Chuck Prophet / Temple Beautiful
You live in a place long enough, the literal and figurative get all mixed up. You speak and think about it in shorthand: Snapshots and colors, glimpses and reflections. Chuck Prophet's new album Temple Beautiful is all that. You could say it's more several knowing nods to San Francisco than a full-blown tribute, but no less a celebration of Prophet's adopted home town. The minimalist lyrics match the stripped-down guitar rock that would sound right coming from a garage or bar any decade of the past half-century, but with expert and brilliant flourishes: a baritone sax in one song, a flute in another. Sometimes the city's grid is just a whisper ("Drop me in the avenues / I'll stumble my way in"), sometimes the images are front and center, as in Prophet's lament about the violent end of the Castro's annual Halloween street party. Even when Prophet is specific, however, the narrative is oblique. "I hear the church bells ring / Willie Mays is up at bat," starts one song, which goes on to name-check Carol Doda and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and you realize the year is 1964, when Doda first went topless and beatniks would soon be hippies, when Laffing Sal still presided over an increasingly scruffy Playland at the Beach, when the Republican National Convention was held at the Cow Palace and, accepting the nomination, Barry Goldwater told the crowd "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." But there's no payoff other than a reminder, in baseball terms, that history has its moments of accounting ("it's three on, two outs, under the lights"), and that Willie Mays always swung for the fences.
In a city of delineated neighborhoods and fault lines, Prophet understands the seams of history but sketches them lightly. Imagine a series of Polaroids, black-and-whites cut from magazines, memories, and memories of other people's memories -- lurid crimes, strippers, punk clubs, young love, sadness and rage. A people's history, hinted at. Personal, too. In "I Felt Like Jesus" he throws us a glimpse of his young self working gigs on 16th Street ("in the heart of the heart of the city") at the Albion (now the Delirium). Sometimes the history is obscured under thick metaphor. I admit I cheated and looked up "The Left Hand and the Right Hand," a tale of two hands, once close, that grow apart but meet again in some kind of afterlife. (He's singing about the Mitchell Brothers.)
Other songs, although spare on detail, needed no investigation. The phrase "White Night" (as in "White Night, Big City") is as evocative to San Franciscans as "Summer of Love." I'd say more so, given how the fury of the White Night riots -- the night Dan White's "Twinkie Defense" actually worked and people turned Civic Center into a war zone -- speaks more to our civic identity now than the fuzzy-headed hippie nostalgia that's mostly reserved for tourists and college students doing the retroactive Jerry thing. Other than a brief reference in the bridge to White's assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, the song is more a challenge to our short attention spans ("What do you know? / What do you know about? / What went on thirty years ago?") than a history lesson.
So why is a baseball blog giving so much ink to a local middle-aged rocker's latest song collection? The Willie Mays tune, for one, but also to get at this notion of place, and how we describe ourselves. Save for the occasional fan who latches on to a logo or color or particular star, geography be damned, we all root for a team because they are here and we are here. They are, we like to fool ourselves, our neighbors. We build common ground around an illusion. Which is why this image is so hard to shake, both for poets and for fans, for those left behind 50 years ago by a cross-country move and for those since, grasping for a bygone notion of rootedness.
And it's rather remarkable that Prophet, a guy who's been toiling on the pop-culture margins for three decades with as much in common with professional sport as Charles Bukowski had with Michael Crichton, tells a piece of his favorite town's history through the language and iconography of baseball. The San Francisco we grew up with is sex and punks and rock and roll and injustice, men in skirts and heels and new arrivals with lonely hearts, and it is also Willie Mays touching his cap. I'm not sure what Willie would think, but I'm very much down with it.
