John Phillips, Jack of Diamonds

reviewed by dave heaton

The fact that John Phillips’ “Me and My Uncle” became an old stand-by for the Grateful Dead seems appropriate for the character of the song – due to the ancient sort of darkness in the traveler’s tale of shoot-out (“it’s a hard hard road,” is a repeated line). And due to the bluesiness of it. That latter quality stands in contrast to the breezier, folksier sound of Phillips’ 1970 solo album John the Wolfking of LA, reissued last year. The material for Phillips’ unreleased, would-be second LP Jack of Diamonds, including “Me and My Uncle”, is marked more deeply by a dirty-blues style than either Wolfking or the Mamas and the Papas would have prepared listeners for. Yet its melodies and instrumentation (including keyboards, pedal steel, sax and orchestra arrangements) still display Phillips’ articulate pop sensibility.

There’s a continual sense of drift here; “Yesterday I left the earth,” one memorable line goes. Phillips glides from influence to influence – jazz, guitar-rock, and a pastoral, post-hippie kind of rock showtune music – place to place (NYC here, California there), person to person, feeling to feeling and idea to idea. “Black Broadway” stands out for its scene-setting; “Revolution on Vacation” for its nutty, image-packed playfulness; “Too Bad” for its macho strut ending with the notion “We all want true love.”

As a recreation of a non-existent album, Jack of Diamonds is not as cohesive an experience as Wolfking. But in other ways it’s just as fascinating. It’s a portrait of a man on the move: a drifter’s, traveller’s, journeyman’s album.

{www.varesesarabande.com}