Long-running rocker Chuck Prophet never lost his capacity for writing engaging tunes or shaking up his style as he does it. For his latest venture, Wake the Dead, he’s wedded his laconic lyric observations with the bright rhythms of cumbia, the Latin American musical style that originated from Colombia. With baselines not so far from reggae and stinging guitar that could be a kin to surf, fueled by a percussion-assisted beat, it’s a thoroughly pleasing, danceable sound to frame his familiar voice.
But with his show at The Hamilton in Washington on a frigid winter night last week, dancing was not possible. The space in front of the bandstand where fans have bopped for previous shows by Prophet and the Mission Express was blocked by gold circle tables extending all the way to the stage. Which may have made it more comfortable for the frankly older crowd on hand. But, like the all-seated duo show with his wife Stephanie Finch at the Kennedy Center last year, it kept the show from reaching quite the celebratory heights his band shows usually hit.
Nonetheless, the rock-cumbia connection bookended the set through some tasty covers—a bilingual blast of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody” to open, and a can’t miss closer of Sam the Sham’s “Woolly Bully” as the final encore. The latter best employed the keening electronic organ and raspy vocals of Mario Cortez, amid his myriad percussive instruments.
As on the Wake the Dead album, he and two members of his usual band Mission Express, guitarist James DePrado and drummer Vincente Rodriguez, are augmented by a couple members from the Salinas, Calif., cumbia band ¿Quiensalve?—guitarist and keyboardist Alejandro Gomez and the multiinstrumental Cortez. And with the newly added bassist for the tour Mike Anderson, they’re touring as Chuck Prophet and His Cumbia Shoes.
And if dancing is not allowed, there’s certainly some toe-tapping caused by these Shoes. Nine songs from the new album dominated the set, which wasn’t a bad thing. Like most Prophet songs, they were distinguished by some droll wordplay and unexpected turns.
Co written with the San Francisco poet known as klipschutz, who Prophet combined to write his 2012 travelogue of the city by the bay, Temple Beautiful, the new stuff has some offhand rhymes and some disarming optimism, especially considering it was put together during a time when Prophet was temporarily sidelined with a cancer diagnosis (which obviously hasn’t affected his current performance).
On tunes like “Wake the Dead,” he’s looking to start something; on “Sugar Into Water” the alchemy can lead to anything. In it he sings “all the politicians drinking in the clubhouse / I can hear ‘em talking, yeah, but I don’t know what it means.” It’s almost as political as he got, blocks from the White House during a week when most Federal institutions were being dismantled as if in a coup. But he did have a song dedicated to Elon Musk, “In the Shadows (for Elon),” in which he warns “Everybody’s gonna have to pay / when he rides his rocket ship away.”
And he was blunt about gun control for his 2017 “Killing Machine,” paired with a song he wrote with Alejandro Escovedo, “Sally Was a Cop” (a song on Escovedo’s 2012 Big Station, Prophet does a cumbia take on his new album). Mostly, there was the bright sound of the music, which came close to surf twang, as on the instrumental “Cumbia de los pajaritos,” an 1982 track cribbed from the Peruvian cumbia band Los Mirlos.
The Latin approach gave a breeziness to his best loved concert staples, from “Wish Me Luck” and “Jesus was a Social Drinker” to “Ford Econoline” and the set-ending “You Did (Bomp Shooby Shooby Bomp).” Still, it was surprising to hear a near-solo song of almost complete sincerity to start the encore, “It Was a Good Day to Be Alive,” about savoring every miraculous moment of the day, the way someone surviving a major health scare would do, while taking a foray into a brand new branch of music along the way.
The solid show was enhanced by the solo opener Flaco El Jandro, also from Salinas, who was expressive with his voice as he was with his nimble guitar (borrowed from Prophet, he said). He advised the audience he only had one song in English, though, and stopped in the fraught week to declare that even though his parents were born in Mexico, he considered himself as American as anyone, to which he got some of his biggest applause.
