This is on the cusp of off-topic, but since Shawn Phillips
has come up and several people don't know about him, I
thought I'd offer a few comments. Shawn Phillips hit his peak
as a musician in the late-1960s/early-1970s. He, like Leon
Russell, was widely known for his shoulder length prematurely
gray hair and achieved some notoriety for a freakish accident
when said hair got caught in a boat prop while he was
swimming. He pretty much embodied the hippie ethos, for
better or worse. His music was (and for all I know continues
to be) soft, folk rock. However, he was different from most
in the genre in that his lyrics were not saccharine. In fact,
there is a bit of a dark streak, a melancholy that rescues
him from being just another lightweight light-rocker.
Musically, his songs were fairly sophisticated, employing
jazz chords, and he was highly regarded for his voice, which
had -- according to many accounts -- a three octave range.
But you could not call his music hard-boiled in the way that
Warren Zevon's music is hard-boiled. I'm not sure many people
in this discussion group would find it to their liking. Not
that I would advise anyone to do anything illegal, but if you
were curious, you MIGHT go to Napster and download "Lookin Up
Lookin Down" and "Song for Sagittarians" to get a sample of
what his work was like.
He definitely was the yin to his father's yang.
Later....Kip
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Sep 2000 EDT