Chuck Prophet w/ Parker Gispert – 8pm $25/30 (Artist Requested COVID Protocols in Place)

Chuck Prophet 

If the best parts of your classic British Invasion, 50s country, 60s pop, and pure rock ’n’ roll records could be transformed into a person, they might look and sound a lot like Chuck Prophet. For almost 30 years, this Bay Area songwriter has reliably delivered albums so pleasingly familiar that, had he started a few decades earlier, it’d be easy to imagine him outshining the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. Prophet has the charisma of an arena star, and thanks to his catchy guitar riffs, powerful choruses, and seductively casual vocal style, which could trick you into thinking he’s talking straight into your ear, his live shows always sound larger than the clubs where he plays. Other artists often cover Prophet’s songs, and many of them, including Alejandro Escovedo and Kim Richey, have turned to him as a writing partner on their albums. Prophet’s own work has only improved over the years, as evidenced by his recent run of records, from 2012’s Temple Beautiful, a tribute to the vanishing underbelly of San Francisco, till last year’s The Land That Time Forgot, which contains sharp wordplay and lovely sad songs about dead presidents and sensitive metal heads. 

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

The Skinny

Since his neo-psychedelic Green On Red days, Chuck Prophet has been turning out country, folk, blues, and Brill Building classicism. THE LAND THAT TIME FORGET is something different, a weather vane picking up signals from outer space – or maybe it’s the Heartland.

Priced out of his beloved hometown, San Francisco, Prophet found himself re-energized in Upstate NY just a few miles from the Vermont border – and made a record that is much a 21st century exorcism as it is America.

The songs inhabit a world where a Fast Kid might be on the run from the truant officer or a handsy boss…or the Immigration Service. These are love songs that turn political on a dime (Love Doesn’t Come from the Barrel of a Gun), and melodic hallucinations about kicking back in the Oval Office after hours “talking to my baby, saying baby, let’s not fight.”

Where else besides a Chuck Prophet LP are songs going to come at you from both the Tenderloin and an English roundabout, with stopovers in Nixonland and a love-struck mirror on a Saturday night while a workingman tries his Best Shirt On? With special appearances by the ghost of Johnny Thunders and Willie Wonka and John the Baptist and the train that brought Abraham Lincoln home one last time.

In Waving Goodbye, a young girl leaves small town attitudes behind to conquer the world one gig at a time. Then there’s a dance Marathon, lost in time and reborn as a reality show. According to Womankind, men had their run, but it’s over. (The good news is he can still try to sing his way into her heart.)

And it all leads up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue where a singer has his say, in two and a half loping verses and a middle eight.

Here’s Chuck:

“Have any of you been to a 24-hour Walmart on the outskirts of Pittsburgh after midnight lately? It was just me and a couple tweakers roaming the auto parts aisles. We got along just fine. Long story short, I fixed that guitar by my lonesome and am playing it right now. I’m kind of proud of that.”

“I will say this, though, about Ohio. Some of my truest hard earned fans are in Ohio. Go on and call it a fly-over-state, but not while Chrissie Hynde is in earshot, unless you want a vegan boot up your ass. All I’m saying is that a state is a lot more than which candidate won by how many votes. I mean you gotta feel sorry for the conservatives. The only songs they can play at their rallies without getting hit with a cease and desist order are by Ted Nugent and Charlie Daniels. And those two sure aren’t shy about expressing their opinions.”

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT got off the ground in the Money Belt, only to find its legs in the Borscht Belt. Musically it has deep roots, from the Southern Delta to the discos of Munich. There’s a kind of folkish inevitability to it, lots of acoustic instruments, on top of each other and side by side. But as much as folk music is the soil all music grows from, it never hurts to have a boiler room. So, there’s always a rhythm section shuffling under your feet here.

Written mostly with longtime co-conspirator klipschutz, this LP steps out of Chuck Prophet’s comfort zone (“two guitars, bass, and drums”). After nailing three tracks in S.F. with Grammy-winning alchemist Matt Winegar, Prophet confesses, “We hit a wall. Schedules. Money. Towed vehicles: a thousand large to get one van out of lockup.”

So he went out on tour, a solo tour. Driving through the Catskills he dropped into Kenny Siegal’s Old Soul Studios, in a “5-bedroom Greek Revival listed on the National Registry,” Chuck and Kenny immediately began to argue. Over anything. Whether it was too hot or too cold (according to WHOM?). At the end of the day – “a very long day, three weeks of them – let’s just say Kenny’s the man. At Old Soul, musicians drop in, sometimes complete blind dates. We did everything live. The drummer gigs with Kevin Morby. The bass player, out of some jazz scene. Piano player, an honorary Bad Seed. A mish mash of personalities and styles. Turns out you can make a lot of noise with acoustic instruments, if there are enough of them.”

When asked about his life, Prophet is candid and evasive all at once: “What do you want to know. Death, health issues, financial hijinks, I’ve had them all the past few years. We lost my dad and we lost Stephie’s dad too. The basement flooded. My shoulder went out. I got hives over 80% of my body; was quarantined. The only break I caught was when the ear, eye, nose, and throat doctors were all in the same building. Oh, and I almost got killed about seven times in rented cars in snowstorms, lost on the way to gigs. Hey, maybe we should talk about songs instead.” http://www.chuckprophet.com

Parker Gispert Sunlight Tonight 

Parker Gispert was still in college when he helped form the Whigs in the early 2000s. But after five critically-acclaimed albums, hundreds of tour dates all over the world with the likes of Kings of Leon, Drive-By Truckers, the Black Keys and many others, and television appearances everywhere from the Late Show with David Letterman to Jimmy Kimmel Live! , the Athens, Georgia-bred rockers decided to pull back on activity in 2017.

Which left Gispert, who had spent the majority of his adult life either in the studio or on the road with the band, at a crossroads.

“It occurred to me that if I wanted to record and tour that I was going to need to do it solo,” the singer, songwriter and guitarist says. “I’d always thought about it in the back of my mind as something that I wanted to do one day, but ‘one day’ had never really come.”

Now, ‘one day’ is here in the form of Sunlight Tonight , Gispert’s debut solo album (produced and mixed by Emery Dobyns). The eight-song effort finds Gispert, known for leading the Whigs through raw and jangly southern-garage rave-ups, taking a decidedly different musical approach—biting electric guitar riffs are cast out in favor of gentle acoustic picking and strumming, and his band mates’ raucous rhythms are traded in for minimal accompaniment that includes light bass and drums, orchestral strings and even trumpet. Gispert’s lyrics, meanwhile, are his most introspective and personal to date (albeit with a bit of humor thrown in here and there) and they’re delivered in a vocal style that finds him pushing out on his range. “I didn’t need to project over a band, so I was able to sing in registers I hadn’t really used before, like a lot of high falsetto,” he explains.

The end result showcases a different side of the artist, to be sure. But it’s one that Gispert felt compelled to explore. “A lot of guys from rock bands that go solo, they just hire another bassist and drummer and go make another album,” he says. “I didn’t want to go that route.”

Ultimately, his change in musical direction was helped along by a change in geography. A longtime resident of Nashville (by way of Atlanta, and then Athens), Gispert last year accepted an invitation from a friend to visit his 100-acre hemp farm, located roughly an hour outside Music City. “It was like out of a total time warp,” Gispert recalls of the property. “No heat or AC. No animals. No active crops. Water from a well. It was just, like, a house and a plot of land. I ended up staying there for a year.”

That plot of land was where Sunlight Tonight came into being. “I would wake up early and get my guitar and walk outside and come up with all these songs,” Gispert says. “And without a band to turn to as the deciding factor on, say, a melody or a lyric, I ended up turning to the scenery and the landscape I was dealing with instead. The farm was like my collaborator—it kind

of answered everything for me, as weird as that sounds. And the songs started coming pretty quickly.”

The first one that came is also the one that opens Sunlight Tonight —a psychedelia-laced meditation titled “Through the Canvas.” Built on a bed of acoustic guitar and cello, the song finds Gispert laying out what is essentially a statement of purpose: “Suddenly I got up / Suddenly I could move / shook off all the bullshit that was weighing down my shoes.”

Explains Gispert, “With the Whigs, I had been in that band since I was a teenager. So when that slowed, I found myself in a place where I was almost paralyzed, like, What do I do next ? It was just confusing. But that song sums up what happened when I got to the farm. It was like, suddenly I got up, grabbed a guitar, walked down to this big field and…”

Shook off all the bullshit?

Gispert laughs. “Yeah. And bullshit was exactly the word to describe it. It was all the worries. All the fear. All the drama. All the stuff you can’t even articulate. After I put all of that behind me I was able to set out on this journey of making a solo record.”

That journey ended up being very unlike any Gispert had embarked upon previously. For starters, he says, “I wrote all of the songs for the record while outside, and that’s something I’d never done before. Usually I’d be in a cramped apartment or a studio space—not, like, walking around outside in a big open field at 1:00 AM, just singing and playing.”

He laughs. “And the good thing is, I was on this secluded property, so nobody could see me—it didn’t matter if I looked like a total goofball just wandering around in my jean shorts strumming an acoustic guitar.”

The material that Gispert came up at the farm with was primarily acoustic-based, but at the same time still incredibly diverse, from the dark folk of “Magnolia Sunrise” to the ambient tones of “Life in the Goldilocks Zone”; the T. Rex-y groove-glam of “Volcano,” to the lo-fi garage-fuzz of “Is It Nine”; the exuberant mariachi-horn-rock of “Too Dumb to Love Anyone” (the one composition Gispert says was originally written with the Whigs in mind) to the oddball genre exercise “Do Some Country.”

That last one also features some witty wordplay (“I am a rock artist,” Gispert sings, before adding, “I paint pictures on limestone”), as well as a unique origin story regarding its title. “I was at a Nikki Lane show,” Gispert recalls, “and in between songs this woman in the audience kept yelling (in a heavy southern accent ) “C’monNikki! Do some country !”And my friend and I were just like, ‘Man…that would be such a sweet song title!’ ”

There are other lighthearted moments on Sunlight Tonight, such as the nursery-rhyme-like “Is It Nine,” on which Gispert attempts to determine which number would fit best into the alphabet. The genesis of that riddle? “It was just a ridiculous question I asked myself, and I had never heard a song about that particular question before,” he explains. “So I thought for my first solo album it would be a good idea to have one track that was uniquely ‘Parker.’ Because there are so many love songs or political songs or whatever out there already.”

Which is not to say that Gispert shies away from those topics on Sunlight Tonight . “Too Dumb to Love Anyone,” for one, addresses his present station in life as an unwedded man. “I’m 36, and most of my friends are at that point where they’re getting married and having kids,” he says. “And my friends’ wives will say things to me like, ‘Parker, when are you gonna meet

somebody and join the club?’ So I always say, the only thing standing in between me and a great relationship is that the idea has never occurred to me.”

Then there’s “Magnolia Sunrise,” which unfolds somewhat uneventfully, with Gispert grabbing breakfast at a local diner (“Coffee, Tennessee / grits made to order”) before an anxious waitress shatters his mundane tranquility: “There’s still a lot that could go wrong,” she tells him. As the guitar accompaniment builds and the orchestral strings turn frantic, Gispert intones, ominously, “One Saturday morning / there will be no warning.”

The narrative, Gispert says, “is based on a real interaction I had, at a diner right down the road that I’d go to all the time in the mornings. I ended up talking to this waitress who was having irrational fears of, like, a hurricane coming, or a nuclear threat. It brings up this idea of, you could be chilling out, enjoying your day, and when you least expect it, that’s when something happens—tragedy could be right around the corner.”

Clearly, Gispert’s environment and experiences at the farm factored heavily into the words and music he wrote for Sunlight Tonight. But when it came time to record the material, he left his rural surroundings behind and headed back into Nashville, cutting tracks at Blackbird Studios and Hacienda Studios, with producer Emery Dobyns (Patti Smith, Antony and the Johnsons) at the helm. Dobyns also added various instrumentation to the tracks, alongside contributions from Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, former Sparklehorse vocalist Sol Seppy and Adele bassist Samuel Dixon, among other musicians. “It was like there was one phase of the record, which was me alone writing everything,” Gispert says. “And then there was the second phase, the studio phase, which was very much a team effort, with Emery shaping the record sonically and production-wise.”

When it comes to playing this material live, however, Gispert has been going it alone—an atypical arrangement for him onstage, but one that he’s been finding incredibly satisfying. “I love it a lot,” he says about being out on his own. “I feel really comfortable up there by myself, and in some respects I’m able to connect with the crowd in a way that I never was able to do with a band.”

That said, Gispert still gets plenty of opportunities to play with his band, as the Whigs continue to reconvene for sporadic live shows, including a recent spate of dates celebrating the tenth anniversary of their 2008 record, Mission Control . But far from his solo endeavors having a negative impact on the group, he’s found the opposite to be true. “I’d always been afraid of doing something solo because I thought it might mess up the band vibe, but now I’m able to see that it actually helps,” Gispert says. “When we do get back together to play, it’s fun and it’s fresh and it has new life.”

As for what the future holds, Gispert is open to any and all possibilities that might follow in the wake of Sunlight Tonight . “Because I didn’t even see any of this happening, you know?” he says. “So I can’t really say what comes next. But it’s almost like a weight off my shoulders to not really know where I’m going from here.”

One thing he can say for sure: the farm that served as both inspiration and companion to Gispert throughout the writing process for Sunlight Tonight is now a thing of the past.