On the cover of the exhaustive Live In The Seventies 3CD set Shawn Philips looks like the archetypal dude with a guitar playing songs about loss an love. And sure, there is plenty of that, but he was also an inventor, an early adapter of using loops, throwing in jazz licks, and getting his audience on the wrong foot with unexpected twists and turns. He came close to being big, graduating from coffee shops and rock clubs like The Bitter End to playing venues like Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center NY. For some reason his songs from his studio albums were rarely heard on the radio, but luckily there were a couple stations who went to the trouble to record his live performances for posterity, capturing his impressive vocal register - three octaves all the way to a superb falsetto.
His fans always claimed to the best way to listen to Shawn Philips is attending his shows and the eight recordings were assembled by musician Roger Houdaille (Ex Norwegian) and composer Alex Wroten for Live In The Seventies are proof that they were right about. The audio restoration was in the capable hands of Prof. Stoned, bringing the urgent intimacy of the musician's stage persona to the fore. Taking it all in one sitting is the best way to get lost in the musical maze and enables the listener to follow his development over the years, but when that is not an option, it is best to break it down to one recording of a broadcast at the time, have a drink, and cue up the next one.
