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Shawn Phillips looks to continue his 40 year,
genre-defying career with the upcoming No Category
album .
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Anyone under the age of 30 is excused if they think that Shawn Phillips might be: (a) a semi-regular on Dawson's Creek; (b) a tight end for the Green Bay Packers; or (c) a hot new R&B crooner.
Shawn Phillips is none of the above, but his resume couldn't be more impressive if, in fact, he was all of those things. Shawn Phillips is: (a) a firefighter; (b) a registered EMT hoping to graduate to full-fledged paramedic; (c) an accomplished and eclectic musician with 15 albums to his credit in a career that spans five decades.
Even the most scholarly Rock historian might blink upon hearing Shawn Phillips' name. Although he was widely considered one of the brighter promises of the Folk/Pop camp in the early '70s, and was lavished with much critical acclaim upon the release of his first few albums, Phillips never rose much farther than the level of cult artist. His fans remain relatively few in number but slavish in their devotion to the almost unclassifiable Phillips.
Even in the face of obscurity and a music business that was almost calculatingly oblivious to his music and talents, Phillips pressed on through the '70s and '80s, hoping for a break or two. When they didn't materialize, he deferred his music career for a stint as a volunteer fireman, which led him to his current position in Austin, Texas, as a firefighter and emergency medical technician.
Although his new vocation is a long way from his musical experience, he remains active on the touring circuit with an average of 60 shows a year. More importantly, Phillips is hard at work on a new album, his first recording of all new material since 1994's The Truth If It Kills. He is clearly excited about the prospects of once again presenting new material to a waiting audience.
"The new CD is really eclectic," says Phillips from the Austin firehouse he calls home a great deal of the time. "There's some really good stuff on it. I'm quite proud of it. My primary concern is that it is of the same quality as the rest of my catalog."
Phillips says his new album (which will include re-recorded versions of a few songs from Truth) will be called No Category. He couldn't have chosen a more fitting or ironic title, and he knows it. Throughout his amazing career, labels have tried desperately to shove Phillips' music into a marketable pigeonhole. His broad range of styles has even confounded his fellow artists.
"Edgar Winter came up to me once and said, 'Why'd you get so far away from the roots?'," says Phillips. "I told him, 'Because there was a whole tree above the ground, Edgar.'"
Phillips' resume is filled with astonishing little factoids and accomplishments. The son of spy novelist Philip Atlee, Phillips traveled the world as a child, absorbing the influences of a wide variety of cultures and their attendant musical expressions which ultimately led to a career in music. After a couple of unsuccessful voice and guitar albums for Columbia, Phillips knocked around Europe in the late '60s, particularly in England where he co-wrote songs with Donovan, met and worked with The Beatles, and recorded an ambitious trilogy of albums with help from Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi from Traffic.
"I met Don in a music store in London," says Phillips of waifish Folk icon Donovan. "We became friends. I played sitar, and he was really interested in that. We worked together for three or four years. We did a lot of writing together, but unfortunately Donovan's middle name is Phillips, and Don's manager just put 'Donovan Phillips' on the publishing contracts. That's how they got around paying me. It's OK, though. Don and I are still friends and I speak to him every couple of years, when he's sober."
Phillips' encounter with The Beatles might be even more astounding in the complex tapestry of Rock history.
"I was with a friend of mine, Steve Saunders, and Steve knew Paul," recalls Phillips of his Beatles meeting. "He got invited to the studio, so we went by. George and John were both interested in meeting me. I played sitar, and George was interested in that, and John wanted to meet me because Pete Townshend had told him that I was an amazing 12-string player. We went to the studio, and they were doing 'Lovely Rita,' and they needed people for background vocals so we gathered around the mic and just did it. It didn't seem like anything at the time. You don't realize when you're part of history. It just happens. Out of that meeting, I went to George's house three or four times for dinner, sometimes with Donovan, and I gave George his first sitar lesson."
But even that amazing string of connections did little for Phillips' own profile. He fell out with Donovan and received only a single songwriting credit on one song; he was never really credited for his work with The Beatles; and once he signed to A&M Records, they balked at the idea of the groundbreaking trilogy and forced Phillips to whittle the concept down to a single album, 1970's brilliant Contribution.
"A fellow at A&M named Bob Feed, who was comptroller, vetoed the idea," says Phillips. "I didn't want a three-album set, I wanted three separate albums released simultaneously. We just broke it down and put out Contribution."
Phillips released a streak of well-received albums and toured incessantly as an opener on multi-band bills. His impossibly long blonde hair became his trademark, and each successive album was predicted to be the one that would expose Phillips to a larger audience. But even as progressive radio in the '70s embraced Phillips, mainstream radio and the industry in general turned a deaf ear to his increasingly eclectic style. Phillips himself had little use for the machinations of the music business and sought to please himself and his fans exclusively. Although that is a stance that can get an artist dropped quickly, Phillips managed to put nine albums out for A&M before his departure from the label in 1977. He signed with RCA, resulting in his 1978 album Transcendence, which he cites as his favorite album.
"That is a gorgeous album," he says. "I'm going to try and get as close to that production quality on the new one."
Phillips continued to tour through the '80s, and had finished back to back recording projects in 1988 and 1992, when he checked himself into an Austin hospital suffering from extreme exhaustion after a local concert date. The problem turned out to be considerably more serious: Phillips was diagnosed with a heart ailment that required quadruple bypass surgery.
During his convalescence he was drawn to rescue work. Seeing a televised notice calling for volunteer firefighters, Phillips offered his services and found himself completely hooked on the lifestyle. He now serves alongside his girlfriend, Juliet Opperman, who is also an Austin firefighter and an emergency care assistant, in addition to being a writer with a master's degree in journalism.
"I'm an adrenaline junkie," says Phillips with a laugh. "I'm not going to stop doing this for anything. It's just too exciting. Jules and I are on duty 24/7. We go when the tone goes off. I've gotten to the point where if I was under 35 years old, I could get a job with any fire department in the world. To date, I've gotten almost 680 hours of training."
In the years since beginning his firefighting and emergency services career, Phillips has maintained a touring presence, hitting the road for an average of 60 dates a year. He has also continued to write and record sporadically, working on material for No Category since 1994. As on many of his albums, Phillips' only collaborators on No Category will be his longtime accompanist, guitarist Peter Robinson (who is currently scoring the television series Charmed) and legendary orchestral arranger Paul Buckmaster (most notably known for his work with Elton John).
"The thing I miss the most is being able to record with the other musicians," says Phillips. "It's all computer now. I do it on Digital Performer and transfer to eight-track and send the tapes out to Paul. Honest to God, I miss going in there and playing with people. That's where the magic came from in all my records. Have a basic structure to work with, play that structure to the guys you're playing with, and do not tell them what to play. You don't tell Alphonso Johnson or Stanley Clarke what to play. You just know their vision is going to correlate with yours."
Phillips is anticipating an early 2002 release date for No Category, perhaps February or March. He will self-release the album, with possible distribution coming through Wounded Bird, an indie label that reissued the majority of his back catalog in the mid-'90s. Although there is still a great deal of interest in Phillips' work, as evidenced by retrospectives released in 1980, 1992 and 1995, the rights to his catalog are held by Universal (who acquired A&M), and the corporation has set a prohibitive price on that material, making a box set release highly unlikely.
In the meantime, Phillips continues work on No Category along the same lines that have defined his career from the beginning -- on his own terms, in his own time, and for himself and his fans. His philosophy on music in general and his music specifically is very simple and it has served him well over the years.
"There is something in music that allows you to touch people," Phillips says. "I don't know whether it's frequencies or what it is, but there are just certain kinds of music that uplift the human soul. And that's what I try to do."
Although Phillips admits to a great deal of frustration over the years in dealing with the music industry and his relative lack of exposure and label support, he has never wavered in his dedication to his craft.
"I can't negate this gift," says Phillips of his musical talent. "I'd be an idiot if I negated this gift. Even if I achieve my goal and certify as a paramedic, I have no intention of stopping my composition. It just comes out."
SHAWN PHILLIPS plays the Southgate House in Newport on Saturday.
