PHOTO: KEITH CORCORAN | Rangy San Franciscan Chuck Prophet has a great little band in the Mission Express, but every so often he breaks away for a solo tour. Armed with just an acoustic guitar and a couple of microphones, Prophet can’t play some of the songs he does with his band. But then again, the arrangement allows him to try some old things, give a different emphasis to some newer ones, and let him tell long stories about each between songs.
And it’s surprising how much rock ’n’ roll verve he can still inject into a show even though he’s the only one up there. He could also roam around an otherwise empty stage as a club in a strip mall in suburban Vienna, Virginia, Monday, and let his compositions really shine.
An appreciative crowd at Jammin Java saw all that, while participating in necessary call-and-response or hand clapping when necessary. (When he asked for finger-popping at one point, they clapped, too, indicating that they might not have known what finger popping exactly was).
Since his days in the old paisley underground band Green on Red, Prophet has been known as a songwriter of considerable skills, able to toss off catchy things like “Wish Me Luck” from his latest album, “Night Surfer,” to enduring reveries to the sunny season in “Summertime Thing.”
A chronicler of his beloved city by the bay, he’s written songs about colorful local pornographers the Mitchell brothers and international heroes like Willie Mays. He’s the kind of writer whose songs take the form of short stories, half-spoken and chock full of characters, plot turns, and lessons contemplated if not fully learned.
He famously co-wrote the entirety of Alejandro Escovedo’s Real Animal album in 2008, so he played one of its strong tracks, “Sister Lost Soul,” accompanied with a long and funny story about recording it in a strange home studio.
Prophet got to approximate a band, or at least a second voice, with one of those distorting harmonica microphones, minus the harmonica. It allowed for backing choruses in a different voice, the odd sampled vocal in “You Did” and, in the case of “Little Girl, Little Boy,” both sides of a duet usually handled by his wife and usual band member Stephanie Finch.
You get the feeling though that somebody as engaging as Prophet could entertain even without the electronics, or maybe even minus the guitar.
