Phillip Hill

Phillip Hill is an American bass and guitar player. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on November 3, 1972. He has been involved in several pop punk bands, including Teen Idols, Screeching Weasel, The Independents, Common Rider, Even in Blackouts, The Queers and the Kobanes. Hill is also a skilled vocalist. He has worked extensively as a recording engineer. His audio engineering credentials appear on numerous albums with a wide spectrum of musical styles, from the pop-punk sounds of bands such as Anti-Flag, Rise Against, Screeching Weasel and his own band, Teen Idols, to the heavy, "death metal" sounds of Human Filleted and Catatonic Atrocity, as well as the country-roots, folksy-blues sounds of The Clayton Miller Blues Band and Appalachian String Band.

Hill grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Growing up in a musical surrounding, he was picking out tunes on the piano before he could walk and learned his first chords on guitar at the age of 3. Hill formed his first band at the age of 13, and within a few years was playing professional concerts around the Southeast as a hired guitarist or bass guitarist in various hard rock bands. Hill founded his own band, Teen Idols, at the age of 19 in the spring of 1992. The band was soon topping the local college radio charts with its first recording.

Hill graduated from Hillsboro Comprehensive High School in 1992 with awards in recording sciences and musicianship under the instruction of the Grand Ole Opry soundman, Vic Gabany. After high school, he worked as an assistant audio engineer on the live television broadcast of the Miss Tennessee Beauty Pageant. At the age of 20, he was hired in an audio/visual position at Nashville's premier amusement park, Opryland U.S.A.. While at Opryland, Hill worked as a video switcher on the stage production of Hee Haw Live, as well as running a spotlight for such performers as George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Alabama, Tanya Tucker and the Oak Ridge Boys.

After assisting in the engineering of Teen Idols recordings at the Sonic Iguana Studios in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1996, Hill was offered a job as an engineer by the producer Mass Giorgini. This position led Hill to move to Lafayette, where he soon became involved with many studio projects in the pop-punk musical genre.

Hill moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he currently resides. He is currently a freelance producer/engineer and is also playing bass guitar for the indie/acoustic-punk band, Even In Blackouts.

In December 2009, after a short tour with the Kobanes, Hill was hospitalized with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung after trying to stop four men from beating up a girl in a parking lot. Because he lacked health insurance, an account was set up to help raise money for his medical bills.^[1]

References

1. "Teen Idols guitarist hospitalized, account set up to help pay medical bills" Punknews.org. December 8, 2009