For twelve long days, Chuck Prophet waited. A stage four lymphoma diagnosis had knocked the wind out of him, dragged him off the road and into surgery, and now here he was, a perpetual motion machine forced to sit still, confronting his mortality for the first time as he wondered if he’d live long enough to see the end of the year, let alone get back on tour.
“I was going through a tunnel,” he recalls. “It was dark. But I had music: music to play, music to listen to, music to get me out of my head. Music was my savior.”
That much is plain to hear on Wake The Dead, Prophet’s extraordinary—and unlikely—new album. Recorded with ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community of Salinas, California, the collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music, which consumed and comforted Prophet during his illness and subsequent recovery. The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.
“Some say this music started in the jungles of Peru and Colombia,” Prophet explains. “Then it really caught fire in the 1960s. In fact, there was such a demand for Cumbia in Mexico that DJs would travel to Colombia just to bring records back. Now that’s trafficking I can get behind!”
While Cumbia’s exact origins are debated, such details are in many ways irrelevant to Wake The Dead. Prophet approaches the music not as an academic or an historian, but as a fan with a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiosity. “When I was growing up listening to The Clash and their flirtations with reggae, the thing I remember most is how the music hit me, how it made me feel. The more you listened, the more was revealed, but on the most fundamental level, those records just felt good, and that was really important to me with this album.”
Prophet’s illness arrived amidst a streak of more than a dozen critically acclaimed solo albums stretching all the way back to 1990, when the California native first shifted focus from his tenure with pioneering neo-psych band Green on Red to working under his own name. Since then, Prophet’s songs have appeared in a slew of films and television shows, and his work has been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Solomon Burke, Heart, and a host of others. Uncut proclaimed him a “renaissance-rocker,” and NPR declared that “no one can turn tales from the outer limits into catchy songs quite like Prophet does.” Decades of relentless touring and bold artistic reinvention came to a screeching halt in 2022, though, when doctors found a mass in Prophet’s intestine.
“I had a lot of time to just sit and listen while I was sick,” he explains. “When I finally got to feeling better, I started jamming with this Cumbia band called ¿Qiensave? that I’d fallen in love with.” The immediate reaction from audiences made it clear they were on to something special.
Like so many of life’s little joys, it’s something Prophet—who’s in full remission—appreciates now more than ever. “It’s a good day to walk on water / Good day to swallow your pride,” he sings in the album’s final moments. “Good day to call your mother / Oh, it’s a good day to be alive.” Chuck will be touring the UK with members of his own band and ¿Qiensave?, playing his classics along with tracks from the new album.
