God sure does move in mysterious ways. Listening to Phil Keaggy’s The Wind And Wheat is a fitting testament to that. Only in our realm can an autodidact, Christian musician from Youngstown, Ohio, who only has the faculty of nine of his ten fingers, be more than just an unsung guitar hero (perhaps the “greatest” one at that) — he can also be a cipher to a path full of grace and beauty. As the pastoral ambient instrumentals unfurl gently in this season, I can’t help but want to meditate a bit on his life and what we can draw from it.
If I’ve figured out something throughout my life listening to music and discovering it, one of those things is this: how rough is it to properly review religious music? For a Unitarian Universalist — hold your quivers — like myself, I try to abscond from touching or judging the overtly religious themes of music because my faith wants to draw connections among beliefs and traditions that might not have them. If there’s anything I try to opine from such devotional works are the good things that might resonate with all of us. Going deeper than that might just cloud what is meaningful in its creation. So, whether we believe in a higher power or that all of such ideas are a human construct, we’ve got to agree all of us are born with certain mysterious potential that we all have to see out. That’s why Phil’s story struck me.
Phil’s life, you could say, was shaped by his early upbringing in 1950’s Hubbard, Ohio. One of ten children, born to a hard-nosed ironworker father and a devout Catholic mother, as a young man he sort of wandered and wondered like all children do, thinking about just how big the world was out there. Phil would get a small taste of that cosmopolitan world in conversations he had with his eldest sister, Ellen, who’d gotten a glimpse of the limelight singing with acts like Guy Lombardo and would later become a film actress. However, it was music that would form a huge connection with her. Listening to old Elvis Presley, Mantovani, and Fats Domino records, whatever their brothers would buy to play on the hi-fi, they would spend endless hours just talking about the music they’d hear coming out of it.
In the beginning, Phil felt sheepish about learning to play guitar. At the age of four, a farm accident involving a big water pump severed his right middle finger. When he convinced his parents to buy him a cheap $19 Sears-made Silvertone plastic guitar — all they really could afford for him — Phil would hide from others when they’d ask him to play something. Afraid they were looking at his hands, he’d practice afar from others unknowing that he had to tune his guitar, inventing his own method.
By the time Phil was old enough to buy his first electric guitar, as a pre-teen he’d already been precocious enough to figure out how to record his music on an old tape deck, doing sound on sound without knowing what that was. While attending Catholic school in some Youngstown suburb, he was now joining early rock Ohio rock groups like The Squires and The New Hudson Exit. At that moment, by Phil’s own admission, the only God (or gods) he was following was the guitar and musicians like Jeff Beck, Hendrix, Harrison and others.
Phil’s first real groundbreaking rock group, Glass Harp, initially began as an outgrowth of that searching, early psychedelic, hard rock period. Forming it with friend John Sferra, Glass Harp evolved from its early secular beginnings into something else. Initially, Phil fell into the classic “rock” cliche: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Then one day in February, 1970, Phil received word from his father of a tragic car accident that sent his father and mother to the hospital.
Unworried, perhaps, uncaring, and unhurried to see them, Phil continued to do his gigs and getting high, thinking they’d be okay. Within a week after seeing his mom in the hospital, she’d pass away. In Phil’s symbolic “come to Jesus” moment, his personal darkness and emptiness was now in full display. Ellen, now a born-again Christian, shared her experience with him of how her life was changed by religion and how her mother’s final words were “Praise Jesus”. Hearing the gospel, he felt his life had to look into this answer.
Two weeks later, Phil would be at home listening to Blind Faith’s “Presence Of The Lord” and accept that his desires were now different. Going back to Glass Harp, he’d try to write music that would speak of his conversion. Although they were going in separate directions spiritually, somehow Phil’s renewed faith had galvanized his songwriting and ideas. Their first three brilliant releases would speak to Phil’s ability to draw from secular artists, perhaps, drawing the spiritual-minded ideas sometimes not easily self-evident in such works, through his. By the time of their dissolution in 1974, Phil realized that all that angst, distortion, and heaviness had run its course. Phil was ready to rebirth his musical career.
Signing to an upstart Contemporary Christian Music label “New Song”, Phil was given a certain freedom to explore his own idea of devotional music. Earnest, absolutely gorgeous, folk-tinged pop albums like 1973’s What A Day spoke of his musical conversion and of a certain happiness enjoyed with his just-married wife Bernadette. Jettisoned-off were the hard-edged, distortion of the past that, if apocryphal stories are to be believed, that once made others like Hendrix state he was their favorite guitarist. Phil instead explored melodic, softer songs that were wonderfully catchy first and ministerial second. In those less-heady, less-dogmatic, more nebulous days of early CCM, somewhere in that Christian radio underground they had found their own Paul McCartney or Harry Nilsson, one with all the intriguing twists and turns one invites in making such comparisons.
As Phil would further explore his softer side in 1974’s Love Broke Thru he never negated the more exploratory beginnings of his longlife exploration of the guitar. Songs like “Time” from the same album possess sophisticated arrangements that speak to his sincere love of jazz, prog, and funk. Where other Christian acts saw something sinister in that music, he understood its importance and drew divine inspiration from it. In it you begin to hear glimpses of that guitar virtuoso whose instrument wanted to do all the speaking for him.
Unknown to many, until years later, Phil and his wife Bernadette would spend the following time suffering through various miscarriages, struggling to find solace in their lives. In that second dark point in his existence, the words Phil had relied on in the past had begun to fail him. It was in that period where he receded from the limelight and decided to rely more deeply on others, as he would in his short-lived Phil Keaggy Band and as a session musician or songwriter for others. When the contours of that music revealed themselves, Phil realized that stripped of all their words, his hands and his guitar could profess something that he couldn’t quite verbalize then.
1978’s The Master & The Musician allowed Phil to express a form of Christian music that had seemed long-forgotten or improved on for ages in its contemporary style. That instrumental form of which Antonin Dvorak fell for, that of which Albion folkloric music was steeped in, one that could be in its own way universal. In a way becoming an instrument for his feelings, songs on the A-side like “Pilgrim’s Flight”, “Suite-Of Reflections”, and “Golden Halls” reflected the chivalrous, contemplative love portrayed in the story accompanying the album. Others like “Mouthpiece”, “Follow Me Up”, “Jungle Pleasures”, and “Deep Calls Unto Deep” all found in the B-side reflect the very ardent, fiery, indescribable love only capable through a lively and spirited faith in one’s convictions. Whether you were or are Christian, undoubtedly this instrumental album’s wide berth of ideas were undeniably jaw-dropping.
So, to cut a long story short, nearly a decade later in 1987 when Christian New Age music label Myrrh asked him to revisit this all-too brief instrumental sojourn, Phil did so in a way that showed all the continuing evolution in thought and positive changes transpiring since then. Now blessed with a growing family and with a decade finding his voice back, now he lets his guitar do a bit of that more talking.
What The Wind And The Wheat transmits is music that is positively “beatific”. Seeds were there in a then-unreleased cover of “Amazing Grace” a decade earlier. All the techniques he had mastered — glissando, finger tapping, harmonics, mixing electronics with electric guitar, looping, volume swells, and so much more — could (if he wanted to) capture the undefinable presence of whatever it was he wanted to ruminate on. Now was the time to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Rather than make music that said: this is why you should believe — Phil made an album that simply professed, “I believe in this.”
Phil spoke in the liner notes of trying to create music that conveys a longing for paradise. Songs like “Paradise Dream”, a surprising Balearic highlight, hit on that bittersweet fingerstyle that he’d develop throughout the album. The titular track uses an English-lilting, harp-like melody to convey the cyclical form of nature. It’s a gorgeous song that builds from reminisce to uplift, reminding one (or at least me) of Joan Bibiloni’s glorious nostalgia-tinted work from the same period. “Where The Travelers Meet” presents that chivalrous tone of his prior work in a way that seems more communal, aged, and lived-in.
All the spacious touches of ambient music, something one wouldn’t expect to come from such an artist, do because Phil’s never truly lost touch with the contours of what is good music. “From Shore To Shore” extends that vision to other coasts seeking yet another palette to fill the stroke of color in this, his masterpiece. In the past, like-minded visionary artists like Mike Oldfield sought comfort in the way recorded music allowed one to immerse themselves (or at least one’s feelings) into a statement speaking of such a precise time, his Ommadawn was one, as is this one. It’s of that beyond connection away from church or temple, to a higher place, directly connected to whatever mystery moves us to create anything. That’s what is found here.
The album unwinds with graceful songs like “The Promise”, “The Reunion”, and “I Love You Lord”, all gentle and unassuming, until they’re not, and they all transform into this powerful, other indescribable thing that I can’t fathom into words. Who knows? Perhaps, somewhere in the space that Phil picks up his instrument, places his fingers on those chords, and follows them on their journey, that somewhere might be where those phrases are.