"I think as time goes on as a writer, you begin to hone in on your own personal truths, your own compass," says Phillips about the material on his new album, "and the songs are less apt to read like the morning paper. Virginia Creeper is by far my most personal record, and, interestingly enough, it's by way of telling a story, by painting a character."
Characters are nothing new for Phillips. Since the days of Grant Lee Buffalo, he has animated his notebook with figures real and imagined. Today it's "Calamity Jane." In '94 it was "Mighty Joe Moon."
Phillips grew up in the town of Stockton in rural Northern California. He picked up his first guitar at age 13 and began writing songs immediately. At age 20 he headed for the lights of L.A., enrolling in film school and roofing houses for money. There Phillips found himself transfixed by the swirling sounds of local heroes The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade, and soon music became his primary focus.
Phillips had played with singer Jeff Clark in a band back home called the Torn Boys. Clark joined Phillips in L.A., and the two formed Shiva Burlesque, a folk-fueled, drum machine-backed postpunk duo that grew to include future Grant Lee Buffalo members Joey Peters on drums and Paul Kimble on bass. Clark took lead vocal duties.
Tensions split the Shivas, and Grant Lee Buffalo emerged as a trio. In 1991 Bob Mould's Singles Only label released their first single: the gorgeous, haunting "Fuzzy." Shortly thereafter, Slash put out their debut album of the same name. Journalists, rock snobs, and fellow musicians were on board in a big way.
Not a traditional balladeer in the "Stagger Lee" sense, Phillips uses personalities and mythology mostly as a jumping-off point. "Stories have always been a pretty fertile place for me to start with a song," he explains. "I suppose some of my favorite songs growing up were like that, painted some sort of picture—the ballads of the '60s and '70s and so on. It's something that I've probably been more known for with [Grant Lee Buffalo] albums like Mighty Joe Moon and Fuzzy. These new songs sort of hint and nudge at stories. They aren't necessarily full-blown ballads to the true sense of the word, but I do think they rely upon setting a mood and offer an invitation to enter into some sort of environment by way of the imagery and the characters."
Have you tasted the finest of trout? Oh no
Have you sleep in a log-burning house? Oh no
With your feet floppin' over the couch? Oh no
—"Mighty Joe Moon"
The title track from 1994's Mighty Joe Moon drew inspiration from a real guy and then headed for points unknown. "Joe Moon was a truck-driving eccentric who had taken up a job at a recording studio in San Francisco, where we were recording Fuzzy in the early '90s," explains Phillips, "and we were just sort of taken with him and began to riff on his name. I think I wrote three other songs all in one go with the title 'Mighty Joe Moon.' The song itself has little to do with Joe Moon. It's the kind of song that I continue to figure out as time goes on. You know, what does it mean?"
Drunk on the blood of our heroes, welcome bade
Ringin' in the year with a ticker tape parade
—"Calamity Jane"
Named after the hard-livin' frontierswoman of 19th century American folklore, Virginia Creeper's "Calamity Jane" was written as a metaphor for aggressive foreign policy. "She was a real person," says Phillips, "but also a symbol for that trigger-happy attitude that typifies the American West. That particular song was probably the earliest that was written [for the album], about the time we were startin' to dip our toes into Iraq again. So it is a way of addressing that kind of American attitude—sort of ambling in through the saloon doors with the Clint Eastwood music in the background."
Gunfire also found its way into the raucous opening track on Mighty Joe Moon.
- They had him nailed up to a T with a T for Texas
His disciples with artillery, they held the fort inside
—"Lone Star Song"
Grant Lee Buffalo were on their first real tour, driving through the plains of Texas, when "Lone Star Song" came to life to the dulcet tones of Phillips' new mandolin. "I think because it was November I was writing about Kennedy and Dealey Plaza and all that," he says. "This was roughly about the time that the whole Waco thing went down, and so I just began to bring in elements of contemporary Texan tragedies. And, lo and behold, I found that I was telling maybe two stories, maybe one bigger story, using Texas as the common motif. But also, a bit like 'Calamity Jane,' it was a personification of a bigger kind of attitude, a bigger picture—a gun-totin', separatist kind of picture."
Mighty Joe Moon, a lush anthology of Americana released on Slash/Reprise, further revealed Phillips as a creative successor to John Lennon, Neil Young, and Van Morrison. Bursting with brimstone rockers and rustic ballads, the album also produced a near-hit in "Mockingbirds," the video for which aired occasionally on MTV. Grant Lee Buffalo made one more album, 1996's Copperopolis, before frictions led to Paul Kimble's exit. Moving to Warner Bros. Records, Phillips and Peters recorded 1998's Jubilee with session bassist Dan Rothchild before assembling an expanded lineup for the subsequent tour.
I ask Phillips why Grant Lee Buffalo tended to be louder than his solo work. "I think that the explosive, noisier elements of Mighty Joe Moon and of the band in general from about '89 to '97—that was a combination of those personalities meeting in the middle," he says. "Kimble was a pretty explosive force onstage—just a really dynamic, intense performer—but he also had a side to his personality that really encouraged the more melancholic, melodic pieces of music that we were known for. And when that was the case, then I was usually on the opposite end of the spectrum, saying, 'No, I wanna really play hard tonight. Let's play all of our whacked-out songs.' So there was always a tension going on there. But I think we all probably pulled and tugged at the fabric of that band."
In 1999, with Warner Bros. bankrolling its quick-buck buzz brats at the expense of career artists, Phillips found a way out of his contract. The following year he self-released Ladies' Love Oracle, a gorgeous set of acoustic songs recorded over three days in producer Jon Brion's basement studio. After signing with Zoe/Rounder, Phillips recorded 2001's Mobilize, a meticulous, pop-leaning album that brought programmed beats to the proceedings. That album was a way of saying, in Phillips' words, "There's more to life than dirt roads and fence posts." Around the same time, he sang on Paul Oakenfold's "Motion" and recorded his own "Smile" for the Gilmore Girls TV soundtrack.
Phillips' pendulum seems to swing when it comes to the record-making process: Jubilee, more production; Ladies' Love Oracle, less; Mobilize, more; Virginia Creeper, less. Is it likely to swing again? "I had put so much brainpower into Mobilize, into the arranging and the production," Phillips explains. "That album was put together with tweezers and a Macintosh computer. Record-making has become so tedious, and this time around it was important to me to cast all of that aside and just perform. There are songs on Virginia Creeper that have a quietude where you can hear a pin drop. Those songs were probably written in the middle of the night and they're performed in that same fashion. And then there are other ones that are a bit more explosive, but it all exists within the same arena. I think that's one of the things that I'm most proud of with this album, that it hangs together as a moment in time as opposed to being 'work.'
"I love the feeling of sweating and hollering and all of that, but when it comes to making albums, it's such a different process for me. I'm constantly trying to find the equilibrium between all of those things. It's hard to say. I think it's less likely that I'm going to be bouncing off every wall production-wise. I feel like I'm just beginning to hit a stride. I know it has to be done quickly. I thought three weeks was a long time, and then we made Jubilee, which took like five weeks, and that seemed like an eternity. With this new one we took about three days to make it, two days to overdub, another five days to mix, and it was done."
Good Christians, they gave you a lily-white dress
And they shorn back that Indian hair
Told you study your Bible, be silent and still
And take to the ways of the whites
—"Susanna Little"
"I haven't made it the focal point of everything that I've done," says Phillips about paying tribute to his American Indian ancestry, "but from time to time I will write a song that touches on that." Inspired by the stories of his great-great aunt and great-great grandmother, Virginia Creeper's "Susanna Little" talks about "being Native Americans and growing up in America in the middle part of the century and all of the hardships that they might encounter, and how that also reflects the greater challenge of Native Americans at that time."
Although Phillips wrote a short acoustic number for Mighty Joe Moon called "The Last Days Of Tecumseh," the song refers more to the Oklahoma town—"the ground below the airplanes"—than the great Shawnee chief. "I think that was another way of trying to describe the transitional point from the ancient, the traditional, to the world that we live in now, and the pains of that transition," he says.
For all its trials, that transition is fertile ground, a line in the dirt across which Phillips plants both feet gracefully. In his case, to know history is to expand the vocabulary of the heart. To have a heart like his is to sift through history with a poet's eye. Must one accept a duel with devastation, may he call upon words as arresting as those to Grant Lee Buffalo's "Mockingbirds": "All my sails were ablaze, I was chained to the helm."
Damn, I wish I'd said that.
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