Phil's (Keaggy and Wilson)

I have been a Phil Keaggy fan for a long, long time. It goes back to when I listened exclusively to Christian music and I went to see some concert that he was a part of. Watching him play and do things with an acoustic guitar that I just couldn't believe could be done. Snapping his fingers on the neck of the guitar. Running loops and playing harmony right over them. It was amazing. And then I heard his electric stuff. Jammin' type stuff from back in the 60's and 70's. Phil Keaggy and Sunday's Child. Crimson and Blue. In fact, I saw him do an incredible show back in 1992 (Oh, geez, that's 14 years ago. Holy crap...) with a full band, Hammond B3 organ included. He's a great artist.

Last night was Phil Keaggy night at Otter Creek. He's been doing shows during the summer there for the last five or six years, and every night has been astounding, incredible, amazing. All those superlatives, but it was also different. He did his normal acoustic stuff that everyone likes, but that's he's done every time he's come to the Creek, but this time he brought his old band with him, Glass Harp. This was Phil's first band, back in the 70s and they have known each other since high school. It's two other guys, John Sferra on drums and Daniel Pecchio on bass. They're basically a jam band and they just have fun together.

And they rocked the house down. It was loud, it was cool, and it was tons of fun. If you missed it thinking it would be the same old Phil on the acoustic, yes, he did a lot of that, but the Glass Harp part of it was just utterly phenomenal. Two pics below. Sorry for the lousy quality. They're from my camera phone from the balcony.
















Phil Solo
















Glass Harp together.


There was something else cool. A couple of years ago, Phil's sound guy couldn't make it to OC, so last minute, Phil asked me if I could run the sound for him. When he did that, my palms immediately started to sweat. "Me? Run Sound for Phil Keaggy?" Another checkbox on the things I'm doing that I never expected to do (go to England twice, run sound at the Ryman Auditorium). Of course I agreed and trotted up to the balcony, hoping I wouldn't faint. I didn't and it's actually very easy to run. Just set his mic level and his guitar level and don't touch anything.

Well, during Phil's sound checks, he just messes around and does crazy loops and funky jams. Last year was no exception, except that I recorded the jam and gave him a copy of it. What I didn't know was that he was going to release a CD of these jams called Roundabout.




















He ended up using that jam from last year and put it on the CD, which means I have an album credit on a Phil Keaggy CD. It's very small in the image, so I blew it up below. Which is something else I never expected to have. It was very cool of him to do that and it was a capper to a very cool night.