Photo By Peter Ellenby

With a little help from former Captain Beefheart member Eric Drew Feldman, Chuck Prophet conquered writer's block to complete his latest album.

Make no mistake, Chuck Prophet knows what he wants from his music. And perhaps more to the point, he knows what he doesn't want.

More than 20 years ago, Prophet made a name for himself as the founder and creative brain trust behind the hugely influential but commercially ignored Green on Red, one of the bands that defined the Southern California Paisley Underground movement at the time. Never content to stand pat, Prophet transformed GOR from psychedelically charged Velvet Underground acolytes into a visceral Roots Rock outfit at a time when Americana was the word for the ugly plaid, knotty pine furniture in your parents' family room. A decade later, they would be considered pioneers, but in their own present tense GOR was virtually unknown outside of a slavish cult audience.

Prophet's solo work after the demise of GOR fared no better as he pursued a similar trajectory of reinvention and innovation. His diverse and surprising work didn't even earn him a domestic label; most of his early albums were available only as imports.

When he finally attracted attention at home, it would have been understandable if Prophet had compromised his ideals just slightly in order to broaden his audience. Instead, he maintained his innovative approach, eventually producing his startling masterpiece, 2000's The Hurting Business. A combination of rootsy tradition and contemporary sonic invention, The Hurting Business showed Prophet to be in the same league as Tom Waits and Beck as he expertly blended his Americana foundation with sampling, scratching and turntabling to create a distinct new form.

With No Other Love in 2003, Prophet moved toward a more conventional Soul/Country direction but on his own sonic terms, leaving his adventurous streak intact. When he was well into work on last year's Age of Miracles, Prophet was confronted for the first time with a situation that he had never encountered before: writer's block.

"I'd spent a lot of time touring behind No Other Love, and I kind of changed the way I worked," says Prophet. "I've talked about the biggest thing in terms of the difficult birthing process of this record was that about three-quarters through, I had to stop. I always kind of wondered what that would be like. I was almost done, and I knew there was something missing. I felt like I was going to the studio out of habit. I'd felt that way before, but I figured, 'What would happen if I just stopped?' So I did. And it was kind of cool."

Prophet spent a few weeks simply living and trying not to obsess about finishing his album. By chance, he ran into producer and former Captain Beefheart band member Eric Drew Feldman and began talking about the difficulties he was having with his material.

"I was telling him that I had these songs that were all very songlike and writerly and what I needed was something to open the record like a 2-ton hammer," says Prophet. "And I said, 'I've got this idea for this thing called 'Automatic Blues,' and it's just one chord ...' and he said, 'It sounds like you may have answered your own question.' I told him later, 'You're like a doctor, you never give me a solid opinion on anything.' But we were able to pull it off in a really painless way."

Prophet brought Feldman in as co-producer on a trio of final tracks, allowing him to finish the project and resolve his doubts about the album.

"I've worked with a lot of intense and difficult people, and I'll probably work with more, but I really did enjoy Eric coming in and doing that," says Prophet. "You tend to think of a producer as somebody who wants to put their fingerprints all over the music. But then there's different kinds of producers. I've worked with people like Jim Dickinson, whose presence in the room really changes the molecular structure of what you're doing. I've found that I get the most satisfaction out of producing my own records, but I was glad that I was able to drag Eric in to help me wrestle the beast to the ground in the last quarter."

Although Prophet has been charting his own unique path for the past two decades, there are still lingering self-doubts about what he does and the way he does it.

"Every time I finish a record, I go out and play it and have a good time, but it doesn't take time before I have this low level anxiety (and) I won't write anymore songs," says Prophet. "I don't have any kind of discipline for songwriting. And it depends on my mental health. Sometimes I get hot and things are flowing and I wake up at 5 in the morning and (go) to my guitar and (whisper) into a hand held tape recorder. I know I have the skills; that's something you have just out of practice. It's like Jim Dickinson says about the process of making records -- he says that in order for it to work, people have to have faith in the process and trust in the producer, and you also have to have luck. I think I threw that one in myself. So that's a lot. It's like planetary alignment."

Prophet has a handful of new tracks that he's written recently, but for the time being he's concentrating on bringing Age of Miracles back out on the road. He was slightly disenchanted with his live presentation of the album last year, and he's tightened down all the screws for this year's tour to create a better show. For Prophet, it's all about extending himself as far as possible, in all facets of his game.