San Francisco has inspired no shortage of music, and we’ll explore a lot of it with our Frisc Discs series. Here we dive into the best album ever recorded about the city: Chuck Prophet’s Temple Beautiful, now five years old. The original version of this essay appeared on El Lefty Malo in 2012.
You live in a place long enough, and 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 Temple Beautiful is all that. But all of its sidelong glances and intimate if sometimes obscure references add up to much more than a tribute to San Francisco, Prophet’s hometown. It’s a sing-along, a windows-down record, and if you fire up your curiosity, it’s also a history lesson.
None of this would matter if it didn’t sound good. It does. The stripped-down guitar rock would feel right rumbling out of a garage or bar any decade of the past fifty years, but with expert and brilliant flourishes: a baritone sax in one song, a flute in another.
In the lyrics, sometimes the city’s grid is briefly there with a wink (Drop me in the avenues / I’ll stumble my way in, Prophet sings in “Play That Song Again”). 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 slowly you realize the year is 1964, when Doda first went topless at one end of town, and at the other, Laffing Sal still presided over an increasingly scruffy Playland at the Beach.
In 1964, the Republican National Convention was at the Cow Palace, and in accepting the nomination, Barry Goldwater told the crowd “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”
It was also, of course, the year of the Civil Rights Act. Amid all the societal upheaval, the Giants, led by the greatest ballplayer of all time, Willie Mays, were locked in their annual battle with the Dodgers, only half a decade removed from their mutual move west from New York. Back then, when the Giants played, led by their two African-American superstars, it was still a whole new ballgame.
Instead of loading obvious freight onto the cultural ferment, Prophet borrows baseball to remind us of the era’s uncertainties and fears — It’s three on, two outs, under the lights / Nobody knows who’ll make it home tonight — as well as its certainties and joys. Willie always did swing for the fence, Prophet sings.
Across the city’s fault lines, Prophet mines historical seams but never sketches too heavily. His lyrics, penned with local poet Klipschutz, are like a series of Polaroids thumbtacked on corkboards, black-and-whites cut from magazines, memories, and memories of other people’s memories. He revisits and reshuffles lurid crimes, strippers, clubs, young love, sadness, and rage.
The uproarious title track, with backing vocals from Roy Loney of the Flamin’ Groovies, is a reference to an impromptu punk club that lived on the same block as Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and the notorious People’s Temple of Jim Jones. The song is about meeting a girl at a show, full stop. But beyond the edges of the song (and the club) awaits so much more.
Prophet is more explicit about city history in “White Night, Big City.” The name “White Night” is as evocative to San Franciscans as “Summer of Love.” Or it should be, given how the fury of the 1979 White Night riots speaks more now to our civic identity than the crass hippie nostalgia being foisted upon tourists and Haight Street bong shoppers.
But once again, Prophet works a different angle. Other than a brief reference in the bridge to White’s assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor 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 30 years ago?) than a lecture about the grotesquely light sentence White received.
I first reviewed Temple Beautiful five years ago for my Giants blog because of the Willie Mays song, but also because I had not heard an attempt like this, to get at a notion of place, to use music and art to imagine and re-imagine voices trying to tell us who we are and why we’re here, since Lou Reed’s New York in 1989.
I loved, and still love, how Prophet, a guy toiling nonstop on the pop-culture margins for three decades, not only paints a minimalist picture of San Francisco history through the language and iconography of baseball —he totally nails it. The San Francisco we grew up with is sex and punks, rock ’n’ roll and injustice, men in skirts and heels, and new arrivals with lonely hearts, and it is also Willie Mays touching his cap as the crowd goes wild.