Stu Phillips

Composer and producer Stu Phillips carved out one of the most extensive and varied careers in the rock & roll period, moving between popular recordings and scoring assignments for both the big and small screen, resulting in a catalog as broad as any peer. Phillips entered the world on September 9, 1929, and trained at New York City’s High School of Music and Art before continuing at the Eastman School of Music, where he also arranged pieces for the Rochester Civic Orchestra. His first professional foothold came as a copyist on television’s Milton Berle Texaco Hour, after which he joined Capitol Records and supported composer Harry Revel and theremin master Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman during the creation of the space-age classic Music from Outer Space.

He soon fronted a run of easy-listening LPs such as Organ and Strings in Stereo, and beginning in 1958 he wrote and conducted music for the long-running sitcom The Donna Reed Show. Named head of A&R at Colpix Records in 1960, Phillips oversaw a string of chart successes that included the Marcels’ “Blue Moon,” Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel,” Paul Petersen’s “My Dad,” and James Darren’s “Goodbye, Cruel World.” Returning to Capitol in 1964, he oversaw the Hollyridge Strings, a flexible studio-orchestra alias that delivered instrumental treatments of current hits; their debut, The Beatles Song Book, reached the Top Ten and was followed by comparable collections devoted to Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, and Simon & Garfunkel, with three separate Hollyridge Strings albums occupying the Billboard Top 20 simultaneously at one juncture. While there, Phillips also released his own Feels Like Lovin’, a quiet standout of 1960s soft pop.

A subsequent appointment as head of West Coast A&R for Epic Records placed him in charge of sessions by the Doodletown Pipers, Nancy Ames, Bob Crane, and the Golden Gate Strings, another studio ensemble modeled on the Hollyridge approach; the latter group’s Stu Phillips Presents: The Monkees Songbook, long prized by collectors of pre-Fab Four memorabilia, received a CD reissue in 2017. Phillips simultaneously began scoring modest theatrical features, among them 1964’s Ride the Wild Surf and 1966’s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. His most celebrated and provocative contribution remains the soundtrack to Russ Meyer’s 1970 cult favorite Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a feverish celebration of sex, drugs, and rock & roll centered on the all-female Carrie Nations; the Phillips-composed album remained a collector’s staple until its 2003 re-release on the Harkit label.

In 1974 Phillips moved to Universal Studios, where he supplied music for such enduring television series as The Six Million Dollar Man, Quincy, Battlestar Galactica, and Knight Rider. His memoir, Stu Who?, appeared in 2003.