Shawn Phillips

Phillips was born in 1943 in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of best-selling spy novelist Philip Atlee, who moved the family around the world at various times, including to the South Pacific. After hearing "Malaguena" on the piano, he took up the guitar at age seven, and by the time he was 12, he was playing the chords to Carl Perkins songs. Phillips' musical experience transcended rock & roll, however. In the course of his family's travels, he got to live in almost every corner of the globe, including Tahiti, and absorbed the music that surrounded him wherever he was living. He returned to Texas in his teens, with some training in classical music but a love for performers like Jimmy Reedand Ike & Tina Turner, among other blues and R&B artists. He did a hitch in the Navy, and then went back to Texas before retreating to California, where he played around the early-'60s folk circuit.

He was ejected from England for playing without a work permit and tried living in Paris before he headed for Italy. He settled in Positano, a tiny fishing village. By the late '60s, Phillips' musical expertise had broadened to include not only different kinds of guitars, but also the Indian sitar. After a few years of trying, he recognized that he'd started too late and would never master the sitar in the traditional manner, and instead began learning to make his own music on the instrument.

In 1968, he went to London with the idea for a trilogy of albums and recorded a major portion of it in collaboration with Traffic members Steve Winwood, Chris Wood, and Jim Capaldi. No record company was willing to commit to such an ambitious body of work by an unknown artist, and the material languished for more than two years until Phillips came to A&M Records. Producer Jonathon Weston listened to his work and decided to try and release an edited version of the music.

This became his A&M debut album Contribution, which ranged freely between uptempo folk-rock ("Man Hole Covered Wagon") to introspective quasi-classical guitar pieces ("L Ballade") and works mixing sitar and acoustic guitar ("Withered Roses"). The album got positive reviews, but it was whenPhillips embarked on his first U.S. tour, in conjunction with his next album, Second Contribution, late in 1971, that he was discovered by the press. Critics in the New York Times and other publications displayed unbridled awe at Phillips' prowess on a range of instruments, including electric and acoustic six- and 12-string guitars and the sitar, and his singing range, a full three octaves from baritone to counter-tenor, as well as his songwriting. He was one of the few singer/songwriters to play double-necked six- and 12-string guitars (a standard feature of progressive and metal bands) on-stage, in intimate locales such as New York's Bottom Line, and to test the full range of the hybrid instrument.

Writers lavished praise on Phillips for his unusual lyrics, haunting melodies, daunting musicianship, and the ambition of his records. He was a complete enigma, American-born but raised internationally, with a foreigner's keen appreciation for all the music of his homeland and a seasoned traveler's love of world music, with none of the usual limits on his thinking about music. He slid between jazz, folk, pop, and classical sounds -- it was nothing for Phillips to segue from a progressive-style mood song with a 50-piece orchestra into an R&B-based number driven by his electric guitar, and back again. "The Ballad of Casey Deiss," from Second Contribution, was a case in point, a song about a friend who died when he was struck by lightning, scored for acoustic guitars, electric guitars, vibraphone, and the horn section of a full orchestra, as well as multi-layered vocals.

Phillips never achieved major stardom, despite his critical accolades. He never courted an obvious commercial sound, preferring to write songs that, as he put it, "make you feel different from the way you felt before you started listening," primarily love songs and sonic landscapes. But his experiments with electronic keyboards on his albums from the mid- and late '70s made him a jazz-funk pioneer as well -- though that, like many of his musical innovations, wasn't generally recognized until somewhat later.

Phillips had become a fireman and emergency medical technician in Texas. In 1994 a brand-new studio date, The Truth If It Kills, produced by Michel Le Francois was issued by Imagine in Canada. In 1998, Wounded Bird re-released eight new classic albums from his catalog.