If you’ve never heard of him, it’s not surprising. Talent doesn’t rise to the top in the Christian market.
My friend James introduced me to Phil Keaggy about 10 years ago. Not literally. This was when I first met James, and he was (and still is) a huge Phil Keaggy fan. And at the time, I was completely uninterested in Christian music because it was (and still is) predominantly crap.
“Oh, you gotta hear him,” said James, and proceeded to find me some Phil Keaggy to listen to. And when Phil came to Santa Cruz later that year, James dragged me to the concert.
Ten years and 21 compact discs later, I am still not as huge a fan as James is (because I don’t know if that’s possible) but I’m up there somewhere. So when I found out he was playing in Los Gatos tonight, I got the tickets as soon as I could find out who was selling them.
My sister emailed me afterward to inform me of something that the Phil Keaggy website hadn’t—that there was a jam session with Phil, before the concert, for aspiring guitarists. I told James about it, and he had to be there.
To get in, you had to raise funds for the Christian Guitar and Bassist Conference, so James did that. He got a lot of sponsors. I wound up being one of them—of course, I didn’t offer to sponsor him; he just put me down on the list, so I shrugged and ponied up the dough. Turns out he raised the third-largest amount of money. So he was a shoo-in for playing with Phil, in case of time constraints.
We fans sometimes overestimate crowds. That’s why I got my tickets early; I expected a sold-out concert, but the building was only half-full. At the jam session, there were actually only seven guitarists out of the 10 expected. (And maybe four or five spectators, including me.) Each of the guitarists got about 10 minutes apiece with Phil, playing either one of their own songs with him, or one of his, or Phil would just make something up and off they’d go.
So I watched that for about two hours. Then we took a dinner break and went to the concert, where Phil was brilliant as usual. And I wound up buying another Phil Keaggy CD. Really, I can’t afford to keep up with his output. The guy cranks out about three CDs a year. He says he’s slowing down; good, I might actually have a chance of catching up! But you’d never know it from the amazing stuff he can do with his guitars.
No, I didn’t get his autograph. I stopped asking for them years ago, when I realized there was no real point in owning them. My memory is more than adequate… but they did make a
Update, 11/30/2024: Back in 2008 I borrowed James’s
Phil’s entire discography, plus outtakes and concert recordings, is on sale on his Bandcamp page, which lets you listen to everything. Can’t find an out-of-print disc? It’s there. And now I’ve lost count of how many albums of his I own.