Glenn Phillips

Echoes: The Hampton Grease Band, My Life, My Music and How I Stopped Having Panic Attacks Glenn Phillips

Glenn Phillips is a critically acclaimed guitarist and composer who's released 20 albums over the past 50 years. From Rolling Stone: "If rock & roll guitarists were kamikaze pilots, Glenn Phillips would be in heaven right now."

As a founding member and songwriter of the Hampton Grease Band in the late '60s, he had encounters with John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Spider-Man co-creator and artist Steve Ditko, and played with countless bands of the era including The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers, and Jimi Hendrix (Phillips is a featured interviewee in the Hendrix documentary Electric Church).

His first solo album, 1975's Lost at Sea, was recorded at home and self-released. It predated and influenced the do-it-yourself movement that later overtook rock music and led to him being signed to Virgin Records by Richard Branson.

Phillips' memoir relates not only his musical experiences, but also the circumstances that shaped him: his parent's alcoholism, his father's suicide, having a daughter on his 18th birthday that was given up for adoption, and his later experiences with panic attacks and how he stopped them. Phillips says, "The common thread to all of my music is that it's all been part of an effort to understand a life that didn't always make sense as it was happening." At its core, that journey is the story of his memoir.