Jerry Phillips For the Universe

The myriad of stars that aligned to create Jerry Phillips’ debut solo album, For The Universe, have been orbiting the rarified atmosphere of Memphis’ 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. 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’ “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.’” When it came time for the “shakedown session,” Album coproducer Scott 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.” 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 Tennesseeto-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!”