Brewer Philips, Artists of the Year, has been playing for over 40 years

" After being informed it was selected as the Record of the Year by BlueSpeak, Phillips says, 'I don't know why. It sounds like shit.' "

By Norm Shaw

It's fortunate not everyone thinks the same thing of Brewer Phillips' Homebrew as he does.

After being informed it was selected as the Record of the Year by BlueSpeak, Phillips says, "I don't know why. It sounds like shit."

It is that kind of attitude that led us to also name Phillips our Artist of the Year. Phillips, and that is all anyone ever calls him, has been slamming away for more than 50 years. From Mississippi juke joints to the ghettos of Chicago to world tours, Phillips is the living embodiment of the blues.

He's best known as one-third of Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers. For more than 20 years, he and Taylor, with drummer Ted Harvey, played six nights a week. Their legendary performances usually consisted of three two-hour sets. Phillips' roots, though, go further back and deep into the Delta.

"I was born in the hill part of Mississippi," Phillips says from his Chicago home. "It was in Coila, a little town with a cotton gin and post office, and that was about it." Phillips moved often, making a living driving a truck. He wound up in Greenwood, MIss., hauling gravel. In the 1950s, he met Memphis Minnie and began a relationship that changed his life.

"I left Greenwood and moved to Memphis, and there I ran across the most beautiful woman, an angel, Memphis Minnie," Phillips says. "She and Son (House) were in Memphis and I got to play with them. Then I met a guy named James Walker who made a little 78 (rpm record) with me and Roosevelt Sykes. That woulda been back in '55 or '56."

It was about two years later that Phillips moved to Chicago. It was then that he hooked up with Taylor to form the Houserockers.

"I knew him in Mississippi," Phillips says. "I never played with him down there, just ran across him. The reason I run across him was I was driving truck, going to all these places. But I met up with him in '59 at his house. One Sunday he needed a guitar player. I never told nobody this, but I went up there 'cause he stole my guitar. I picked up the guitar, and I knew it was mine. He'd painted it, but it was mine. I could tell by how it felt. It had disappeared from the Hi-Lo Club we'd been playing."

That one-day gig turned into 20 tumultuous years. The Houserockers played hard and fought harder. Bruce Iglauer formed Alligator Records in 1972 in order to record the band. On liner notes for a later compilation, Iglauer told the story of Hound Dog waking up drummer Harvey by saying, "Wake up and argue." Stories circulate about harsh words, knives and guns, but through it all the music survived. "We fought it for 10, 12, 15 hours a night for next to nothing," Phillips says almost sentimentally. "We'd play all night for $50. We were black-man rich."

Taylor died in 1975. Harvey and Phillips remain friends, talking almost daily. When Delmark Records, which ironically refused to record the Houserockers, offered Phillips his own record, he and producer Pete Nathan put together a top-notch outfit. Joining Phillips are bassist Willie Black, drummer Robert "Huckleberry Hound" Wright and vocalist/pianist Aaron Moore (see related story). While Homebrew may be Phillips' record, it in many ways is a collaborative effort with Moore.

Moore handles the majority of the vocals, and wrote or co-wrote eight of the records 16 tracks. His increased role was partly planned, partly necessity. "I was sick with the flu when we recorded," Phillips says. "I did the best I could. You know, you can't always go into the studio when you want to go. You gotta go when the man tells you to."

Regardless of how it came together, the end results are stellar. The beauty of Homebrew is its timeless quality. As we said in our initial review, Homebrew sounds like it could have been recorded in 1950, not 1995. The key is that the 71-year-old (or 72, he's not really sure) Phillips and 68-year-old Moore were there in 1950. They brought that spirit with them, and producer Pete Nathan gave them the freedom to re-create a live sound.

Raw and energetic, Homebrew has the key element that legendary Sun Records founder Sam Phillips says all great blues has. Sam calls it "gutbucket fundamentalism." Homebrew is nothing if not gutbucket. For that reason, and Brewer Phillips' lengthy dedication to "real blues," he is our Artist of the Year.