Category Archives: Chuck Prophet

Best Of Bandcamp Via The Hype Machine

Anthony Volodkin of the Hype Machine is a clever interesting guy who played a big role in music culture in the early 2000s when he revolutionized the promotion of music on the internet after he coded up an aggregator called the Hype Machine in 2005 that found a way to stream tracks form the myriad of internet blogs then posting music to an avid readership numbering in the millions. I can tell ya personally about the popularity of this wild wooly indie scene because I had a music blog at the time drawing thousands, if not tens of thousands of hits a day, much of that traffic derived from Anthony’s Hype Machine website.

Today with Alphabet’s YouTube, Zuckerberg’s social media & ezos’ e-commerce empires hogging most of the web traffic, my website now pulls around a fraction of that, maybe a hundred unique visitors a day, a far cry from when there were fewer internet users but there was more equal footing amongst all the sites on the web. I myself had kind of forgotten about the Hype Machine over the past decade, as the democratization of the web has largely disappeared into corporate content mazes, but was recently amazed to stumble in and see the Hype Machine was still functioning. In fact, it had even been crowdfunded, and now plays a central part in a quasi historical new book by Lina Abascal on the so-called ‘bloghouse’ movement, an account called Never Be Alone Again of which some excerpts from her writing are aggregated ala the ype Machine below.

“Music was beginning to move at the speed of the internet and new songs could be uploaded, reviewed, distributed, redownloaded, DJed out, remixed, (and repeat) faster than ever before.

Abascal BookMusic blogs in the second half of the ’00s were completely autonomous, uploading a constant stream of new tracks for not much more than the love of the game. (And maybe for the glitter of Z-list celebrity status from a regular position on the Hype Machine charts.)

The mode of discovery shifted away from finding your new favorite song on the radio, at the record store, or even hearing it at a club; now you knew everything about an artist before you even got to the party. The party where a promoter had booked an artist based on hype from blogs written by kids in dorm rooms. The bloggers weren’t totally sure if what they were doing was legal, but it never seemed to matter all that much anyway. Publicists representing the artists being blogged about were known to encourage the practice by sending free download links in their press releases to bloggers.

Compared to now, the scope of the internet felt drastically smaller; a loose network of niche communities that had yet to be flattened by corporate interests.

The true democracy of the sound’s wild wild west was Hype Machine. An aggregator with no human face or editorial input, Hype Machine (sometimes known as Hypem) was founded in 2005 by Anthony Volodkin, a Brooklynite by way of Russia.

“It was a chaotic time for music on the internet. I would spend hours listening and finding new blogs to listen from. Then I started thinking of how I could make something so I could listen to this more easily,” explained Volodkin. Marrying curation with convenience, the software engineer began building a tool to aggregate all of the scene’s music blogs’ daily postings to one website. “It felt like a radio station was being assembled in front of me,” he said of the earliest version of the site.

With its green and white layout, Hype Machine simply listed songs in a numerical ranking by online popularity. Other blogs could decide what to post based on what the rest of the blogosphere was posting, and listeners could head there to streamline the process of trolling the blogs themselves. In its prime, Hype Machine remained a fair, non- gameable website where the good stuff rose to the top. There were no paid posts, no partnerships, no commentary. The technology did the work and the culture did the rest.   (read more at Abascal’s new book Never Be Alone Again )

One of the cool things Volodkin’s HypeM team encoded recently was perhaps a penance for their illicit mp3 spreading past, this being the Merch-Table an application that can cross reference song titles from Spotify Playlists and link out to their monetizable counterpart links on Bandcamp where revenues from purchases are far more likely to actually make it to bands and labels that are keeping music alive. Here are some tracks below that I pulled from Spotify playlists I’ve made that can be found on Bandcamp where you can check out the albums and artists’ official sites to support them.

You can read about the rise and eventual decline in popularity of the Hype Machine here at Noisey

Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins

Chuck Prophet Buy on Bandcamp →

 

Cenário

FloFilz Buy on Bandcamp →

Bird of Spring

Metropolitan Jazz Affair Buy on Bandcamp →

Always Back to Lorraine

Chrome Pony Buy on Bandcamp →

Sad and Beautiful World

Jesse Malin Buy on Bandcamp →

Lunar Gardens

Possum Buy on Bandcamp →

Jacker

Heavy Times Buy on Bandcamp →

A Psych Tribute to the Doors featuring Raveonettes

Various Artists Buy on Bandcamp →

World Music

Goat Buy on Bandcamp →

Lets Do It Again

Giuda Buy on Bandcamp →

Brenn Siste Brevet

Erlend Ropstad Buy on Bandcamp →

New Leaf

Bantum Buy on Bandcamp →

Back Together

Jean & Trevor Buy on Bandcamp →

Untitled (Black Is)

SAULT Buy on Bandcamp →

Gold Brick

Jon Langford Buy on Bandcamp →

Racey Roller

Giuda Buy on Bandcamp →

I’m Just Like You: Sly’s Stone Flower 1969-1970

Buy on Bandcamp →

Days To Come

Bonobo Buy on Bandcamp →

The Instrumental Session

Various Artists Buy on Bandcamp →

 

Live From Axis Mundi

Gogol Bordello Buy on Bandcamp →

Carved By Glaciers

Lymbyc Systym Buy on Bandcamp →

The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer

Red Sparowes Buy on Bandcamp →

Tokyo EP

Nyteowl Buy on Bandcamp →

Rotober Random Revelations Mixcloud

Gotta lil’ bored and needed to share some quarantunes with my peeps online… If yer around me in the house, you’d know I spend hours everyday regurgitatin’ through thousands of albums . For those that don’t have the pleasure of me drunkenly thumbing through the shelves and pulling out obscurities I created a digital simulation. This is an official 2 Hour Guided Missile Of a Mixtape, literaly pounds upon pounds of platters painstakingly plopped under yr Spin Doctor’s new needle. (NOTE: long before a hippie jam band in NYC used the name Spin Doctors, I was using the Spin Doctor moniker on flyers for my DJ gigs around San Francisco. I eventually gave up because you know, Little Miss Can’t Be Blecch was getting way too much MTV time, and killed my buzz).

We Begin With Members Of The Dils Cowboy Nation Covering Dave Alvin of The Blasters And End With Wanda Jackson Imitating Charlie Rich. In The Middle We Get Tales Of The Big Boys Playing With Trouble Funk & Gwar Being Banned From The Club For Life At Their Very First Show. There’s Cosmic Sounds Of The Zodiac, BT Express, Flo & Eddie, Kendra Smith, Tom T. Hall, Chuck Prophet, Nick Lowe, The Mexican Hat Dance, Stax Soul Icons & Successful Major Label Heavies Revisiting Their Punk Roots. A Rarely Heard Hip-Hop Collab Between Lil’ Jon, Jay Z & Too Short, Indie Rock Rarities From The Incredible Casuals, And Beatnik Beatch, Plus Hawaiian Islander Protest Music From Israel Kamakawiwo’ole & Michael Kahikina. Dusty Springfield vs Tony Joe White, Hank Ballard vs Kris Kristofferson, Roberta Flack vs Les McCann …So, Uh, Yeah It’s A Thing & It’s All Happening Deep Inside The Random Revelations Rotober 2020 Mix.

Anyhow the the turntablist spins sonic stories for the masses in my latest Illegal , Immoral & Fattening mix…






Highlights Of Chuck Prophet’s Hardly Strictly Weekend 2019

Here’s a two song video clip from the opening salvo of the Chuck Prophet Official annual two night stand at The Make-Out Room this weekend as his post Hardly Strictly after party tradition. The two tunes I edited up here are the set opener “Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins” from the Yep Roc album of the same name and the song “Balinese Dancer” which appeared first in the early 90’s on one of his earliest solo albums. The sound for these San Francisco shows this first weekend of October 2019 was pretty darn good, especially with dedicated knob twiddler Damien Rasmussen handling duties at the board.

Here is a capture of the live feed provided by the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass fest website of Chuck’s full set Friday from the Swan stage at the outdoor festival in Golden Gate Park, as reposted by Craig Love

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express
Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express Live At The Make-Out Room

Hop Monk Cookout Concert with Chuck Prophet & Pals

Northern California music promoter KC Turner (blue shirt) poses with the musicians after a Cookout Concert at The HopMonk Tavern in Novato CA

For the past 6 years a cat named KC Turner has been presenting his outdoor cookout concert series up in Marin, and this year’s events have been as popular as ever. I attended one this past weekend featuring Chuck Prophet and The Sam Chase opening.

Just before the show, none other than Commander Cody guitar player Bill Kirchen, no slouch in the string slingin’ department, deemed  “The Titan of The Telecaster” by Guitar Player magazine, gave Chuck & Steph’s live set a ringing endorsement as one of “the most enjoyable R’n’ R shows” he’d ever seen.

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Here’s Chuck doing his song “Wish Me Luck” backed by his wife Stephanie Finch, drummer Vicente Rodriguez and bassist Steve Rue Adams (who is also in Animal Liberation Orchestra, and previously played with Chuck & Charlie Sexton doing a Rolling Stones’ Some Girls tribute tour in Spain circa 2018)

“Wish Me Luck’ is from Chuck Prophet’s album “Night Surfer” that was released in 2014 on Yep Roc Records

My life is an experiment

that doesn’t prove a thing


I wake up every morning

wondering

what the day will bring…


Then I throw open the windows
I fill up both my lungs
And I shout “Look out all you losers here I come”
So wish me luck
Even if you don’t mean it
Wish me luck
If it’s not too much to ask
Wish me luck
It’s not like I really need it
It just feels so good to hear it anyway

Now I’ve harvested your cannabis
Down the Yucatan
In fact I slept beside a Catholic priest one time
In Henry Rollins’ van

I’ve marched in your parades
And I’ve fought your late night wars
But in my father’s house there are no doors
So wish me luck
Even though I don’t need it
Wish me luck
If it’s not too much to ask

Wish me luck
It’s not like I really need it
It just feels so good to hear it anyway
Now watch me dance upon a wire
Watch me dangle from a string
Shining like a diamond in the sun
Shining like a diamond
Shining like a diamond
Shining like a diamond in the sun
Wish me luck
Even if you don’t mean it
Wish me luck
If it’s not too much to ask
Wish me luck
It’s not like I really need it
It just feels so good to hear it anyway
Come on now
How hard can it be?
Wish me luck
You can do it
Come on now

Songwriters: Chuck Prophet / Kurt Lipschutz / James Deprato

Wish Me Luck lyrics © Kingsblood Music, No Socks Music, Dipsongs

Ian Hunter Rant Band joined by Chuck Prophet & Scott McCaughey at The SF Fillmore

Caught live in San Francisco nearing his 80th birthday, Ian Hunter & The Rant Band play some encore numbers with special guests Chuck Prophet & Scott McCaughey.

They play a medley of Roll Away The Stone / Life / All The Young Dudes / Goodnight Irene

This Encore was for the September 15th 2017 show at The Fillmore in San Francisco featuring Ian Hunter and The Rant Band with Special Guests Chuck Prophet & Scott McCaughey.

The Ian Hunter Rant Band stay generally busy, writing, touring and recording for Hunter’s own label Rant Records and includes drummer Steve Holley, bassist Paul Page, Dennis DiBrizzi on keyboards and guitarists Jim Mastro & Mark Bosch

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The Rubinoos – Do You Remember (Aranivah Dance Edit)…

The Rubinoos vs Dance Culture By Aranivah. NYC’s Salvadoran scenester salvation puts the polka in the dots and shimmies some boom boom into the boom box as she interprets The Rubinoos new single off their upcoming don’t call it a comeback LP “From Home” via Yep Roc Records

Listen + pre-order this power pop maestro piece here: https://lnk.to/fromhome

The Rubinoos – Do You Remember is track from their forthcoming Yep Roc debut album co-produced by fellow Yep Roc recording artist Chuck Prophet

Chuck Prophet – The Hurting Business (Live 2000)

Chuck Prophet and the Mission Express shot live at The Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco during the recording of their Cooking Vinyl Live Album “Turn The Pigeons Loose”

Dedicated to Iron Mike Tyson, this is the title track of Chuck’s 1999 album, The Hurting Business. This is footage I shot live in August 4th 2000 in San Francisco at The Bottom Of The Hill during the making of the live album “Turn The Pigeons Loose”.

This is my unofficial raw non EQ’d camera mic room recording heard maxing out on the audio channel occasionally. A properly mixed & mastered version of this song recording appears on the Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express official live album “Turn The Pigeons Loose”.

Accept no substitute for the real thing, and support the artists & labels that bring great music to life! The full length live album is available and released through Cooking Vinyl, available for download at this link : http://tinyurl.com/2ourwo

Carlos Guitarlos & Chuck Prophet – Ramblin’ On My Mind Jam at the SF Eagle

Bad ass bar room blues guitarist Carlos Guitarlos (Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs, Bottom Of The Can Band) joined Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express onstage in early 2002 at legendary leather bar the SF Eagle. They jammed on this version of a storied blues refrain “Ramblin On My Mind”.

I got ramblin’
I got ramblin’ on my mind
I got ramblin’
I got ramblin’ all on my mind
Hate to leave my baby
But you treats me so unkind
I got mean things
I got mean things on my mind

When I recorded this clip back in 2002, Chuck Prophet’s backing band The Mission Express included Max Butler on guitar, “Teenage” Rob Douglas on bass, Paul Revelli on drums, and Chuck’s amazing wife Miss Stephanie Finch on keys.

#CarlosGuitarlos can be found on the web at http://facebook.com/CarlosGuitarlosMusic

#ChuckProphet at http://ChuckProphet.com