Chuck Prophet
Presented by The Current
Sunday, August 2, 2026
6 pm Doors // 7 pm Music
All Ages
$45 ($55.38 w. taxes/fees) Premium Seating
$35 ($43.85 w. taxes/fees) Preferred Reserved Seating
$25 ($32.30 w. taxes/fees) Advance General Admission
$30 ($35 w. taxes/fees) At The Door General Admission
Ticket purchases are final and non-refundable
Master of country, folk, blues, and Brill Building classicism, legendary musician Chuck Prophet and his band return to The Parkway!
Chuck’s streak of more than a dozen critically acclaimed solo records stretches all the way back to 1990, when the California native first shifted focus from his tenure with pioneering neo-psych band Green on Red to working under his own name. Since then, his songs have appeared in a slew of films and television shows, and his work has been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Solomon Burke, Heart, and a host of others. Rolling Stone dubbed him a “streetwise city kid with an eye for the country;” Uncut proclaimed him a “renaissance-rocker;” and NPR declared that “no one can turn tales from the outer limits into catchy songs quite like Prophet does.” Chuck Prophet’s latest record, Wake The Dead, dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music and made its way to #1 on the Americana charts.
Wake The Dead, Chuck Prophet’s extraordinary — and unlikely — new album, was recorded with ¿Qiensave?, a band of brothers from the Central Coast farming community of Salinas, California. The collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music. The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, all but demanding you move your body while you listen, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.
“This music,” Prophet explains, “really caught fire in the 1960s. In fact, there was such a demand for Cumbia in Mexico that DJs would travel to Colombia just to bring records back. Now that’s trafficking I can get behind!” Prophet approaches the style not as a musicologist or historian, but as a fan with a voracious appetite and an insatiable curiosity. The result is a profoundly adventurous celebration of life that balances hope and fear in equal measure, a rich and exultant meditation on what really matters from an artist who always manages to find the light, even in the face of the most oppressing darkness.
“At one time I felt immortal,” Prophet muses. “Or at least something like it. Remember that age? You’re trying to figure it out. And you’ve got time to do it. You have your whole life in front of you. And in all your young and dumb glory, you’re spending it like you’ve got an endless supply. But all that stupidity stacks up. The meter is running and it’s expensive. And now I can see mortality in the distance, rushing toward me.”
The sessions with ¿Qiensave? came together on a whim, for the sheer fun of it at first, but Prophet soon invited the band to back him up at a couple of live shows, and the immediate reaction from audiences made it clear they were on to something special. “One of the things I love most about Cumbia music is that it’s all about the dancing,” Prophet explains. “It’s as much about the audience as the musicians. When punk rock came along, it erased the line between the stage and the crowd, and Cumbia has a similar effect of breaking down those barriers and bringing everyone together in the moment.”
