Monday, February 9, 2015

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express w/ Kevn Kinney at the Great American Music Hall SF


On January 31 Chuck Prophet and his band Mission Express played one of the final gigs of his Winter tour in support of the 2014 Yep Roc album "Night Surfer". Chuck has been performing since the new wave and alternative rock salad days of the 1980s both as a solo performer and a member of the influential rockers Green on Red. As a songwriter he has penned tracks for artists as diverse as Solomon Burke, Heart, Peter Wolf, and Kelly Willis. 

It was great to see Chuck perform to a hometown crowd and two really serendipitous things happened at the Great American Music Hall show, the first being opener Kevn Kinney, who I had not realized is the lead singer and songwriter in the band Drivin' and Cryin' most famous for their 1990 recordings made in the midst of the rock and Americana scene in Georgia that also included R.E.M. Matthew Sweet, The Drive By Truckers, Pylon and The B-52s to name just a few. Kevn continues to perform with Drivin' N Cryin' ( they are playing one lucky Bay Area couple's wedding later this month ) and I enjoyed chatting with him after the show. DNC is/was a 90s band I had not collected as much as others, but it has been fun and rewarding digging back into their catalog.




The other strange coincidence that happened had to do with a question I get often about the inspiration for the imagery in my prints. For Chuck's show print, I had started trying to draw a vintage Pignose amplifier ( the little leather encased and strapable battery powered amps loved by pickers and buskers the world over ), but soon settled on a more elaborate, but equally vintage looking cassette recorder. Setting up at the gig I watched not only as one of the sound engineers plugged a Tascam solid state into the soundboard, but also heard from multiple fans that taping at Chuck's shows is a longtime and honored tradition. It has made for a nice story behind the sketch. 




The prints sold well, and online sales thus far have also been brisk, but you can still grab a print from the show night's edition here!