me about cumbia music it’s a lot of things, but that was an aha moment, this is cool and whatever’s happening here, I want to do more of it.

Music is all about rhythm, did your songs change with the new rhythms?

There were a lot of songs and they all had their own lives. Some of them stood up for themselves more than others, which is often the case with every record. With some songs as a group we just played better, and some songs just fell into place.

You have a long history of songwriting with Kurt Lipschutz, and you’ve mentioned writing songs with Alejandro Escovedo, Kim Richey and Aaron Lee Tasjan. What do you get out of collaborating with other songwriters?

It’s an extension of my social life. Kurt has got pretty tired of me describing our relationship as getting in a room and we never run out of things to talk about. That’s a big part of it, and it’s also a big part of it with Alejandro Escovedo. With Kurt I think he is pretty gifted as a writer, I remember the morning he came in and said ‘It’s a Good Day to Be Alive’, and I thought, yeah, I don’t know what that is but let’s write it. So that was a good day, and there are always going to be days when we argue about where to eat lunch and don’t get anything done, but at least we honour the fact we can get together.

Do you think your songwriting is getting better as you get older?

I know that a lot of my heroes ran out of steam, and maybe I’m a late bloomer. I still feel that I have lots of songs to write, I don’t know if I’ve run out of steam just yet.

San Francisco has always been important to your music, is cumbia music part of San Francisco?

San Francisco is an incredible place. There are twenty-seven San Franciscoes and they are all on top of each other and they all overlap. I think one of the first times I felt the cumbia vibe just wash over me would have been at the Make Out Room, which is a club we play at as a band. Like a lot of clubs they kick the band out early so they can get the disco going, but in this case, on a Saturday night they have Cumbia Night, and they have a couple of excellent DJs there.

I’ve told this story a lot, but one Saturday night we played a gig, it was a triumphant gig, we had Clem Burke from Blondie sitting in and it was one of those you had to be there kind of nights. We always used to rush to get our stuff out of the way so the DJs could come in, and they clear the house. So, they cleared the house and we took out equipment and we neatly packed it up in the corner, and we were all sitting in this red Naugahyde booth just relaxing after this great gig and the guys in the band were having a beer, I was probably having a Diet Coke, and Stephanie was having a white wine, I don’t know. The DJs then showed up and people started coming in, and the DJ dropped the needle on these records, and they have subs in that club where the low end is really pumped into the room, and it can be really loud and fill up the room. I heard those basslines and all that chromatic accordion stuff, and people were dancing, they were dancing with other people or they were dancing by themselves and the room was starting to fill up. Then our drummer Vincente Rodriguez, who is from San Antonio and who has played a lot of Tejano music, started showing Stephanie a couple of basic dance steps. I was watching them and listening to this music, and I thought I really don’t want this night to end.

That was probably when I was really bathed in that stuff. After that, I had a heightened awareness, and I heard music spilling out of places and I was thinking, that’s interesting is that cumbia? I can’t say I’m any kind of expert on what that music is, and I’m not sure as a band on this record if we were playing it particularly correctly, but when we’ve gone out on tour and played the songs, people move and sway from side to side, people dance. So, you can’t argue with that and we must be doing something right if people feel it in their bodies.

How did the other members of the Mission Express take to it?

My guys in the Mission Express are pretty cool, they put up with me and I’ve led them down some dark alleys before. They were cool and there was a naturalness to it, especially with Vicente and he fit right into the groove, and we didn’t really talk about it very much because he had a naturalness about him. James DePrato really embraced that accordion music where there’s a lot of that chromatic runs and things, and he’s kind of fluid at that. Then we got the ¿Qiensave? guys, Ricardo Cortez played percussion, Mario Cortez played percussion with the güiro, Alejandro “Flaco” Gomez played the bajo sexto and the organ, and he’s also just an excellent guitar player and singer, somebody to who that music is just part of his DNA, and he’s a young guy. So that was a shot in the arm, they embraced it.

¿Qiensave?
What did the cumbia guys make of it?

I don’t know, I think initially they were kind of amused by me. I was a bit needy, I went to see them a few times and I was always asking them questions about what they were doing, how long had they been playing, and who wrote the song. So, I think they were just amused by me, I think, and they knew I played music and they said I was welcome to come down to a house they have in the woods in Salinas, which is about three hours south of San Francisco, and play. They said I could come down any time and jam with them, I could bring my guitar and amp and turn it up as loud as I wanted because they were in the woods. That’s what we did, and initially, we did a few things and then we added to that, and Alejandro showed me how to spice up the chords a little bit and make it more latin, and I was more than happy to take his suggestions. It took some time, it took some time to write some songs, it took some time for us all to get to know each other, and I wasn’t really in a hurry.

What can people expect on your 2025 UK Tour?

You know, I will be bringing the Chuck Prophet show. Nobody needs an owner’s manual to understand how to enjoy it if your heart’s in the right place. I’m bringing the Cumbia Shoes, a six-piece band. It’s out there on the internet so anybody can check it out, there are clips of us playing on our recent tour.

What was it like working with the Rubinoos on “Going Home”?

The Rubinoos were a favourite of mine, I played with them when I was a 16-year-old high school kid. They were such an exceptional band, I don’t really know how to describe them, they were sort of like pub rock in a way in that they could do anything. They could sound like the Jackson 5, they could sound like the Beach Boys, they could do do-wop, they wrote great songs, they made records, and at the time I was a kid they seemed so much more grown-up. They weren’t that much older than me but they seemed so much more grown up, they had been to England, they had played on American Bandstand, and when they went to England they were on The Old Grey Whistle Test. I just really looked up to them, particularly Tommy Dunbar the main songwriter and the Brian Wilson of the group.

He and I got together with the idea of writing a song and we did, and we got together again and wrote another song, and then we started thinking about making a Rubinoos record. I asked a lot of questions about how they made the first couple of records. I consider them a West Coast Big Star, they were kind of isolated in their own way growing up in Berkeley, which was a very progressive weird place. When they were in high school they backed up Jonathan Richman for some of that Modern Lovers stuff that people think is the Modern Lovers on a couple of songs like ‘The New Teller’ and ‘Government Center’. Those are the Rubinoos backing Jonathan, and of course, Jonathan Richman loomed large over everything when I was growing up. When we got to where we had enough songs we thought I would be the best person to produce it, so I did. I insisted we get the original guys back together, and that took some doing. I think we went to the same studio where they recorded their first single, which was a B-side off a DeFranco Family record, a song called ‘Gorilla’. They are my teachers in many ways. The album was called “Going Home”, and it was inspired by a Troggs song in their set in the early days.

Your label Yep Roc has reissued some of their early albums. I assume you had something to do with that.

Yes, I got them the deal with Yep Roc. I brought them to Yep Roc, and they were like, maybe we can do something, and they signed the band. I’ve had a great relationship with Yep Roc. I’m still excited about music and the possibilities, and when I told Glenn Dicker, the President, that I wanted to make a cumbia record he was ready for the adventure. It was really an adventure, I didn’t know where it would go, or where it was going to lead, or how it was going to be received, but he was very much game.

I’ve made a lot of records for Yep Roc, and I remember one record where I really wanted the release date to be in a few months, and they said for us to do a really good job of promoting and marketing your record we really need six months. I was like, I really need to get this gone because I’ve got some tour dates in the fall overseas. They were like, well Chuck, we don’t really release records based on when you have tour dates. I told them I understood, but that I was so wrapped up in all this stuff that if I didn’t tour I didn’t know what I would do, and they said they understood and that they would do their best to get it out quickly, and they did.

I felt like they understood what was important to me, and there are lots of ways to measure success, like did you get the songs to stick to the tape in the studio, did you get the songs to connect with the people when the sound comes out of the speakers, were you able to go out and play and bring those songs to the people. There are lots of ways to measure success, and it’s been great to collaborate with Yep Roc in that way, they understand. Sometimes they do things that are almost managerial in terms of how to help the artist along.

At AUK, we like to share music with our readers, so can you share which artists, albums, or tracks are currently top three on your personal playlist?

I’ve been listening to Jinx Leonard out of Ireland, a great songwriter who has a song ‘Grow a Pair’, which always puts a smile on my face and is a song for our times, I think. I like Ezra Furman, I still listen to Lucinda Williams, Nick Lowe, Bob Dylan, Tony Joe White, John Prine, and some of the hard rock of my youth like the New York Dolls, Bebop Deluxe, and I don’t know, Motorhead. I’m also listening to a lot of latin music, like Pérez Prado and a lot of cumbia playlists.

I also got inspired by a lot of cumbia bands online because during lockdown, and my subsequent cancer treatment, I watched a lot of stuff on YouTube. That includes bands like Sonido Gallo Negro out of Mexico City. You can see bands like Los Mirlos playing in the dirt somewhere down in Colombia, or something, with their surf guitars and organ. It is just fantastic, and this stuff is out there, it is truly mind blowing. If you could click on a video and see Robert Johnson play those “King Of The Delta Blues” sessions they did, just imagine if they’d been able to video those. So, yeah, that’s also part of my inspiration.

Finally, do you want to say anything to our UK readers?

I love playing in the UK. It was a place where Green On Red was always welcomed, and we played up and down the Angry Island, and all these places like Nottingham and Newcastle, Sheffield and Leeds. They’re the best audiences in the world, they know how to go to the bar, get a pint and just belly up to the stage, stand on a sticky black floor, and hurl insults at the band. I welcome all that. I just love British audiences, they get it, you know, more than anywhere. It is just ingrained in the culture, we all love it, even though it is disappearing. We used to stay in interesting places, bed and breakfasts and things, and then they started building those Travelodges out by the motorway and things got less interesting.

Chuck Prophet’s “Wake The Dead” is out now on Yep Roc Records.

The Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes 2025 UK tour:

February 19 – Oxford – The Bullingdon
February 20 – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
February 21 – Manchester – Yes Pink Room
February 22 – Newcastle – The Cluny
February 23 – Glasgow – St Luke’s
February 24 – Sheffield – Greystones
February 25 – Leicester – The International
February 26 – Nottingham – Metronome
February 27 – Cambridge – Portland Arms
February 28 – Norwich – Arts Centre
March 1 – Hassocks – Mid Sussex Music Hall
March 2 – Bristol – Lantern
March 3 – Birmingham – Hare & Hounds
March 4 – Southampton – 1865
March 5 – London – The Garage

About Martin Johnson 454 Articles
I've been a music obsessive for more years than I care to admit to. Part of my enjoyment from music comes from discovering new sounds and artists while continuing to explore the roots of American 20th century music that has impacted the whole of world culture.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

4 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
keith hargreaves

Brilliant man! Brilliant interview! Three gigs booked looking at more !!

R. Sawrey

I saw Chuck and the band last night in Charlottesville, VA. He blew the roof off the place. He had us dancing in the aisles…..had us in his hands.