Phil Keaggy Speaks Out

Nice CT interview with Phil Keaggy today. I've been a huge Keaggy fan since I was a teenager, and he has influenced my guitar playing ever since. Aside from being a phenomenally versatile guitarist, Phil has always been a genuine nice guy, which makes a couple of comments in CT a little surprising. In context, he is not bashing anything or anyone, just being honest about some minor annoyances. Says Phil:

What irks me most about the Christian music business is the model on which they built the whole thing. It's based on the world's model of taking songs and masters from artists and owning it, when they make you pay back the production budget based on your royalties' percentage and then they end up owning it. It's like making 30 years of payments on a house that the bank never gives you!



Keaggy also dislikes the categorization that has compartmentalized Christian artists and sequestered them away from the mainstream for most of forty years.

CT: So are you suggesting that the genre of "Christian music" shouldn't exist?

Keaggy: Maybe. I would've been out there more in the world playing, selling CDs and spreading some light instead of conveniently singing to the choir. What Bono's doing is dangerous. He's basically sharing the gospel in a very real sort of way, and I kind of respect that. He didn't want to get tagged and pulled into CCM. [Bob] Dylan wouldn't let that happen either during his Slow Train Coming days. At same time, barriers are put around us. When you go to Europe, they don't know what CCM is! Let's all just do our music and go where we're led to go.

I've often imagined what Phil could have done had he felt more free to just be himself and not have to fit into the CCM mold. There are few guitarists with the virtuosity he has in so many different styles. Eddie Van Halen was always doing variations on Eddie Van Halen. Jerry Garcia was vastly overrated. A few, like Eric Johnson were melodic and versatile, but Phil could do anything from screaming rock to classically based melodies to pop and jazz and blues. His voice, as a younger fella, has always been reminiscent of his early hero, Paul McCartney.

Not that Christians should seek the recognition and status of secular fame, but if the question is simply being in the world and not of it, and as a result having influence in culture, the construction of a Christian subculture has been a strategic error.