Burlap to Cashmere and Phil Keaggy Celebrate 20 Years of “Anybody Out There”
Burlap to Cashmere “Celebrating 20 Years: Anybody Out There?”
With Special Guest: Phil Keaggy
Yellow Cab Tavern
Dayton, OH
Sunday, July 21, 2019
By Brian Quincy Newcomb
It had already begun to sprinkle down rain as the line was forming outside the Yellow Cab Tavern for the Phil Keaggy & Burlap to Cashmere show. Nobody seemed to want to get wet, as people scrambled back to their cars for umbrellas or huddled under the makeshift tent where they were collecting tickets, but coming as a promised break in the two-week long heatwave, folk were grateful that it was finally going to cool down. Most of the early arrivals appeared to be somewhere on the grandparent end of the age spectrum, as they happily grabbed seats near the stage, and some took advantage of the full-bar, and the tall cocktail tables and chairs toward the back of the long room that had once been a garage.
Phil Keaggy, a Christian music mainstay going all the way back to the mid-70’s with a reputation as a world-class guitar phenomenon, has become adept at solo performances where he takes advantage of digital looping technology to build a musical foundation for his songs to display his soloing prowess. After a quick introduction, Keaggy took the stage with his acoustic guitar, to find a warm reception from the get-go. He opened with “Full Circle,” an appropriate choice for the 68-year-old musician who’d gotten his start in Ohio. After a couple of quick runs up and down the neck of the guitar, which alone would have impressed a music fan who didn’t know what to expect from Keaggy, he started laying down the bass-line, putting some folky jazz chords down on top of that to add to the song’s rhythmic structure, and having built the groove to his satisfaction, began singing about how life had brought him back around to important connections that had mattered to him in his youth – and of course he played a jazzy guitar solo over the top of what he had created.
Keaggy is a master of long, fast, melodic lines, but he is such a relaxed, unpretentious performer that you might miss how masterful a musician he is… there’s no big movements to emphasize the challenge of playing at that level. And although he often has an impish smile, you get very little of the stereotypical exaggerated emotional display. What you get is masterful musicianship delivered in Keaggy’s natural, somewhat matter-of-fact fashion.
Keaggy played “Mercy” from his 2016 Kickstarter album All At Once next, giving the song’s pop melody a slightly funky bass groove. While his voice has a bright feel, it’s Keaggy’s instrumental prowess that take his music to places where listeners are blown away, and his unique musical abilities were on full display in the Celtic-flavored “Shades of Green.” He plays the song at the high end of the guitar neck, aided by two capos, which gives the song a bright appealing sound, made all the more compelling by his melodic soloing.
Between songs, Keaggy has an endearing, self-deprecating style, as if he knows he’s there to entertain and that he’s at his best playing music, but feels the need to say “something.” He laughs easily, often at himself, and folk generally laugh along. But as he was making small talk with the crowd, we got the impression he wasn’t working from a setlist and wasn’t sure what to play next… so he offered, “hey, how about some George Harrison?,” before turning in a lovely performance of “Here Comes the Sun,” with special attention to that iconic finger-picking.
Keaggy also featured music from his latest album Illumination, a collaboration with Rex Paul (here’s my review of that release). “Don’t Hold Back” is a fine pop/rock song, with lyrics based on Jesus’ call to help those in need in Matthew 25. Keaggy described the album as the most edgy rock & roll project he’d worked on in quite a while.
At this point, someone called out a request, and Keaggy responded he’d be sure to play that ballad at some future date when he returns “to play in a church” environment. Still, Keaggy did take a moment to offer a witness to his Christian faith, thanking God for the promise of new life in Jesus, which received a warm response from some in the crowd.
But then, he turned his attention to laying down the musical layers on his build-a-track loop machine for one of his beloved live standards, “Salvation Army Band,” which brings together a variety of musical efforts that allow him to display the long, fluid melodic lines that mark his unique level of guitar-master virtuosity. Very few guitarists in the world can play at Phil Keaggy’s level, and when he’s set free to perform at the top of his game it is quite a thing to behold, and the fans there in the Yellow Cab seemed to recognize they were experiencing something special. After promising to return and play at the end of Burlap to Cashmere’s set, Keaggy was done.
After a brief break, Steven Delopoulos and Johnny Philippidis took to the stage with their acoustic guitars and started playing the Neapolitan folk music-influenced pop/rock that first distinguished their band Burlap to Cashmere when their debut album, Anybody Out There?, was released 20 years ago on Squint/A&M. After the opening number, rich with Mediterranean warmth and Old World charm as the two cousins stomped their feet to suggest the bold folk dance rhythm, they were joined by long-time drummer, Theodore Pagano, and two young new support players, Basil Wojdowicz on electronic keyboard and Mike Forzano on bass. And unceremoniously, they launched into the title track of the album that first introduced them to the music world, “Anybody Out There?”
Delopoulos, wearing a sporty gentlemen’s hat, welcomed the crowd and served as the evening’s M.C., while Philippidis was a commanding presence beside him, playing acoustic guitar with muscular movements that suggested the bright ringing sounds often associated with the bouzouki, the Greek ethnic instrument of choice. Pagano and the other players added just the right subtle support, enhancing the sound and enhancing the cousin’s vocal harmonies that rang out on most of their songs. They delivered the fast-tempo of “Orchestrated Love Song,” with its expressed desire to “get on a boat and sail away.”
Deloupoulos introduced “The Other Country” as a song he wrote in response to a request that he offer a song for the Narnia movie franchise, saying “but it didn’t make the cut, so we recorded it ourselves.” Both this one and the previous song showed up on the band’s 2011 self-titled album for Jive Records. Pagano provided a strong backbeat for “Build A Wall,” based on the story of Nehemiah (not the current political debate.) The band’s strong ethno-musical connection to Greek culture shined through as the two singers delivered the “hey, hey, hey” refrain on the chorus, while Philippidis offered up another strong solo.
Pagano called for a pause at this point, so he could replace a failed pedal on his drum kit; while he was making the fix, the cousins ad-libbed a quick version of a song the two no doubt had played together as youth, the Simon & Garfunkel classic, “The 59thStreet Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” and you could see quite a few of the music fans of a certain age knew to sing along as soon as they heard the “slow down you move too fast” intro. Once the drums were back, the band moved smoothly into “Live In a Van,” a song delivered with a country feel, while referencing one’s marriage vows with a nod to Thomas Merton.
For the quieter, Greek folk sounds of “Skin Is Burning,” Philippidis leaned even harder into his guitar playing, turning in another fast, muscular solo with melodic lines that suggested classical music influences as well. The full band shined through on “Closer to the Edge,” a folk-rock song that demonstrated the untapped commercial potential in this fine band of writers and players, and then they moved right into another pop-oriented ballad, “Mansions” that relied on Wojdowicz’ organ sound.
About 2/3rds of the way through that song, Delopoulos began to share with the crowd, most of which may not be aware of the band’s long, challenging history. While Burlap to Cashmere released their 1998 debut to considerable promise, after six years of touring with some of the biggest acts in popular music without producing a breakout hit of their own, they were dropped when the label changed hands and they had burned out. In 2005, Philippidis was hospitalized in a coma after a car accident turned into a physical altercation that left the guitarist without one eye, and the doctors needing to rebuild his face, which explains why he wears sunglasses on stage.
“I want to remember this night,” said Delopoulos, “I want to remember this night for the rest of my life. There’s something in the air, and it feels like new possibilities, new beginnings. Transition is in the air,” and then he exited to leave the stage to his band.
Philippidis led them into an instrumental that appeared on the band’s 2015 digital download-only album, Freedom Souls. Taking the lead, the guitarist dipped back into their Greek/Mediterranean roots for “Dialing God,” setting the muscular dance rhythm with the band, and approaching his guitar with flamenco style playing that got faster and faster, playing the Old World music with an energy that echoeed punk. Then Steven returned to offer up a solo rendition of “Another Day,” the opening track from his 2003 solo album, Me Died Blue.
When the band returned to the stage, they brought Phil Keaggy with them, while Delopoulos recalled the first time they played with the master guitarist at a gospel industry event, not knowing anything about him until he started to play, “and just blew us all away.” After a few perfunctory musician asides with Keaggy to fill him on the song they were about to play, they dug into the funky Greek meter of “Tonight,” with Wojdowicz taking a lengthy organ solo to give Phil a feel for the chord changes. Soon Keaggy and Philippidis were both digging into their guitars in the first of two lengthy jams that had the crowd screaming back their approval anytime anyone played a particularly exciting set of licks.
While that first effort felt pretty exciting, things were taken up a notch with “Basic Instructions (For Leaving Earth),” with the band playing supportively while Philippidis and Keaggy exhorting each other through a lenghty jam that left Delopoulos standing there watching the two guitar masters with his mouth open and a silly smile on his face.
With two plus hours of music behind us, the crowd settled up with their bartenders and servers, and headined out into the heavy downpour and the start of a new week with a warm feeling from experiencing two very unique musical styles coming together on a very special evening.