Grant Lee Phillips
Before he ever began making magic onstage with his voice and guitar, Grant- Lee Phillips got his first experience as a performer in a different vein…
Before he ever began making magic onstage with his voice and guitar, Grant- Lee Phillips got his first experience as a performer in a different vein. Having become intrigued by the famed early-20th-century magician Harry Houdini, Phillips, as he recalls, "took to card tricks and sleight of hand, eventually booking myself around town as a ten-year-old conjuror."
That seems an apt start for someone whose music (both with the celebrated band Grant Lee Buffalo and as a solo artist) regularly pulls marvels out of thin air. "Conjuration is at the heart of all things creative," says Phillips, whose life of creative pursuits has included writing, drawing, acting, filmmaking, etc.
"Since I've had the chance to dabble and flirt with so many things, I don't draw any great distinctions between those things. It's just sort of what you wake up and do, on a good day." On what evidently are Phillips' many good days, his kind of conjuring isn't nifty parlor tricks full of flash and misdirection, but the more elevated and rare sort: the summoning of images, the transfiguring of emotions, the invocation of spirits.
Such transcendent passion runs in the family for Phillips, who comes from a line of ministers. "We're talking little country churches, real fire and brimstone stuff," he says. "My memories of that are very vivid, almost traumatic. But I suppose it informed me of how deep the human experience is.
"Whatever it is that drives me to create is as close as I can get to good-time religion," Phillips acknowledges. "It's a direct link to the current. Art has a way of shining a light on the subject." In which case, Phillips' work for the past decade has been a beacon. Not unlike the light, "blue as a welder's torch," that represents the aspirations of the hardworking hopeful in "Bethlehem Steel," one of the most striking songs from Phillips booming days with Grant Lee Buffalo.
Over the course of four albums with that band, Phillips became one of the most critically respected figures in the rock world of the '90s. No other band of its time achieved such a potent combination of emotional intimacy and sonic majesty, rootedness and adventure. The group toured with the likes of R.E.M., Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, and released indelible (and distinctively tender-hearted) modern-rock hits such as "Mockingbirds" and "Truly, Truly." And Phillips' breathy wonder of a voice, shifting frequently from pensive murmur to aching falsetto to urgent declamations, earned "best male vocalist" honors in 1995 from Rolling Stone magazine.
Since Grant Lee Buffalo's disbanding, Grant-Lee Phillips has continued to thrive, further demonstrating his stylistic range with a pair of markedly different albums (the stripped-down "Ladies' Love Oracle" and the technology savvy, collage-like "Mobilize"), scoring the film "Zig Zag," working with the acid house DJ Paul Oakenfold, contributing to the eclectic all-star album project "One Giant Leap," and appearing regularly in the TV series "The Gilmore Girls." Many good days, indeed.
Named after his respective grandfathers, not, as has often been assumed after the opposing Civil War generals, Grant-Lee Phillips was born in 1963 and raised in Stockton, California. Part of his youth was spent at the Pollardville Palace ("Home of the Chicken in the Sky"), a fried chicken joint/melodrama revival house where he cut his performance teeth juggling, acting, doing stunts, etc. (Perhaps that's where he first learned the basics of captivating a crowd with his mixture of wit, energy and pure force of personality. Walking onstage is like walking out onto a plank," he says. "And you either fall off into sharks or you rise to the occasion.") At the age of 13, however, he discovered the guitar.
"I can recall living and sleeping with the guitar for a year before I even learned to tune it. I was just making noise with it. One of the first things you learn about electric guitar is that it's a great mass irritator. Then after I began to learn to actually play, I gravitated to the archetypal licks of 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' and 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown' all those national anthems. That, and 'Smoke on the Water.'
"The most important light that appeared over my head as a teenager was seeing Lightnin' Hopkins on 'Austin City Limits' or some program like that. It was just incredible to see someone like that. There was no distance between the man and his music. That really showed me that creativity is not a party-line call. It's between you and whatever burns within you."
The burning in Phillips led him to leave Stockton for Los Angeles, where he worked roofing houses, attended film school by night, and eventually hooked up with an old Stockton cohort to form Shiva Burlesque. By 1990, that group would splinter, and Phillips' faction, which also included drummer Joey Peters and bassist Paul Kimble, would become Grant Lee Buffalo.
The new band began playing regularly at the L.A. cafe Largo, still a favorite haunt of Phillips. Bob Mould's Singles Only Label released the tune "Fuzzy" as the first Buffalo vinyl, and that same song became the title track to the band's 1993 debut on Slash.
The richly promising debut, with its dreamlike imagery twisting romantic Americana into new metaphorical shapes, was followed the next year by one of the most staggering musical achievements of the decade, "Mighty Joe Moon." Blowing hot and cold through raging, anthemic rock and delicately ruminative balladry, Phillips and company wrestle with transgression and disillusion, judgment and redemption.
The characters tend toward the outsized, the mythic (David Koresh, Tecumseh, Lady Godiva), but in such melancholy touchstones as "Mockingbirds" and "Rock of Ages," there's a sense of intimacy that goes beyond the confessional to the spiritual.
"Copperopolis," from 1996, further expanded the band's sonic palette with brushstrokes of pump organ, pedal steel, violin, marimba and bass clarinet adding subtle tonal colors to the trademark whisper-and-surge dynamics.
Paul Kimble served as the band's producer to this point, but after his departure, Paul Fox manned the board for what would turn out to be the Buffalo's swan song, 1998's "Jubilee." The mix of acoustic folksiness, hard-rock roar and glam-pop filigree remained the band's essential recipe, but sweetened this time with more of a radio-ready punch.
For a time, Grant Lee Buffalo was bolstered by the addition of L.A. veterans Bill Bonk and Phil Parlapiano as touring players, but the great beast wasn't long for this world. "This thing went off the road one wheel at a time," Phillips says.
"We had an interesting run. And yet, music only brews in a state of flux; it thrives on the personal changes of the people that play it." Though the group undeniably was a success, it never broke through to the mass acclaim it so deserved. But Phillips isn't one to look back with regrets.
"I've always been one to look upon my lot as a fortunate one," he says. "I moved to L.A. and left behind musicians in my hometown that were stars in my mind. And I encountered musicians here who didn't attract the attention that Grant Lee Buffalo would get. I always considered myself fortunate to be able to get up and apply myself to this."
"Every album has been a reaction to what's gone before it, and to what's around us," Phillips says. And so his post-band projects have taken him in still new directions.
"After Grant Lee Buffalo came crashing down, there were people who said that it was time for a change, and I felt like embracing that. At times, I didn't even want to look at an acoustic guitar."
Though he focused on acoustic instruments for '99's "Ladies' Love Oracle" (recorded in the basement studio of his friend Jon Brion, and initially sold primarily through Phillips website), for the first full-fledged album of his solo career he took a turn toward electronic sounds, working with programmer/co- producer Carmen Rizzo on 2001's "Mobilize."
The prominent keyboards gave the singer's gauzy melodicism an even greater fluidity, and he sounded more lighthearted than ever, celebrating resurgent optimism in "Sadness Soot" or even checking out the dance floor action on "Spring Released."
"It suited my need for solitude," Phillips says of the album's technology-aided approach. "And it also seemed as if the sky was the limit. It allows you to flex your muscles as composer and arranger. It also lends you to put on your thinking cap.
"Which maybe is n't the right cap to put on," he adds. "Eventually you realize you can never escape your own skin, and you rediscover the things you've always loved. These days, the greatest joy I get is sitting at a piano or with an acoustic guitar and having that kind of immediacy you get with a charcoal sketch, I don't have the patience to wait for the paint to dry.
"My process hasn't changed a great deal, except that these days I've grown to be more assured about myself. When you find yourself on your own, you have to have that internal bedrock. Over the past year, out of daredevil desire and because it was the only way to do it, I've left the band behind and gone out on the road with guitar and amp. It's good to go out there with just your own devices. It's really the songs themselves that hold it all together."
In Phillips' case, those songs hold worlds of self-examination, socio-political concern, sadness, longing, devotion, and yes, of course, magic.
"The songs are a means of bottling up a state of mind," Phillipssays, more humbly. "At the heart, there's always an emotional need, or a struggle. Maybe it's all about seeing Lightnin' Hopkins when I was a teenager; maybe these all are my versions of the blues."
"Every day I get the blues," goes the old refrain. Which is alright, if on a good day you can transmute it through the power of a creative spirit.
"When you make this long haul that some might call a career, some might call it a calling, it's a constant struggle to maintain your bedrock. It's not aboutshifting units or collecting magazines with your picture on the covers. It's about documenting the journey."
And about conjuring wondrous music along the way.
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