The Greatest Guitar Player in the World

A good friend of mine, Jim Ingraham of Thornton, NH was cleaning out his record collection. There were a ton of albums (you know, those big, black CD’s) that he wasn’t playing any more, and he knows that I collect, so he very graciously donated them to my ridiculously large library. So bit by bit I’m going through and playing them while I putter in my music room.

A lot of this stuff is early Contemporary Christian music from the ‘70’s. Quite frankly, a lot of it has more historical value than musical, and yet there’s a freshness and energy that sneaks through the questionable production values. They may not have had enough money or skill to sound like Zeppelin or Tull or James Taylor, but they believed what they were singing.

I put on a record by a group called Love Song and set to work doing something, probably changing the strings on a guitar. I was letting the music be a background noise, not really listening to it. The singer sang, and than a guitar solo came in. I stopped dead in my tracks. The sound was so distinctive, it could only be one person. Out of the fog of concentration it had reached in and grabbed me. I picked up the album cover and scanned the credits, and sure enough . . .

Phil Keaggy.

There’s a story – apocryphal, but a great and widely told story none the less – about an appearance by Jimi Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show. At one point Cavett asked him what it’s like to be the greatest guitar player in the world.

"I don’t know," Hendrix is supposed to have said. "Ask Phil Keaggy."

Hendrix called the tune that everybody playing a solid-body electric guitar in the 1970’s had to march to. Either you embraced him and tried your best to sound like him, or you ran screaming in the opposite direction and tried your best to NOT sound like him. Either way, there he was planted firmly in the middle of every note on the neck.

Hendrix had re-written the book on electric guitar and amplification. Love him or hate him, he had a distinctive sound that influenced absolutely everybody in the field of rock. Personally, I think Carlos Santana put it best; Jimi’s music was "wider" than anyone else’s.

One of the few that managed to distinguish himself outside the pack was a young Ohio native named Phil Keaggy. He came from the same music scene that over the years gave us Joe Walsh, Alan Freed, The Pretenders and Devo. He lost two fingers at the tender age of four in an accident on the family farm, but it didn’t keep him from being a prodigy on the guitar. He stands five feet, four inches and at certain times his singing voice sounds remarkably like Paul McCartney’s.

He came to the public’s attention when he was still in his teens. The band he was fronting, Glass Harp, got signed and he dove head-first into the rock-star lifestyle. He was on the road and high on drugs when he learned that his parents had been killed in a car accident. It caused him to re-examine his life, and before long he became a Christian.

Glass Harp was getting ready to record its second album, and there’s a lot of talk about how the band ended. Some say that there was tension over Phil’s new lifestyle and message. Some say it was just everybody wanting to expand beyond the three-piece group’s inherent restrictions. Whatever the cause, after their third album they broke up.

From 1973 through the ‘80’s Phil’s music could best be described as Fusion/Jazz with vocals. The one exception was "Master And The Musician," his first all-instrumental album and still among his most highly regarded. His albums have never sold particularly well, but he did a lot of session work and had connections with most of the Contemporary Christian musicians of the day.

One album I would highly recommend from this era is a live set he recorded in 1977 with Second Chapter of Acts called "How the West was One." They were doing a West-coast tour, y’see. It’s a very well recorded example of his pristine mid-70’s sound. The live version of his classic, "Time" is not to be missed.

A pattern soon developed around Phil and his music. In Contemporary Christian music (also known as CCM) a big hit of the day would sell maybe 100,000 copies. Much less than that, and your contract didn’t get renewed. It’s a very unforgiving genre, but purely by necessity. After all, Christians have bills to pay, too, and there were no Michael Jacksons or U2’s to make big bucks for them. So every album had to sell well.

Phil’s did not, so it wasn’t long before his label dropped him. Another quickly picked him up along with the back catalogue, simply because of the prestige of having CCM’s only bonefide Guitar Hero. Fortunately for him, his concerts always drew well and that’s probably where he’s made most of his living. But as time has gone by, the back catalogue has gotten heavier and his albums >sigh<>

The big change came at the end of the ‘80’s with the release of "Sunday’s Child." He had done the fusion thing to death and was every serious guitarist’s secret vice; the bible thumper who burned the strings. But his audience was getting smaller and smaller and he was staring down the barrel of yet another dropped record company option. Sorry, Phil, we can’t afford you.

At any rate, he went into the studio and did something he hadn’t done for a long time; a rock and roll record. It was so good, so much fun, that it took repeated listenings to notice that there were hardly any guitar solos on it. Nobody minds, though, because it was his best album in years and still stands as one of his best ever. After that he dove headfirst back into the rock music he grew up with.

Recommended Listening:

What A Day (1973) – His first solo album, and still great after all these years.

Emerging (1977) – The Phil Keaggy Band, featuring keyboardist Phil Madeira. A great album, and it shows just how far from the Hendrix norm of the ‘70’s Phil went. Good songs, good recording. Its predecessor, "Love Broke Thru," had great songs but Buck Herring’s production made it sound stiff and flat. "Emerging" is much better.

Master and the Musician (1978) – You have to put this on, because even Phil refers to it. His first instrumental record. It was the sort of thing your label gave you permission to do, back in the day. It is really good.

Town to Town (1981) – This is much better than the record that followed it, "Play Thru Me." The differences between them are subtle. The former holds up better over time. Some of the songs on the latter are just a little twee. Town to Town just feels more relaxed, more natural. Especially good are the songs, "Full Circle" and the title track. Also really good is his rendition of the old hymn, "Rise Up, O Men of God."

Getting Closer (1985) – After "Play Thru Me," he got dropped by his label; Sparrow, I think. Phil wandered in the wilderness for a couple years, living off live shows and plugging away in his home studio. This period is captured in the album, "Underground, Volume 1." It’s got some very good tunes, but sounds very homemade. When he got signed again, his reply was "Getting Closer," and it’s a triumph. Energetic, great tunes, excellent production values, and best of all a guitar tour de force.

Way Back Home (1988) – An all-acoustic album, with themes reaching back to his childhood. A re-release on CD years later had most of the lead vocals re-recorded, which I thought was pointless. The original version I have on cassette is better. The CD also includes an extra piece that I suppose for total Phil devotees is interesting, but for my money breaks up the musical vibe too much. It’s snippets of an audio recording of a Keaggy family gathering, with Phil noodling on guitar recorded over it.

Sunday’s Child (1989) – There’s not enough one can say about this album. As I mentioned before, it’s the one that changed everything. This was Phil’s liberation. Not that the jazzy stuff wasn’t great, but this one feels more fun than anything he’s done before or since. Cameos by Russ Taff and Randy Stonehill and a couple of really good Mark Heard songs actually up the ante.

Find Me in These Fields (1990) – And his very next album was, in my humble opinion, even better. Just as much fun, but painted with a broader brush. Phil Madeira, the keyboard player from Emerging, and John Sfarzo, Glass Harp’s drummer, made appearances on this one.

Crimson and Blue (1995) – This was sort of Phil’s last shot at rock stardom. His record company at the time made a big push with this one, and even prepared three different versions of the album. Crimson and Blue itself was aimed at the CCM audience. Another version, Blue, had some different tunes and remixes of some others and was directed toward the secular world. Yet another offshoot, Revelator, was released as a special treat to the Phil fans. The original is the best, trust me.

Phil Keaggy (1998) – This one is more acoustic, and very Irish-influenced, and it’s great.

He has also done a number of instrumental albums, most of which find their audience in the New Age Music genre. There are also instrumental things like the hard rockin’ "220." If you’re a guitar player, file it with your Satch and Vai CDs.

I have seen Phil live, hmm, lessee, four times in all. The last time was around 1991 or ‘2 or so with my wife. He and Randy Stonehill were sharing the bill in support of Sunday’s Child and Find Me In These Fields and he kicked butt. They both did, actually. Lynn went to see Stonehill and I, of course, was there for Keaggy, and we both came away impressed with the other’s performer. Phil ran his guitars through a rack as tall has he is and from there into a Vox AC30.

Before that I saw him at Gordon-Conwell College in Mass, sharing a bill with Brian Duncan. Duncan was good, but the room and their sound system made him sound muddy. For some reason, Phil’s sound was much better, especially the vocals. Maybe I’m just prejudiced. This was around ’86 or ’87, in support of Getting Closer.

I also saw him at the Creation festival in Pennsylvania around 1987. Good show but kind of overshadowed by the whole festival atmosphere. He was one of the smaller acts on the bill, so he played in the afternoon.

The first time I saw him was in 1984 at California Christian Center in Sacramento, Ca. Four-piece band with a second guitarist. It was a good show, but funny in a way. You could tell it had been a long tour; they all looked tired. Phil came out and burned the frets for three songs to get the guitar players in the room excited. Then, he and the band shifted gears and we did some serious worship. Phenomenal show!

I was there with the friend who led me to Christ, Rick Nixon. We stayed until after so he could try and talk to Phil. We hung back while all the guitar players grilled him for about half an hour with the same babble of questions I’m sure he’s put up with for years; what kind of strings do you use, how high’s your action, what are those pickups, what guitar did you use on this song . . . It was endless and he looked very tired, but was very patient and kind.

As a sidebar, this is one of the things I like about Christian concerts. The artists generally take time at the end of the show to mingle with the crowd.

Anyway, Rick and I finally got our turn. Rick explained that the Lord had put on his heart that he should pray for Olivia Newton-John. Phil had recently done some magazine ads with Randy Stonehill and the British singer, Cliff Richard. Cliff had done a movie with O N-J. Rick asked Phil (are you still with me?) if Cliff had ever mentioned Olivia’s spiritual state of mind.

Phil took this in patiently, then gave us a look like he was waiting for the punchline. Then he realized that this young man was actually concerned about Olivia Newton-John’s salvation. He smiled, and said he was sorry but the subject never came up, but I think he was touched that Rick chose to ask that question of him. It was a nice moment, and I can tell you that Phil Keaggy is an honestly nice man.

The thing that, above all else, makes him worthy of the title I gave him up top is not just his skill. Lots of people have skill. It's his versatility. Over the years he has absorbed elements from an increasingly diverse universe of the guitar. You can hear snatches of Allan Holdsworth, Andres Segovia, Michael Hedges, and many others. And yet, he is distinctly, identifiably, Phil. Nobody sounds like Phil, and he can play any kind of music.

I don’t know if he’s actually got a record deal at this time, but he still records and performs prolifically. He also freely jumps back and forth between differing styles; vocal, instrumental, electric, acoustic, retro, post-modern, and anything else that tickles his fancy. The last few years he’s also been into looping, which uses multiple layers of delay to create compositions. He’s also presided over the reformed Glass Harp, which has released new music. For more information, and corrections of the things I got wrong, click on the title.