About me
The myriad of stars that aligned to create Jerry Phillips’ debut solo album, For The Universe, have been orbiting the rarified atmosphere of Memphis’s Sam Phillips Recording Service — the namesake studio that Jerry’s father built in the wake of his Sun Records success with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis — since its doors opened in 1960. The fact that it took 64 years for those stars to fully align is more a testament to Jerry’s own unwavering path than it is being the son of the man who unleashed rock ’n’ roll on the world.
Whether taking part in the Mid-South’s dyed-in-the-wool wrestling legacy with his childhood hero Sputnik Monroe, picking guitar in rock and soul bands with Memphis madmen Teddy Paige and Jim Dickinson, producing records with his brother Knox or playing bass with blues deconstructionists Mud Boy and the Neutrons and rockabilly trailblazer Billy Lee Riley, Jerry has always done it his own way. And all along, he was writing songs, often just for fun, and occasionally with Phillips Recording engineer Roland Janes, the guitarist who’d ignited every one of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Sun sides before hanging up his Stratocaster and moving to the other side of the studio glass. Roland’s protege Scott Bomar, who co-produced For The Universe with Jerry’s daughter Halley Phillips, remembers Janes — a hilariously droll man of few words and no false pretenses — singing Jerry's songwriting praises decades ago. “I’d be at Phillips with Roland and Jerry would call,” says Bomar. “And Roland would always say, ‘You know, Jerry’s got some pretty good songs.’”
Scott knew that Jerry had also worked at the studio as an engineer with Knox, most famously on John Prine's Pink Cadillac album in 1979, and had also recorded there as a teenager with scorching garage R&B combo the Jesters. Due in no small part to Jim Dickinson’s pounding piano and banshee wail and Teddy Paige’s brilliant lyrics and blues-inflected guitar leads, the Jesters’ late-in-the-game 1966 Sun single “Cadillac Man” was as high-octane as anything Sun had recorded in the fifties. Fellow guitar maniacs Phillips and Paige played together in other bands that Knox booked on the fraternity circuit, such as the soul-fueled Jimmy Day and the Nights and the Stones-spiked Escapades, and the ultimate end result was the trio’s collaboration on 1973’s “Frank, This Is It,” a spoken word soul-blues single that starred R&B singer Jellean Delk dressing down sobbing drummer Cliff Jackson while Paige moodily wailed the blues. Issued by Shelby Singleton on the Midnight Sun imprint after he purchased the Sun catalog, “Frank, This Is It” — with its traces of proto-rap and hip-hop — represented an incredibly individualistic approach to record-making. But it was business as usual for the boys from the Bluff City.
“My brother and I did a lot of engineering,” says Jerry. “For years we cut every local band in town and I think I even mastered ‘Arkansas Twist’ by Bobby Lee Trammell on our lathe!” Slinky, soulful and southern-fried, Trammell’s 1962 jukebox hit was just the kind of record that crystallized the Mid-South spirit that Bomar was hearing in Jerry’s songs. “I could hear the Jesters sixties garage band stuff, Sun influences, seventies country, Jerry Lee Lewis — and I also heard a lot of Jerry Phillips himself,” he says. “The more I’m around Jerry and the more I hear what he does and hear his songs, he’s like a Memphis music sponge. He soaked a little bit up from everybody. I realized that it isn’t so much that he was Sam’s son, it’s the people he got to be around. The people he was around — hanging out with Elvis as a kid — he soaked up the Sun rhythm. I never realized how specific the Sun thing was until I started working with Jerry and hanging out at Phillips. This is a distinct, unique rhythm and he’s got it.”
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when the studio acquired the original Spectra Sonics console from Stax Studio B, which had captured soul classics like Rufus Thomas’s “The Funky Chicken” and much of the Isaac Hayes catalog. “Jerry said, ‘I want to be the first person to record on the Stax console at Phillips.’ I said, ‘I think you should be.’” When it came time for the “shakedown session,” Bomar remembers, “we liked the results and that was the beginning of the record. Jerry’s recording method was a window into what it was probably like recording at Sun — very live, off-the-cuff, and unrehearsed. It all had a real spontaneous feel and spirit.”
“A couple of the guys in the band wanted me to send them demos of the songs,” details Phillips. “But personally, I don’t like people to rehearse what they’re gonna play. I’m a big believer in that when you get out on a limb a little bit, that’s where the real stuff comes from — if we had already planned the guitar breaks and the stops and all that I just don’t think it would have had the feel. All my vocals were cut live with the band and I think that’s a better way to do it than coming back and overdubbing my voice. I’ve got a saying: ‘When you’re in the studio, you’re not playing for the tape machine, you’re playing for the universe, the tape machine just remembers it for you.’ That’s a mentality that was passed down to me and my brother Knox; not to get too focused on the microphone because when you’re listening to every word, there’s just no emotion there.”
Most importantly, Jerry’s method served the songs, a ten track tour-de-force ranging from full-tilt rockers to slow-burning country soul, all rife with chord changes that bring the listener a smile of comfortable familiarity while simultaneously tugging at the heart strings. The driving guitar and horn-blasting “Number One Girl” and its tender tremolo and organ-flavored follow-up “Treat Her Like She’s Mine” — both of which could have been bookends of a post-Sun Jerry Lee Lewis album — set the stage for a Memphis-to-Muscle Shoals musical road map with enough tributaries to take in the West Texas tumbleweed vibe of “Black Widow Eyes,” the smoldering Gulf Coast soul of “I Like Everything I See” and the harp-heavy blues rocker “24:6 Not 7,” co-written with Austin honky-tonker Dale Watson. The Tennessee-to-Alabama highway is a road well-tred by Scott and Halley, whose production pedigrees reflect the respective locales. Similarly, the crack studio combo anchored by garage soul guitarist John Paul Keith proves perfectly comfortable dwelling on the edge of any musical cliff, as long as there’s feeling in it.
Whether considering the past with bittersweet introspection in “She Let Me Slip Right Through Her Fingers” or the potential future with bar room intimation in “Good Side, Bad Side, Side Of Crazy Too” (where Jerry nods to his brief career in the wrestling ring by introducing himself with his nome-du-plume DeLayne Phillips), the songs just seem to get deeper and deeper, crescendoing with the taking-stock-yet-refusing-to-declare-defeat triumph of “New Pair Of Everything” (“I’m not gonna give up / No, I’m not goin’ down / That don’t mean my world / It ain’t spinnin’ ‘round and ‘round…”). The song’s strident horn lines are the perfect set-up for a downshift to the swamp-rock swagger of “Specify,” where Jerry signs off singing over a Pops Staples guitar riff that brings to mind one of his favorite Sputnik Monroe quotes: “Rough, tough and hard to bluff.”
As soulful and southern as it is singularly spontaneous, For The Universe, like Jerry Phillips himself, brings to mind another quote, this one from Muscle Shoals country soul songwriter Dan Penn. “Somebody asked Dan one day, ‘How would you describe the Memphis sound?’ And he said, ‘Well, we just don’t let anybody tell us what to do.’ And that’s it!”
