Versatility is an important trait to any successful musician. The more styles and genres a player can play, the more opportunities will open up. South shore keyboard player Lulu Phillips is certainly well versed in many styles. Phillips can be seen playing her keyboards in the Lickity Split blues band or working her synthesizers in the David Bowie tribute band Diamond Dogs.
“It’s just a lot of fun. I love the blues,” Phillips said. “It’s the kind of band where a lot of people will call us for holidays, and hall parties, and beach parties. It’s more of a local project whereas the Bowie tribute is where trying to play to larger venues.”
Lulu Phillips began her musical journey, and she does see her career as a journey, when she took traditional piano lessons and theory in third grade to seventh grade with a Catholic nun before taking some courses at Berklee and then some instructions from David Zoffer, the Jazz Department Chairman at New England Conservatory of Music.
Phillips was influenced primarily by Little Feet’s keyboard player Bill Payne and Allman Brothers keyboardist Greg Allman, two who were influenced by the roots of blues players like Professor Longhair. Growing up in Quincy, Phillips has been a single parent for many years, and she majored in music therapy to reach children in need. Although she didn’t get a chance to finish her degree, she still gives people something they need.
“It’s almost like a spiritual thing,” Phillips said. “That’s the main part of it, the passion. I don’t think you can ever get to the highest plateau because then you’re on the bottom of the next plateau. It’s a constant feeling of curiosity. That’s why I get so much enjoyment from it. The business itself is very cold and it’s not pretty, but the music is.”
Phillips played with a variety of outfits over the decades, a jazz band, a wedding band, a gospel choir. She eventually ended up in a two piece band that played music for fans of Irish music, Morrissey, U2, and Irish rebel music. This was in the late 1990s, when all the Quincy clubs offered Irish music.
Phillip eventually made her way to the Yardrock blues jam in Quincy where she made her mark in the blues scene, though she had been a blues fan all of her life. Her love for blues having come to her after hanging out in Cambridge clubs during her youth. Phillips worked with the blues and classic rock band The End Result in the Lowell scene.
If that was a tangled enough musical route, Phillips was invited to join the popular David Bowie tribute band, Diamond Dogs. Diamond Dogs leader and singer Mike Richard saw Phillips perform at The Next Page in Weymouth. Stuck by her stage presence, he recruited her. Bowie’s material gives Phillips a lot to sink her teeth into.
“Bowie puts together really heavy hitters when he puts musicians together and he creates at an artistic level,” Phillips said. “His pianist’s name is Mike Garson. Mike Garson is a trained classical-slash-jazz player. He’s unbelievable. So that whole area, classical and jazz, is much more involved for me to work on, and it’s intriguing. It was more of a challenge, something different.”
Diamond Dogs focuses on Bowie’s 1970s material like Ziggy Stardust and his dance music in the 1980s. Phillips described the singer‘s ever changing stage personality in the 1970s. “He was following personas on an artistic level but people thought it was his personality which he claims it wasn’t. He was representing personas that he created over a period of time. The next biggest thing for him was the dance phase.” Phillips said that Diamond Dogs also plays material from Bowie’s Reality Tour. “He morphs through what’s popular, I think,” she added.
“He definitely throws a spin on everything,” she said. “He takes rock and then he uses classical and jazz progressions. He’s still rocking out. I guess he’s the kind of person you don’t know where he’s going to go next.” Phillips enjoys the research she has to study to learn Bowie’s stuff. That depth of musicianship among the tribute band players, she said, makes the Bowie tribute popular with other musicians. It also gives her more opportunities to use her synthesizer than her blues bands. Luckily, her keyboard features buttons and switches that allowed her to work on the sound designs.
Phillips has not tried to write her own original music yet, but she feels good about sharing her interpretation of other people’s material.
When Phillips isn’t busy blowing people’s mind with Bowie’s prog-rock, she cuts loose with Lickity Split, the unit lead by south shore promoter/booker/musician Satch Romono. The band plays at South Shore rooms like The Next Page, Varsity Club, Murphy‘s Twin Shamrock, and Louie’s in, and in the North Shore they play O’Neil’s in Salem.
Phillips uses Korg Triton LE keyboards. She is hard to see on stage in the Diamond Dogs tribute band in the space next to the drum set and behind a line of guitarists. She is not very visible in that corner, but she can certainly be heard.
“I am playing music to make people happy,” she said. “Nobody can take this from me. I can always give my music out, and it makes me happy to see people out having fun and dancing. It shouldn’t matter whether you can see me or not. My whole purpose is being fulfilled.”
http://www.myspace.com/bowietributeband
www.myspace.com/satchsnewbluerevue
