He's the son of rock and roll, so you know that on Jerry Phillips' debut album For the Universe (released in 2024), he's gonna rip hard. As a kid, his late-night hangout pals were Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, because they all hung with his dad, Sam Phillips, who founded Sun Records, the studio and record label. Us rock and roll fans, we heard the music—Jerry was baptized in it.
Jerry's made plenty of records. With his band the Jesters, he recorded "Cadillac Man" for Sun Records, a highlight of the original label's last years. He's produced plenty of albums too, including soul music for Stax and with his brother Knox they made one of John Prine's greatest, Pink Cadillac.
But sometimes it takes a lifetime to get to your own album. With this one, Jerry invites you to sidle up to the bar on the third floor of the Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, Tennessee. This is the studio that he recently refurbished, keeping Sam's design intact and enhancing the control room's technology, grit and funk. At the bar, he points out where the original Formica still has just one cigarette burn scar on it—Johnny Cash, early 1960s.
As soon as he begins to chat, his stories become the songs on this album, and without making a move you find yourself closer and closer to Jerry, and the bar morphs, putting you in an excited crowd, colorful lights, thick smoke and it's just after last call when the doors get locked, the liquor flows, the dance floor fills. Jerry is at the mic leading a band, and whether he's talking or singing you're just as intent because of his great casual delivery, a sweet spot between hymn singing, telling a secret and holding the tension before delivering a punchline.
With "Number One Girl," this beast kicks off like the solo record that Mick Jagger has not been able to achieve. Jerry doesn't sing like Mick, but he can rock like Mick, and that's what For the Universe is here to tell you: We gonna rock.
And to prove how we'll be rockin', this natural born rocker Jerry dang Phillips stole the song title "That's All Right," the title that might be most associated with his family and his heritage and he wrote his own damn song to it—on his debut album. Step aside Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley.
But like you know from hanging at that bar, the good-natured Mr. Phillips is not just about playing hard. He's ready to cha-cha with your girlfriend that he just stole on "Treat Her Like She's Mine," and he's praising her like you shoulda on the cooing "I Like Everything I See." You can't stand by on "Specify" when he testifies for love.
With "Good Side, Bad Side, Side of Crazy Too, " you have to lean in—the steel guitar cries like a country weeper, Jerry's spoken intro vulnerable like a confession. It's intimate and intense, puts us solidly at that bar, makes us want to buy him a drink, maybe hug him too.
There's background girls singing "whoa-whoa," you'll hear Wurlitzer electric piano noodlings and honky tonk tack piano pounding. There's wailing harmonica and guitars, choogling rhythms, and definitely your own fingers snapping with "24-6 Not 7," one of the truest love songs ever. There's some ballads here. A taste of country, a taste of doo wop. You know what it took to concoct rock and roll, so you're gonna hear a lot of influences here.
And you're gonna hear some of the best Memphis players from across the generations, reaching back to Spooner Oldham, sweeping in Jerry's daughter Halley, who is one of the album's producers along with Scott Bomar, the studio's successor-to-Roland-Janes. Many Memphis players have made some of their career finest music in the Phillips' family studio and they, like me, ran to say yes when Jerry rang for accompaniment.
Jerry Phillips likes to have a good time. And this record is his testament to that. He had me in mind when he made it, he had you in mind—and look out, I think he had your sister in mind too. But that's fine, his intentions are good. Jerry's message is for the universe.
Rock on.
--Robert Gordon, Memphis, 2024
