Chuck Prophet’s Music Has Never Felt More Alive

For two weeks in March of 2022, Chuck Prophet didn’t know if he would live to see the end of the year.

Days earlier, the musician was gearing up for an international tour — one that had already been rescheduled three times due to COVID. He’d released a full-length in 2020, but hadn’t yet taken it on the road, and the acclaimed San Francisco rocker was excited to get out there.

Instead, after a routine checkup, doctors discovered a mass in his upper intestine. “Mr. Prophet, you’re not going anywhere,” he remembers one physician telling him. It was clearly cancer. But determining which kind required a type of scan that Kaiser couldn’t schedule for 12 long days.

“It blindsided me,” says Prophet, 61. While he waited to learn his fate, he turned to music to distract him from fear. He’d been getting into Latin dance music for the last few years, so he listened to a lot of that. And then he wrote a song.

Two and a half years later, after surgery, chemotherapy and immunotherapy for stage-four lymphoma, Prophet is in full remission. Sitting at a Mission District coffee shop on a warm October afternoon, he is yet again gearing up for an international tour. “One Lie for Me, One for You,” the song he wrote during that two-week purgatory, is now a tender cowboy lullaby, undercut by both dread and acceptance, with lyrics about plunging into “dangerous waters” ahead.

It’s track 8 of 11 on Prophet’s new record Wake the Dead, an album that drives headlong into the songwriter’s dark night of the soul with an unlikely companion riding shotgun: cumbia.

The album, out Oct. 25, sees Prophet collaborating with ¿Qiensave?, a Salinas-based band of brothers whose sound enchanted Prophet when he first heard them back in 2022. As soon as his health allowed, he began driving from his home in the Duboce Triangle to their place near Salinas to jam. Eventually, they all headed into an Oakland studio to record, intermingling with the usual suspects — including Prophet’s wife, keyboardist/vocalist Stephanie Finch — in his longtime band, the Mission Express.

The result is an adventurous, soulful project that deftly balances darkness and hope, shot through with the unmistakable energy of a veteran musician having more fun than he has in years. Longtime followers of Prophet’s work (his wide, loyal fanbase includes Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams and Stephen King) will find plenty that’s familiar here. A storyteller at heart, he retains his usual dry wit and wistfulness over warm, jangly guitar, with tinges of rockabilly and surf punk.

But from the opening notes of the title track, clave rhythms, accordion and a Farfisa organ announce that this will not be your standard Americana record. “Gonna wake the dead, get ‘em on their feet,” Prophet sings slyly over rhythmic Latin percussion.

At the handful of live shows he’s played with this new band (“Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes”), people do something Prophet hasn’t always seen at his shows. They do get on their feet, immediately, and they dance.

A different musical vocabulary

The first time Prophet really “got” cumbia was around Hardly Strictly Bluegrass weekend, in October 2019. He and a few musicians who were in town for the festival played at the Make Out Room, and afterwards, a DJ started setting up for a staple at the tiny club. It was cumbia night.

“Me and the guys and Stephanie were all sitting in one of those Naugahyde booths, we’d stacked our stuff up, and they started playing this music — it was really loud with the subs and bass and everything,” he recalls. His drummer, Vicente Rodriguez, began showing Stephanie some dance moves. “I was watching them, listening to this music, and it was just one of those things, like: This is amazing.”

Stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic, he threw himself into learning about the genre, but it was after his diagnosis that everything converged. He started collecting records, going to shows. He drove to Modesto to see the psych-punk-cumbia outfit Valley Wolf, and fell in love with the atmosphere.

“The crowd is not just standing there, watching the band,” he says. “They’re not shoegazing. Everyone’s dancing. They’re partying. It’s Miller time.” Like with punk rock, he says, the hijinks in the crowd are just as lively and important as what’s happening onstage. “It kind of erases the line between the stage and the audience.”

Enter ¿Qiensave?, a cumbia urbana group that’s built a following in the West Coast’s Latin music and festival circuit since 2009. Hearing from Prophet was initially a little surprising, says Alejandro “Flaco” Gomez, who plays lead guitar and sings in the band. But Prophet’s curiosity was genuine, and he had an obvious desire to learn. He shared some new songs he’d written, and asked if they wanted to jam.

“He’s a man who does his research,” says Gomez, recalling the first few times Prophet drove out to play with the band. “And I appreciated his enthusiasm. He was excited to hear our interpretation of his music, and to bring his songs somewhere they had never been before. I mean, that’s how you innovate.”

A year later, the band was piling into 25th Street Recording in Oakland alongside the Mission Express. Gomez has been a working musician for over a decade; he releases his own music, which blends cumbia and boleros with more modern rock and pop sounds, under the name Flaco el Jandro. He’s no stranger to collaboration.

But “to have a collaboration where it was two groups of musicians that have never met or interacted, who come from completely different musical worlds and use different musical vocabulary?” says the musician. “That was exciting. I’ve never done anything like that in my life.”

‘Cumbia is for everybody’

It’s a week before his tour kicks off in Seattle, and Prophet is shopping at Discodelic, the tiny Latin vinyl store on 24th street. He’s brought a list of Latin American psych-rock albums he wants to check out, like Rise of the Melted Eagle, by Los Tabanos Experience, and Gran Muro de Coma, by La Iglesia Atomica.

“This place is pretty hip,” he murmurs as he thumbs through records, eventually selecting a few to listen to on the store’s turntable. “Not a ton of reissues.”

There is, of course, an elephant in the record shop: the question of when appreciation becomes appropriation.

¿Qiensave?’s Gomez says he knows what it’s like to feel tokenized in the music industry. But with Prophet, it’s been an ongoing conversation filled with respect: “To me, cumbia is for everybody,” he says. “Music is for everybody. So if you inject your respect and appreciation into it, and that shows through the art, then I don’t see anything wrong with it … cultural exchange, fusion, that’s how art and music grow and progress.”

Prophet reconciled any hesitation through enthusiastic co-signs from his collaborators. “There are always reasons not to do something,” he says, “but I know who I’m playing with.” On Wake the Dead, that includes Prophet’s old friend Alejandro Escovedo, formerly of groundbreaking San Francisco punk band the Nuns, who co-wrote and rips some beautiful guitar harmonies on “Sally Was a Cop.”

And Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas, who grew up steeped in Latin music, helped Prophet get over his sense that he wasn’t playing cumbia the right way.

“He said, ‘Pay no attention to the clave police.’ Which was his way of saying, if it feels good, it feels good, don’t worry about being correct,” says Prophet. He also looks to how the Clash incorporated reggae, which of course did not originate in their culture. “When I hear ‘Police and Thieves,’ I’m like, these guys don’t know what they’re doing. And it’s never bothered me!”

And then there’s this: When an art form helps comfort and guide you through the darkest time in your life, the suggestion that it’s problematic to practice that art might feel downright cruel.

Sometimes, lately, Prophet forgets he even had cancer. He doesn’t identify as the kind of person who goes around with a cancer story. “I’m not that guy,” he says. He’s always been lucky, he adds with a smile.

He still feels that way. But it’s undeniable that there’s something weightier in his voice now.

“It’s a good day to walk on water,” he sings in the album’s final moments. “It’s a good day to swallow your pride. It’s a good day to call your mother. It’s a good day to be alive.”

‘Wake the Dead’ is released on Friday, Oct. 25. Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes play at 5 p.m. that day at Amoeba Music in Berkeley. After a European tour, the band plays a homecoming show on Saturday, Dec. 28, at The Chapel in San Francisco.