Graham Reid | | 3 min read
As All is Played
Recently when writing about Tucker Zimmerman we observed that no matter how much archive digging you do, there will always be someone you'd never heard of – like Tucker – who suddenly appears to your delight.
Shawn Phillips, born in Texas, isn't like that to us – we've had his Faces album since it was released in 1972 -- but he's probably unfamiliar to many people, despite having an interesting backstory, his path crossing with Donovan in the Sixties (playing sitar on Donovan's key albums), teaching George Harrison the fundamentals of sitar which he'd learned in India and playing at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.
Although he appeared in the age of youth idealism, Phillips was no dreamily folksy hippie (despite having the most astonishingly long hair). He wrote the brittle and unnerving music for Donovan's paranoia cynicism on Season of the Witch (“beatniks are out to make it rich”).
Season of the Witch
And – as the war in Vietnam and Nixonian politics took over the Age of Aquarius he dealt directly with confrontational politics as on I Took a Walk on the Faces album: “I took a walk through the fields of America, I'll tell you what I saw. I saw a murder in a place called Attica. I saw a man called power who said 'You've got to fit my vision'. I saw a man called law who said 'If you don't, I'm gonna put you in the prison' . . ."
He's recorded over 20 albums but because he was so itinerant – US, Canada, London, Italy, LA, South Africa and currently, at 81, living in Kentucky – he has slipped past most people.
Record companies didn't seem to know what to do with him because he was so hard to pin down musically: sitar and folk to funk (with members of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band) to classical compositions.
Way way back Bill Graham called him “the best kept secret in the music business” and so he has remained.
A couple of years ago we pulled, by chance, his Faces album off the shelf for consideration and mentioned it should actually be an Essential Elsewhere Album for its marriage of folk, rock and jazz with the likes of Steve Winwood, Glen Campbell and an orchestra.
He multi-tracked his vocals for the tour de force of Chorale.
His voice is extraordinary – a four octave range – and he can effortless pierce the clouds.
As we said, “this is music which soars and reminds what a singular talent Shawn Phillips was”.
As if to prove that point now comes a previously unheard live concert from 1976 cleanly recorded at Austin's Armadillo World Headquarters with longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist John Peter Robinson.
The album is well-named, Outrageous, because he is so exceptional as he moves from folksy pop (We) to shapeshifting folk where his wordless voice becomes another instrument (Rumplestiltskin's Resolve).
And although love is at the core of many songs (Looking at the Angel) there is sometimes a mystical quality to Phillips' lyrics, as on the extraordinary seven minute-plus L'Ballade which opens with “In the consecrated chambers of a mountain's winter day. I left her at the turning, to go on her seeking way, to pass o'er meadows green and bare . . .”
At times Phillips does sound in need of an editor when his lyrics spiral out into more and more coiling narratives full of fast moving imagery (the very beautiful Looking at the Angel) but as an instrumentalist his guitar playing is often breathtaking (the nine minute Intro solo and the lengthy instrumental intro to Moonshine where Robinson's piano playing sometimes heads straight into free jazz jigsaw-puzzle rhythmic and melodic changes).
Elsewhere the eight minute Woman is pure prog-folk with classical allusions and the album goes out with the urgent folk-rock of Keep On.
This must have been an extraordinary concert to be at for the power of Phillips' voice, the weave of poetic imagery in his lyrics, the virtuoso playing and the sheer unexpected nature of what they played.
He can rock the joint or silence it into a holy hush with his fragile, barely there whisper.
What surprises here is just how Texas y'all he sounds in comments between songs. For some reason I imagined he would have a mid-Atlantic accent, closer to London's Chelsea than the Texas' Austin.
Even more unexpected are the three minute Improvisation of psyched-out space noise on guitar and piano which finds its way to a bluesy mood. And another Improvisation which sounds more akin to the prepared guitar improvs by Fred Frith.
Neither fit anywhere in Phillips previous canon of folk, folk rock and jazz folk but illustrate how musically curious he was about form and technology.
By the end of this extraordinary two hour-plus trip you'll have been enthralled, bewildered, seduced, wondering whether to take this to jazz or folk friends and concluding: Little wonder record companies didn't quite know what to do with Shawn Phillips.
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You can buy this album (vinyl, CD, download) from the Think Like A Key music site here. And while you are there head to the homepage to see the fascinating catalogue of folk, folk-rock, prog and beyond which the label carries.
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