Phil Upchurch (1941 - 2025), a candid interview, 1979

The sound quality is troublesome — backing music mixed too high? — but here’s Chicago-born and bred Phil Upchurch, a guitarist’s guitarist — speaking about his career and realities of the music industry. Transcript thanks to AI, which I have corrected as appropriate.

PHIL UPCHURCH WBEZ studio, Chicago, 1979: The fact of the matter is that I’ve grown up and I’ve matured somewhat and music is my life. I finally came to that realization very recently. For the first time in my life, I made a total commitment to myself and to the music business. And music is a business.

It’s all I’ve got. It’s my life, so I’m going to have to do the best I can with it from a business standpoint also.

As you know, all the art in the world don’t mean nothing if you ain’t got your business together in terms of making a living. It’s my craft, and I wanted to get as much out of it as I possibly can, musically and financially.

And the way to do that is to reach the masses, and the way to reach the masses is to diversify and simplify.

HM; That’s Phil Upchurch, a Chicago-born guitarist who’s really reached some pinnacles of success already, and we hope he’s going to reach a lot more. Phil Upchurch is my guest today on Jazz Chicago. I’m Howard Mandel.

UPCHURCH: When I was born in my mother’s bedroom on Lake, California and Lake Street. And from there, we moved to the projects, 13th and Racine. And I was there until I was eight years old.

From there, we went to the west side, around the neighborhood of Homan and Roosevelt Road, actually Grenshaw Street, which I think is a city parking lot now.

HM: When did you first start getting interested in music?

UPCHURCH: Well, all we have, like music . . . What got me interested in music basically was my father, who used to be a piano player. Professionally, he used to be a piano player. And so I’ve been around music all my life. I took piano lessons as a child, like you know a lot of people do. And I didn’t really stay with it after a while. And I became interested in music again when my father asked me, did I want a ukulele? We were out shopping for school clothes. And I really, you know, it didn’t make me no difference, really. But I said, sure, I want a ukulele. And he taught me how to play it.

And after a while, he bought me a guitar, and I started attacking it. And I’ve been attacking it ever since, trying to get it together.

HM: You were a graduate of Marshall High School. Did you have any musical education in the Chicago public high schools at all?

UPCHURCH: No. Which was, I think, one of the biggest mistakes of my life was not being in a high school band. It was just that I wasn’t really interested in a career in music.

You know, I was always more of a hobbyist. I liked building things, model airplanes, and I was always interested in animals and stuff like that. Hadn’t been for music, I think I would have been an anthropologist or something like that, maybe a biologist. It would have been something more along the lines of that. Or a photographer even, or even art. But it just turned out to be music. I got more calls to play music than do anything else I was interested in. So when people started paying me for it, it was just a thing that took its own course.

I first started playing with what they call doo-wop groups.

HM: Yeah.

UPCHURCH: Groups like -- well, a high school group was my first musical experience,

basically, after I learned how to play the guitar a little bit. My first professional experience was with singing groups.

I was playing on the South Side of a place called Birdland with the Dells. Quite a ways back, I think it was like 1958, ‘59. And they didn’t have a guitar player in the band. And the band leader asked me if I’d play a couple of tunes with the band. And one of the tunes was “Honky Tonk,” which was a guitar feature. And he asked me, “Well, do you know ‘Honky Tonk’?”

I said, yeah, of course. What guitar player doesn’t? He said, “Well, you mind setting in with the band? I’ll pay you a little extra money.” -- I said “Of course.”

HM: Were you very aware about the blues guitar players around Chicago, though,

during the late 50s, early 60s, the time you’re talking about?

UPCHURCH: It was hard to get around them. I was a little smack dab in the middle of it. You know, the blues activity in the city was, most of it at that particular time, I think was around Roosevelt Road [Eddie Shaw’s 1815 Club was home of Howlin’ Wolf] and Madison Street. There was some activity in the low 30s [Pepper’s Lounge},

you know, in the ‘40s on the South Side (Theresa’s, Buddy Guy’s club], but I think a good deal of it was on the West Side.

I lived around the corner from Cobra Records, and I used to hang out there because there was a record shop, and you had a recording studio in the back,

and I used to just go back there to watch the guys record, like Otis Rush and Muddy Waters and Willie Mabon and Willie Dixon, all those guys. I met them actually before I was really into playing music.

So the rest of it just naturally came. I had to quit school to go out with the Dells.

The record company told them they didn’t need a guitar player and they didn’t

need to be going through the expense of having an extra guy, so they didn’t buy me a plane ticket. And after I quit school, the guys left without me -- you know, because of the record company, it wasn’t their decision. So I went and got back in school and came out, and when I got out of high school, I went on the road with a group called the Spaniels.

We were down in Florida. I toured with them for about four or five months. At that particular time, financially, it wasn’t really that much happening, and I went and played with Jerry Butler [vocalist, “the Ice Man”]. That was my ticket back to Chicago. I met him in Washington, D.C., and he gave me a gig.

At one time, Chicago was like in the top three in the record industry for making records. They all had offices. There was door-to-door offices for several blocks on Michigan Avenue. I was on the staff at Chess for a while, and so we were recording with all the artists on [its jazz imprints] Argo and Cadet.

For a couple of years I was on the staff there. Before that, the artists that I happened to be working with, a lot of those were VeeJay, recording artists like the Dells and the Spaniels and Dee Clark and Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield and all those people were on VeeJay records.

HM: If one were to think of Chicago musicians by generations, you’re of the generation that produced Charles Stepney, Donny Hathaway, Maurice White, Minnie Riperton. Terry Callier. . . Who else?

UPCHURCH: I don’t know. You probably know better than me.

HM: Well, then the only other ones are Tennyson Stevens and Phil Upchurch.

UPCHURCH: Well, you just called them off, man.

HM: Who else came out of Chicago and made it big?

UPCHURCH: Well, some of the people have stayed here on down through their careers, like Jerry [Butler] and Curtis [Mayfield]. They’ve stayed here.

HM: What about Odell Brown and the Organizers or some of the organ groups big in the 60s?

UPCHURCH: Well, Odell Brown is out in L.A. now, doing some freelance studio work and doing some producing and writing and arranging. There was another group called Clarence Wheeler and the Enforcers. Sonny Burke was with that band. He’s now working for Smokey Robinson, and he does freelance studio work in L.A.

HM: When did you first get a break and get a call to record a record under your own name?

UPCHURCH: Let me see. The first record I recorded, oh, okay. After I came off the road with Dee Clark, there was a tune that we had recorded as a demo, and it was on the shelf at VeeJay. They didn’t want to release it because we were publishing hassles about who owned the publishing on it. So it was a demo that De Clark’s band had recorded, and it had been sitting on a shelf, and some guy got word that I had this hot tune, you know, through the grapevine. He called me up to ask me would I be interested in putting the record out and putting my name on it.

I said, “Well, it’s not my record. It belongs to the organist who wrote it, Cornell Mulder, and Dee Clark is the guy that paid for the session, so it’s actually Dee Clark.

So I went to Dee and asked him about it, and at that particular time, he had lost interest in the project. The guy who created the tune, “You Can’t Sit Down,” had also lost interest in the project by that particular time. He said, sure, go ahead and put it out in your name. It’s all right with us. So the record came out with my name on it, which is part of the reason why I probably never took advantage of it and went out on the road and made appearances from the record, because initially it really wasn’t my thing. It was a joint thing. And I just, you know, I felt funny about going out on the road, making money from the project that that actually belonged to several other people.

HM: Phil, when you play guitar, do you think of yourself as a single line player or as a chord player or as both?

UPCHURCH: As neither, but both. When I play music I think of it as a whole rather than I’m going to just play rhythm now, I’m just going to play notes now -- and I’m just going to play. When I play guitar, I play the entire instrument, you know, not just chords, not just single lines. I play a little bit of all of it.

HM: You were doing studio work in Chicago for a long time, and one of the record companies that you were most involved in was Chess, which also had the Cadet and the Argo labels. Did Chess Records have big plans for you in the 60s?

UPCHURCH: Well, they had some plans that didn’t agree with my way of thinking, so naturally, after doing a couple of albums with them, since our minds weren’t in the same place musically, we parted company in terms of me being the recording artist for the label. They wanted me to be a psychedelic rock and roller. And I don’t consider myself to be a psychedelic rock and roller.

HM: You thought you were playing pretty much straight-ahead jazz at that time?

UPCHURCH: No, I wouldn’t call it straight ahead jazz either. I just would like to refer to it as just music, playing music. And perhaps still more, Upchurch music at that.

HM: Yeah, well.

UPCHURCH: You could call it that, too, because it’s a little bit of everything. It’s been influenced by the classics and by the blues and by jazz and everything, because I like all those different kinds of music, and I listen to those different kinds of music, and it reflects in my playing, I think, which is part of the reason why I was successful in the studio is because I could play more than one style.

Blue Thumb Records is a California label. They knew about me from my previous efforts with Cadet. And when I was out in California visiting, a friend of mine took me to meet to his contact at Blue Film. At the time I was looking for a record deal, and they were known as being a musical record company. Good music was their goal, and since that was my goal also -- to play some good music rather than concentrate on playing this, that, or the other commercial -- we sat down, we had a short talk, and boom, boom, we signed a contract and made a record.

On Darkness, Darkness, we had Chuck Rainey, Joe Sample, a female percussionist named Bobbye Hall, I think was her last name. And Arthur Adams played rhythm guitar. Harvey Mason played drums.

HM: These are some of the well-known names of successful studio players in Los Angeles.

UPCHURCH: Right. Also, one of the tracks I did in Chicago, Donny Hathaway was playing with my band at that particular time. This was before he struck out on his own. And Donny Hathaway is also on that album. He did an orchestration on me on a slow blues tune called “What We Call the Blues.”

HM: What was the Chicago music scene like in the late ‘60s? Was it pretty exciting here? Were there a lot of people around to play with and a lot of people to play for?

UPCHURCH: Well, Chicago was really booming right up to 1969. I think ‘69 was the peak year for Chicago. There were a lot of people coming here to record. There were a lot of recording artists living here, but most of them have left. I don’t know what happened just after ’69. It just started dying out.

HM: When did you move to Los Angeles?

UPCHURCH: Well, I’ve been out there for about four years now this time, and I’m there to stay for sure. Because that’s where the bulk of the activity in the music business is in. And the way I feel about it, if you’re going to be in the business in order to maximize, then you should be where the activity is at its greatest. And that’s L.A. or New York. And since I don’t like the winter weather anymore . . . I think 39 winters is plenty enough.

HM: Phil, in the last few years, you’ve appeared on several records. along with George Benson. When did you first meet George Benson?

UPCHURCH: I met George about 20 years ago in Washington, D.C. He was playing for Jack McDuff. I was playing for Dee Clark. And how I met George was Jack McDuff was opening act on the show, with his band who George was playing for. And I had this record out at that time called “You Can’t Sit Down.” And when I walked into the arena where we were playing -- Jack McDuff was rehearsing -- and they were playing my song, ”You Can’t Sit Down.” I said, “Goodness, that sounds better than the record.” These cats are playing the mess out of my song.

So I walked up to George and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around. I said, hey, man, you’re playing that song better than me. He said, well, who are you? I said, well, you know, my name is Phil Upchurch. He said, Phil Upchurch! Man! So we’ve been tight ever since then.

HM: When did you start recording along with George Benson?

UPCHURCH: Well, he came to town, that was right before the Bad Benson album. And, you know, me and George would get together whenever he came to town to play and hang out and stuff. And he came by the house one time asking me, did I have any material? He was looking for some material for his next album. And he knew that I did some writing, so I pulled out some tapes and played for him. And then I said, one of the songs that I recommended to him, I said, why don’t you do “Take Five”? And he said, “Well, I don’t want to do nothing that reminds me of the ’Late Late’ show, you know. It’s kind of corny.”

I said, “No, I got an arrangement of it I think you’ll like.” And I played this arrangement of it, and he fell in love with it. He said, “Okay, well, I’m going to do ‘Take Five.’ But,” he said, “you got to come to New York and play on a date.” He said, “Because I like that rhythm that you’re doing there, you know. You know, with the wah-wah pedal and stuff.

HM: For a player who specializes, In a very soulful and funky kind of music, it seems to me that you experiment a lot with 5-4 particularly, and also you have a song called “6-2-4,” which appears on a George Benson album.

UPCHURCH: Well, ironically to me, time signatures don’t really mean anything in terms of . . . I play according to a melody, not according to . . . I don’t sit down and say, well, I’m going to write this song at 5. It doesn’t come out like that.

How it happens is I hear a figure in my head dancing around in my head like a repetitious figure. When I sit down, I’m not counting. I’m playing and humming and singing and feeling this groove happening. And when I sit down, I put it on tape and I turn around and I count it out. It happens to be in another time signature.

I mean, Quincy [Jones] made a comment one time. He said, “Some of these cats are listening to this music and they’re setting out, they sit down and they write out telephone numbers. and just put music to it. But I don’t write from a time signature, it just happens to come out. If you count “6 to 4,” if you figure it out mathematically, actually it is 4/4, but with a 6 feeling, you know, it’s just subdivided.

Any time signature can sound like 4/4 with a couple of extra beats added on, depending on how the melody goes. Sometimes the melody forces you into another time signature. It’s depending on how you’re hearing melodically, in terms of how I write things in different key signatures. I don’t hear things in four all the time. I haven’t purposely experimented with other time signatures, it’s just that, that’s just the way, “Oh man, wow that was a bar of five, and I liked the way that bar was going, so I think I repeated a few more times.” So then you’re in f5/4

Most of my compositions that I’ve written, most of them come to me when I’m working on somebody else’s material, like at a record date. “6 to 4” came together, came to me all in one piece at a record date. Ironically. actually, what I had in mind when I put the music together was for Curtis Mayfield to put lyrics to it. Because to me, the way I heard it in my head, it just came out Curtis Mayfield to me. And I gave the tune to him.

He never got around to putting lyrics to it, which I’m glad of, because George got a hold of it. And it was on the Breezin’ album, which happens to still be the biggest selling jazz record in the history of jazz.

HM: You want to call it a jazz record?

UPCHURCH: I think it’s a jazz record in terms of any music, you know, even if it’s just one chord with a backbeat, there’s improvisation going on to me is jazz. That’s what jazz is all about.

To become successful in commercial terms and in layman’s terms, I mean, outside the musical industry circles, like I said, you have to diversify and simplify. In order for me to do what I want, I’m going to do to diversify. I don’t consider myself a singer, but I’m going to start vocalizing.

People come in and they hear the music. They don’t know what you’re really trying to say. You know, they just hear a bunch of music. They don’t know what the music is really trying to say. They don’t know where it’s coming from. But if you get out and you put it to them lyrically with words, then they know what you’re trying to express and they can appreciate it a lot better.

I can communicate with musicians, but I can’t really communicate with your average everyday layperson who’s not really into music technically, but just from what they hear. In order to communicate with those people, I’m going to have to start vocalizing.

A lot of people put George down for becoming slick, but actually he’s playing more guitar than he ever played in his life. They’re just so busy, hung up listening to the background -- It ain’t what’s back there, it’s what he’s putting on top of that stuff.

You take away the background and put a bebop background to it, then it’s bebop.

But it’s the same stuff he’s always played, only better. He’s playing better than he ever played in his life, man. People are putting him down, which is kind of a drag.

HM: People are saying that you’re playing better than you’ve ever played, too. Do you think you continue to extend your technique and extend your ideas?

UPCHURCH: No, I practice. I’ve never practiced before. No, I practice two or three hours a day because I want to become successful.

I never wanted to become successful, it just happened. And I think success is in the head of the beholder. You know, because what is success? You know, is it money or is it the ability to perform and do your job? You know, or is it having a ton of money in the bank?

You know, success with different people is a different thing. I feel successful in terms of I’m not rich. I’m not financially independent. I have to work. But I’m successful in terms of I have a respect and admiration of my peers. And I work at my craft all the time.

So in terms of being successful -- I’ve had people that know me well saying it’s a drag.

Phll Upchurch ain’t made it. Because my name ain’t up in lights, they think I ain’t made it. People might not be standing in line blocks long to hear me play, but I had the respect of my peers, and I know I’m playing better than ever before, because now I’m putting some real time into my playing and getting that stuff together.

HM: Your most recent record is just called Phil Upchurch, and it’s produced by two other guitar players, John Tropea and also George Benson, who you’ve been working a lot with. And we definitely hope that you have a much longer and more richly rewarding recording career.

Thanks very much for being with us today. I’m Howard Mandel. I’ve been talking to Phil Upchurch on Jazz Chicago. nJazz Chicago is a production of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. This edition of Jazz Chicago was edited by Jo Ann Kawell and mixed at Acme Studios. The Jazz Institute of Chicago is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the support of jazz in all its forms.

Adding a tasty bit of Upchurch on electric bass, engaging with George Benson and Chick Corea, on a 1976 DownBeat poll-winners show. . .