The Steve Miller Band

 

I was sitting in my archive room lined with shelves containing boxes of slides, negatives, prints, and digital images from my entire 67 year life. On July 4th I’ll be 68 years old and currently spend more time reminiscing past events than I do participating in new ones. I’ve spent a lifetime collecting images taken of me and my family as well as ones that I took of them along with everything that took place around me. So if I don’t make use of them at this stage in my life, I never will. This blog is dedicated to Jesus Music and the 2 volume book that I wrote about it, which Praeger published in 2012, but at the same time, I write about secular issues and artists that I classify as spiritually important for one reason or another.

Today, I want to talk about Steve Miller, the baby boomer musician that is a seminal baby boomer rock star. He was one of those guys who happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right interests and mentors to nourish him. By the time that the San Francisco sound, via Haight Ashbury through the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms along with the Monterey Pop Festival, made headlines across the country he had his foot in the door. Miller grew up in Wisconsin where he was exposed to Chicago blues and the guitar, before his doctor father moved the family to Texas. Les Paul, the guitar genius, happened to be a family friend who gave Steve lessons.

Steve met Boz Skaggs in Texas and they ended up forming the Steve Miller Band that played in San Francisco with Miller, Skaggs, Jim Peterman, Lonnie Turner, and Tim Davis. They gigged for the hippie crowd and ended up backing up Chuck Berry at the Filmore, after Jefferson Airplane, the headlining group failed to cut the mustard, according to Miller. The Steve Miller Band got a recording contract and began to produce albums. The first was “Children of the Future,” which was a spacey psychedelic album that could accompany an acid trip. The next album was “Sailor,” which was a harder rocking album that included the radio hit, “Living In The USA,” along with some psychedelic numbers. If you want to hear a concert from this era in 1968 click on this link:
https://youtu.be/YqmOkKdW-rc (1968)

By 1969 I was out of the army, after being drafted in 1966, and was attending college on the GI Bill. Since college was the breeding ground for all aspects of the counter culture, I had my opportunity to decide which faction to join. The SDS (Students For A Democratic Society) were declared illegal and outlaws, so I never considered them, but instead fell in with all the other returning veterans, that were embracing the hippie movement. Ironically the hippies were also involved in illegal activity, but it wasn’t destructive, but simply mind expanding. Easter weekend 1969 I was off from school so I drove to Chicago, which was under 300 miles and took less than 5 hour to drive to, on the I-94 expressway. When I arrived, I stayed with my army buddy, Bob Duran, who was discharged a month before me.

On Saturday night we smoked some weed that I brought with me and hit the blues clubs in the Chicago Old Town area. In the window of one of the clubs was an advertisement for a concert at the Aragon Ballroom on Easter Sunday afternoon with the “Iron Butterfly” headlining and the “Steve Miller Band” opening. We talked about it and decided to check it out the next day. I had already seen the Iron Butterfly at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, around Halloween 1968 and was somewhat impressed by their performance.

On Easter Sunday, we headed to the Aragon Ballroom, with Bob’s friend driving. When we got there, it was an hour before the concert started, but there were tickets available and it was first come first serve concert seating. We got in line, behind about 30 or 40 people and while we waited I pulled out 2 capsules of mescaline that I told my friend Bob that I had. He already told me that he would take a hit and his friend would be our chaperone and designated driver. So we each took one and swallowed it, using a stick of chewing gum to provide the saliva. Normally, it would take about 90 minutes for the peak of the trip to happen, but I knew that we would be seated in about 45 minutes.

After we were seated and got situated there was an announcement that there had been a bomb threat and everyone was to immediately evacuate the building. People immediately got up and began to quickly walk to the exit. Bob, his friend, and I sat there and since 2 of us were starting to get stoned, we weren’t that concerned and besides we’d seen live artillery fire in the army and weren’t that worried about some amateurs, who were probably bluffing. So when everyone left, we stayed and moved to the first row, center stage. After about 10 minutes everyone returned and sat in all the seats around us, but nobody ever said anything to us about where we were sitting.

By the time that the Steve Miller Band began their performance, we were peaking on the mescaline and their performance was augmented a thousand fold. There were only 3 members of the band at this time, who were Lonnie Turner on bass guitar and Tim Davis on drums. Their performance was tight and their musicianship was phenomenal. The power trio was popular at the time with bands like Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience topping the charts. After we were completely blown away by their hour long performance comprised of songs that I had never heard before, other than “Living In The USA,” the Iron Butterfly took the stage.

The Iron Butterfly was good, but I enjoyed the Steve Miller Band more and since we attended a matinee, there was going to be an evening performance also, which immediately followed. Almost everyone got up and left after the Butterfly played their 17 minute long hit, “In A Gadda Da Vida.” Their act had a gimmick, which was an early pyrotechnic grand finale at the conclusion of their signature song. the front of the stage burst into flames as they concluded their set and we sat in our seats, still numb from the mescaline.

Nobody asked us to leave, so we sat in our front row center stage seats, as a new crowd began to fill the chairs that were set up in front of the stage on the dance floor. We were blown away a second time by the Steve Miller Band’s incredible performance. Steve talked about their upcoming new album called “Brave New World,” and played songs from it,. The ones that I remembered at the time were “Kow Kow,” “Seasons,” “Mercury Blues,” and “Space Cowboy.” When I got back to Detroit, I went to the record store and bought all 3 of Steve Miller’s albums.

Over the next 3 years I saw the Steve Miller Band perform another half dozen times at various venues around the Detroit area including Meadowbrook, the Eastown theater and University of Michigan. Then in 1971 I moved to Los Angeles, California from Michigan and became a born again hippie Jesus freak and broke all ties with secular music, which I now viewed as a tool of Satan. I destroyed or sold all my secular albums. Ironically, the last secular concert ticket that I purchased before destroying my collection of 300 record albums, was for Steve Miller at the Palladium on Sunset in Los Angeles.

The night of the concert, my wife Kathy and I went to the Palladium, but were convicted, so we sold the tickets to someone for half price. When the guy we sold the tickets to heard the reason, he tried to give me back the tickets and told me that I was being too extreme in my Christian belief. I stuck to my views and after we left, we attended a Friday night home church that I knew of, run by some Jesus freaks. For the next 15 years I only purchased and listened to Christian rock music and sometimes even questioned that.

 

Over the years, I would hear new Steve Miller songs, playing over PA systems, that I immediately recognized, even though I never heard them before. By the late 1980s, I was living in Salem, Oregon and my views on music had mellowed enough to allow me to attend an occasional secular concert. In 1988 Steve Miller came to the newly constructed L. B. Day Amphitheater in Salem, so I attended with a friend that I worked with. After that I took my oldest son, Michael to see Miller at Portland State University In 1990. By the mid 1990s, ironically I was a freelance rock and roll photographer photographing everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Rolling Stones for Ticketmaster and a variety of music magazines. I covered many Steve Miller concerts and reviewed them for a variety of publications, including Blues Revue and Blueswax during its publication life.

All in all, I’ve probably seen more live Steve Miller performances than any other artist, and have turned many other people on to him. He isn’t a gospel or Jesus music artist, but he has done as much to propagate joy and love as that genre has. If you want to see some performances of the band click on the links below. The photos were taken at 3 different concerts. The first was in 2003, at the Waterfront Blues Festival, in Portland, Oregon. The second was in 2006, at L. B. Day Amphitheater, that I took my oldest daughter Rachel too, who later fronted a blues band.

The third was the last time that I saw the Steve Miller Band, in 2012 when I covered the Portland, Oregon Waterfront Blues Festival for Blues Revue and Blueswax. Coincidentally, my army buddy Bob Duranl who moved from Chicago to Post Falls, Idaho, was visiting and attended the Blues Festival with me. That year Steve was wearing a white shirt and the guy that we were standing next to was passing around joints of marijuana that were as large as cigars, as soon as the concert began. I became so intoxicated by the fumes that I flashed back to that first concert back in 1969, and I began to hallucinate, as tears rolled down my cheeks and I had to dry my eyes so I could focus my camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfsxwUBQfz8 (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkVjAEHcsvs (1974)

How The Jesus Movement Really Began

Way back in 1978, when I was the associate pastor at the Highland Park Neighborhood Church in the North East Los Angeles barrio known as Highland Park. It was home for the Avenues Mexican gang that sprayed graffiti in the alley behind the church, but we also had Jesus music concerts in the pioneer Agape Inn coffee house. Then in 2008, when I was still a contributing editor and staff photographer for “The World’s Only Christian Satire Magazine,” the legendary “Wittenburg Door,” I began writing a history of “Contemporary Christian Music,” for Praeger publishing Co. This is how it developed as I wrote and communicated with my editors, until 2011 when I completed it.

Table of Contents:

Preface: What Is CCM? An essay that explains what CCM is to readers who may not be familiar with the genre, and brings them up to speed.

Part I: Prelude – Setting the Stage.

Chapter One: The Baby Boomers 1946-1964. This chapter sets the stage for the birth of the counterculture, and the coming of age of the first batch of Baby Boomers, as they graduate from High School. It covers all the significant cultural, political, religious, and social issues that made up this time period.

The first of the “Baby Boomers” were born in 1946 to returning World War II veterans. Those same soldiers fought Germany and Italy in Europe and Africa, along with the Japanese in the South Pacific. Harry Truman, the man who okayed the nuclear annihilation of two cities in Japan, was president. The returning veterans were happy to find work, after living through the joblessness of the “Great Depression” prior to going off to the work of war. From the auto plants of Detroit, to the steel mills of Pennsylvania and the oil wells of California, Oklahoma and Texas, there was plenty of work. For those that preferred a pastoral setting to that of a bustling city, there was an infinity of fertile farmland in between the coasts to feed and employ the growing population.

The first memories of that early batch of “Baby Boomers” were formed through the lens of a new technological influence, the television set. President Dwight D. Eisenhower expounded on the Communist threat and the American Dream, while Walt Disney marketed everything from Davey Crockett to Mickey Mouse and taught the young sponges to dream. Most everyone had Sunday off from work, and all but drug stores, movie theaters, bars and businesses related to the recreational industry were closed. For most citizens of the USA, Sunday mornings were either spent in church or watching religious programs on television.

UFO sightings, beginning in 1947, were part of early childhood memories. From flying saucer crashes in Roswell, New Mexico, to floating lights in Adrian, Michigan, earth’s attention was drawn to the sky and the possibility of extra terrestrial life. Movies like “This Island Earth,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and “I Married a Monster From Outer Space,” and authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlien speculated the ramifications of human encounters with alien life forms and space travel.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), was first discovered in 1938, at the beginning of WWII, by Albert Hoffman, a chemist, working for Sandoz Laboratories, in Basel, Switzerland, on a cure for morning sickness during pregnancy. The psychedelic mind expanding entheogen was used by the US government in mind control experiments under the CIA’s MKULTRA program, during the 1950s and into the 1960s. The drug played an important part in shaping the Boomers’ vision of reality and spirituality. Especially after receiving positive endorsements by recognizable members of society, like the actor, Cary Grant and the publisher of Time/Life, Henry Luce.

Pope Pius XII led the Catholics while Billy Graham donned the Protestant leadership mantle and ultimately became the Protestant counterpart to the pope. War broke out again, this time in Korea, with our new enemy, the atheist Communists, who now controlled North Korea with the help of the Chinese hoards, led by Mao Zedong. The hot war in Korea ended, but the cold war with Communism continued and Nikita Khrushchev led the USA’s second arch enemy, the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR), and pounded his shoe on a desk in the United Nations assembly.

A new musical form was born in the early 1950’s known as rock & roll. Pioneers like Ike Turner and the “Kings of Rhythm” along with Bill Haley and the “Comets” recorded the first 45 RPM records of the new genre. The sound was derived from the merger of White country and bluegrass music with Black blues, gospel and R&B. It was hard to distinguish whether the performers were Black or White by just listening to the recordings. Some of the early Black pioneers were Little Richard Penniman, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley.
Bo Diddley (Ellas Bates), like so many of the pioneers of rock & roll received his early musical training in the church. When Bates was asked about why so many of the early rock & roll artists were involved in churches when they were younger, he responded with “That’s where we learned how to do something…but I wasn’t playing no Rock ’n’ Roll in it then. My pastor of my church was Reverend Smith and the man who took care of the music part was the professor O. W. Frederick, Oscar Frederick, and he taught me violin, so I played classical music for twelve years. Nobody influenced me to play classical music. I saw a dude with a violin and a stick and that looked really cool, you know? And my church got together and took up twenty-nine dollars and that’s what it cost back then. Twenty-nine bucks was a lot of money back then. You could get a sack of potatoes for like damn near ten cents.”

Their White counter parts, like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and Dion Dimucci came out of their respective churches. Dimucci was one of the early White rock & roll stars. He was raised a Roman Catholic, in New York city, where he formed Dion and the Belmonts, after Belmont Avenue, in the Bronx. The style of rock that they performed was doo wop, the vocal harmonizing style of Black music that originated in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia , and it was 1957. He narrowly avoided death, by passing up on the opportunity to fly with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper on their ride to eternity in 1959. In a 2006 interview about the different messages of Blues and Gospel music Dion explained –

“A lot of Blues music seems like it’s moving away from God, or the center, and Gospel music is moving towards it. It’s embracing a higher reality. When you look a little closer, the way that I define it or explain it is that the Blues is the naked cry of the human heart, apart from God. People are searching for union with God; they’re searching to be home. There’s something in people that seeks this union with their creator. Why am I here? Where am I going? What’s it all about? Who am I? All this kind of stuff, but the Blues is a beautiful art form. It’s incredible that you could express such a wide range of feelings. You could use it to sell hamburgers or cars, or to cry out in sorrow, or joy. You could express yourself totally within the Blues. So there’s some kind of connection, but if you ask me exactly what it is, I think that it all comes out of the same place, so to speak.” (1), (2).

Christian recordings were a marginal esoteric branch of the music industry produced by Christian record companies, like Benson Records. In 1951, Jarrel McCracken, a graduate of Baylor university, in Waco, Texas began what was to become an important record label for the Jesus movements music – “Word”. Southern Gospel was the dominant form of Protestant Christian music at the time, in White society. Christian music was just as segregated as the rest of society, so Black gospel had its own record label, “Vocalion”. Most Christian music was marketed by Christian bookstores. In 1950 the Christian Booksellers Association was born, and included about 2 dozen stores.

Racism was the law of the land, in the form of Jim Crow, and enforced segregation. It existed throughout the country in one form or another. Some states, like Oregon, simply made it against the law for Negroes to move there, while others like Michigan, simply designated what areas they could live in, or gather. The Southern states, like Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi had perfected segregation, and had separate facilities, including restaurants, bathrooms and drinking fountains for Negroes. The mixing of the races in the music bled over into other areas. After education was integrated, in 1954, through Brown vs. the Board of Education, in Kansas, the floodgates were opened.

Elvis Presley was the breakthrough act for rock & roll to hit the mainstream. After being televised on some of the top TV programs in the mid 1950s, including “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” “The Milton Berle Show,” “The Steve Allen Show,” and finally, “The Ed Sullivan Show,” he became the most popular entertainer in the USA and ultimately the “free world”, during the last half of the 20th century. Interestingly, Presley was a frustrated Southern Gospel singer, who signed with Sam Phillips and Sun Records, after failing an audition with Jim Hamill and Cecil Blackwood’s Southern Gospel group, “The Songfellows”. At one point Presley’s popularity even eclipsed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s National Communist witch hunt headlines.

The fear of communism and nuclear war were further exacerbated by films like “Invasion USA” and “On the Beach”. One of the pop culture trends in the 1950s was to build a bomb shelter for the family. Using the same technology that launched destructive nuclear warheads, the USA and USSR began a space race, in 1957, after the Russians launched Sputnik 1. Soon the space race escalated from launching dogs and monkeys to humans, into orbit around the earth.

Beatniks and the “Beat Generation”, in the 1950s preceded the counter culture “Hippies” of the “Baby Boomers’ ” 1960s revolution. Two of the leading literary icons of the “Beats” were poet Alan Ginsberg, the author of “Howl,” an epic poem about man’s disconnection with his environment, and his novelist compatriot, Jack Kerouac, author of “On the Road”, and other equally hip tomes. They wrote about the rift between the human soul and the industrialized world that the 20th century had produced.

Preceding the Beats were the Industrialized Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies. They were union activists, who used literature, folk music and blues to carry their message. One of the martyrs of the movement was an immigrant named Joe Hill, who was executed in 1915. Singer songwriter, activists like Woodie Guthrie sang about Joe, and the plight of the working man. Even authors like James Jones wrote about economic injustice forcing the poor to join the military as their only option to poverty, in his novel “From Here To Eternity”.

By the 1950s the big three auto corporations, GM, Ford, and Chrysler, along with major supporting industries from the rail road and trucking to steel production, were unionized. This resulted in wildcat strikes that sometimes turned violent, as the unions demanded better wages and working conditions. As wages got better, the rural Southerners, both Black and White began immigrating to the larger industrial cities, like Detroit and Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Although the cities were segregated, there was a mixing of the races at the workplace, and sometimes in recreation.

The Civil Rights movement began with the passing of “Brown vs. the Board of Education” by the Supreme Court, May 17, 1954, calling for the desegregation of public education. In 1955 Rosa Parks started the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that brought Rev. Martin Luther King to his leadership role, as co-founder of “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference”. In 1960 Ella Baker founded “The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee” (SNCC), which was the beginning of an expression of what became known as “Black Power”.

American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark in Philadelphia, via the television set, became the first national TV show to showcase rock and roll and its culture, in 1957. By the end of the 1950s, Elvis was drafted into the army, and a tragic air plane crash claimed the lives of three early rock stars, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper. In 1960, Chubby Checker released a cover of Clyde McPhatter’s song called the twist, which initiated a dancing craze, that got unhip white people shimmying and shaking on the dance floor. It was even reported that President Kennedy did the twist in the White House. One of the major unexpected results of this new musical phenomenon was the integration of American society.

If rock & roll was the soul of integration then folk music was the mind. By the early 1960s the Black rock & rollers were marginalized, and top 40 AM radio stations played pop rock that had lost its earlier edge. Fabian and Franky Avalon replaced Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. As rock & roll was on the descent in the late 1950s, folk music began its ascent. Folk music was inspired by Woody Guthrie and his student, Pete Seeger, whose career was put on a temporary hiatus when he was blackballed by Senator Joseph McCarthy as a Communist.

The Kingston Trio was the first major act of the new folk genre, to receive national recognition and air play. After them came the Limelighters, The Highwaymen, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary. The music was acoustic in instrumentation, and used guitars, mandolins and banjos. It employed a wide range of vocal styles, both solo and in harmony, and its lyrics dealt with gritty subject matter. Topics like adultery, exploitation, murder, robbery, swindles, extraordinary exploits, and broken promises told stories that captivated its audience.

Peter, Paul and Mary were made up of Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers. Their debut album in 1962 was inspired by the same social, cultural, and political tradition that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger followed. Their first hit off the album was “If I Had a Hammer”, by “Weavers” Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, who first recorded it in 1949. They represented the musical conscience of the nation, supporting the struggling civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam war faction.

At one point folk music so upset the status quo, that the city of New York banned folk singing in Washington square, which precipitated a protest that successfully, reversed the decision. Popular folk singers of the day participated in the civil rights movement, and sang about it’s struggles. The biggest folk ensemble of the 1960’s, the “New Christy Minstrels” performed at the White house for president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

This thought provoking music reflected the mood of the country, as it continued in the Ideological war with the Soviet’s. There were multiple Cold War confrontations with Communism, in the early 1960’s, from the Marxist conversion of Cuba, the crisis with Russia, over nuclear warheads in Cuba, the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco, the invasion of the Dominican Republic and US military involvement in Viet Nam.

Barry McGuire began a solo career in 1960 after he purchased his first guitar. He spent some time in the Navy, and got into Woodie Guthrie, Ledbelly and Pete Seeger until he started gigging at Santa Monica bars, until Peggy Lee discovered him, and got him a recording contract. In 1962 he joined Art Podell’s group, the “New Christy Minstrels” as the lead singer. He wrote and sang lead on the group’s biggest hit 45 rpm single, “Green, Green”, and eventually went solo again, which produced the biggest his of his career, when he recorded P. F. Sloan’s song “Eve of Destruction, in 1965.

Black music groups began receiving more air play, on White radio, after groups like the Mills Brothers and the Inkspots broke the ice, back in the 1930s. By the 1950’s when Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry came on the scene, the White market was being integrated by Black music. Columbia records producer, John Hammond signed a Black Gospel singer from Detroit, Michigan, named Aretha Franklin in 1960. At the same time Detroit produced the most important Black record label of the 1960s, when Berry Gordy established “Motown” records with Smokey Robinson singing “You Got To Shop Around“.

Sam Cooke was 1 of 7 children born to a Baptist minister in Clarksdale, Mississippi. After the family moved to Chicago he became part of the family’s singing quartet, and by 1950, at the age of 19, joined the “Soul Stirrers”, a black gospel group. Through his success with the “Soul Stirrers”, on Specialty records, he achieved fame and fortune within the gospel community. He signed as a secular artist with Keen records where he had his first hit, with “You Send Me”. He started his own record label, SAR, and finally signed with RCA, where he had a string of hits, until his death in 1964.

In an interview in 2002 Clarence Fountain, leader of the “Five Blind Boys of Alabama”, who was a contemporary of Sam Cooke, explained – “We had plenty of chances to go with rock & roll. We had plenty of chances for doing the things that all the rest of the people had done. We could have did that too, but we didn’t want to. I was in the studio with Sam Cooke when he signed his contract. The man offered me one just like he did him. But I turned it down because that ain’t what I told the Lord I wanted to do. I wanted to sing gospel.” (8)

After his discharge from the army, Elvis Presley became a movie star, only singing songs in his own films, that he starred in, with titles like “Blue Hawaii”, “Follow That Dream” and “Kid Galahad”. His impact on music now wasn’t from his style and manner of performance, but from the direction that he took. Music films, featuring artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan would soon begin to make their way to the screen, as an important way to satisfy and create fans.

The 1950s ended on a sour note, as Fidel Castro established a Marxist government in Cuba, after taking power, and became an ally of the Soviets. The next conflict with the Communists occurred when U2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers was shot down over Russian air space. Everyone was ready for a change, when a youthful looking John F. Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic president elected, and ushered in an era of optimism, along with the Peace Corps. Kennedy’s inaugural speech in January 1961 set the tone of his administration when he said – “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Mylon LeFevre was a member of his parents Southern gospel music group, “The Singing LeFevres”. “The LeFevres” were pioneers of Southern gospel music, and owned their own recording studio, as many of the early groups did. They also embraced the potential for ministry using the new medium of television. While Mylon was in the army he wrote a song titled “Without Him”, which was recorded by Elvis Presley, and over 100 other artists. (2), (3), (4) Mylon formed a secular Southern Gospel Rock group named after himself, and spread the gospel in secular venues, through his music, in the late 1960s.

The next major breakthrough that would change the social structure of country was the advent of the FDA approved birth control pill, which began the sexual revolution. Sex of course had always been popular, or there wouldn’t be a human race, but sex without the consequence of pregnancy never had been readily available before. This liberated women, as they never had been before, which in turn augmented the women’s rights movement.

The Roman Catholic Church convened Vatican II, in 1962, to discuss the birth control pill among other issues of the day. Pope John XXIII was in office at the time and at least four future popes were council members. Some of the key issues that impacted church members were, no longer requiring them to abstain from eating meat on Friday, allowing the mass to be spoken in the language used by attendees and economic justice.

In an interview in 2006, Bruce Cockburn explained the impact of Vatican II on the world in general: “I think that there is, but it’s hard to access. One of the things that happened in the 1960s was Vatican II, in which Pope John XXIII convened all the bigwigs of the Catholic church to decide what the destiny of the church should be and what role it should play in the modern world. It was decided at that time that the church would be the church of the poor. It was decided that I think because the vibe of the sixties, the kind of philosophy and energy that was flowing around. It flowed through the clerics as much as it flowed through everybody else. I mean it was just in the air. It touched everybody, whether they wore the uniform or not…of the hippie movement I mean. As a result of Vatican II the church began to teach people in Latin America to read. As a result of people in Latin America learning to read they started trying to overthrow the governments that were keeping them poor and malnourished and not getting medical attention and all sorts of stuff. Many church people became supporters of that kind of social change, and we’ve been living with the result ever since.” (6)

Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, as the Berlin wall was erected. Freedom riders descended on the segregationist South, from Washington DC, as students begin protesting everything from nuclear testing to the escalating war in Viet Nam. The CIA conducted experiments, under the code name MK Ultra, to find out the potential of psychedelic drugs like LSD, for mind control. Ken Kesey, a Stanford graduate student in creative writing was given LSD and wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

At the turn of the decades, with Elvis in the Army and rock & roll on the decline after the payola scandal ruined the career of New York DJ Alan Freed, and nearly derailed Dick Clark’s American bandstand, squeaky clean Pat Boone was the top pop star in the US. Boone was a descendent of American frontier pioneer, Daniel Boone. He began his singing career in the 1950s, when he was a college student, and recorded sanitized versions of what was then called race music. He had hits on the radio with songs like Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame” and Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruiti.” He drew criticism from both sides, when some accused him of trying to pollute White society with Black music, while others claimed that he was exploiting Black songwriters by capitalizing on their compositions.

The human space barrier was cracked for the USA, when John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962, and the first communications satellite, “Telestar” was launched by AT&T, which producing a radio hit for the “Ventures”. “Silent Spring” one of the first books, voicing concern for the environment was published by Rachel Carson. Students begin protesting more loudly, as they supportted the civil rights movement, and began speaking with a louder voice, through the Free Speech movement in California and the forming of “Students For A Democratic Society” (SDS), in Michigan. At the same time Bob Dylan released his debut album.

Another genre of music, who’s popularity was waning in the early 1960s, was known as doo wop. Groups like “Little Anthony and the Imperials,” “The Drifters,” “Dion and the Belmonts,” and “The Coasters” were some of the top groups. The Castells, with lead singer Chuck Girard, had a couple of top 40 hits with “Sacred” and “So This Is Love”.

“I was pretty much a straight-laced young guy. I was into the music thing. I wasn’t really much of a student but I wasn’t really into religious activity or spiritual curiosity in those days. I was more into the music thing, I got bit with the music bug about junior high school years, and by my senior year in high school I had put together a little vocal group. I’m old enough to where I go back to the doo-wop days in 1961.” (7)

Soon afterwards Girard began working as a studio musician. and collaborated with Beach Boy producer, Gary Usher, and sang lead on Brian Wilson’s hit composition about a motorcycle, called “Little Honda” by the “Hondells”. Motorcycles would play an important part in the 1960s, through the “Hells Angels” motorcycle club, led by Sonny Barger president of the Oakland, California chapter.

Civil rights was the dominant issue during much of the early 1960’s, along with the escalating conflict with Viet Nam. Bob Dylan wrote and recorded “Blowing In the Wind”, which not only became a top 40 hit when Peter, Paul & Mary recorded it, but an anthem of the civil rights movement. Pop art took the stage and graphic television images of self immolating Buddhist monks in Viet Nam burnt themselves into the brains of the beholders. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard, after their research with mind expanding drugs like psilocybin, mescaline and LSD got out of hand.

President Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation is punctuated by violence, including the death of Medgar Evers whose murder Bob Dylan wrote a song about, and four black girls that were killed in an Alabama church by a bomb blast. At the same time the UK, US, and USSR sign an above ground nuclear test ban, as women officially find out that they are discriminated against, through a commission’s finding and a US supported coup condones the murder of president Ngo Dinh Diem.

President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn is assassinated by Jack Ruby, and Lyndon Baines Johnson is sworn in as the new president. President Johnson declares an “unconditional war on poverty”, and signs into law, the “Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Dr. Strangelove” is released and the Beatles come to America, appear on the Ed Sullivan show, while “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is number one on the radio charts.

Chapter Two: From Jesus Freaks to Jesus People (Both Secular and Christian Counter Culture). Chronicling the birth of the Hippie counter culture in Northern California and how it affected a revolution of thought among all the youth of America, through drugs, music, politics and religion. Pioneers like Chuck Girard, Phil Keagy, Mylon Lefevre, Barry McGuire, Larry Norman, and the Talbot Brothers performed music in secular venues that reflected their spiritual quests.

Part II: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Christian Music.

Chapter Three: The Birth of Jesus Music – The late 1960s to 1971. The Edwin Hawkins singers, Norman Greenbaum and “Jesus Christ Superstar” producing top 40 secular radio hits about Jesus, making Jesus cool. The birth of Christian coffee houses and night clubs, Ralph Carmichael’s Light Records, and Andrae Crouch.

Chapter Four: The Birth of Contemporary Christian Music – The early 1970s. Independent record labels, church becomes a venue (e.g. Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa) and the first Christian rock stars – Children of the Day, Love Song, Randy Matthews, Larry Norman.

Larry Norman and his contemporaries, like Mylon Lefevre, Chuck Girard, and Randy Matthews, did for the Christian Church what Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones did for secular society. They introduced their audiences to the Black influence in White music. The church was being integrated, from the inside out.

Chapter Five: The Floodgates are open 1972-1979. More Christian rock stars come on the scene – Daniel Amos, Amy Grant, Keith Green, Mustard Seed Faith, Petra, Phil Keagy, Second Chapter of Acts, Randy Stonehill, John Michael Talbot, Terry Talbot, etc., etc.

Chapter Six: Conversions and defections from secular music validate the genre – Bruce Cockburn, Richey Furray, Al Green, Barry McGuire, Van Morrison, Leon Patillo, Dan Peak, Noel Paul Stookey and Bob Dylan. The Jesus movement is buried by the Moral Majority.

Chapter Seven: The Maturation of CCM – The 1980s. Contemporary Christian Music produces its first crossover superstar – Amy Grant. The multiplication of the genres within the genre – The Alarm, The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Call, Dion Dimucci, Benny Hester, Kings X, Newsboys, Twila Paris, Undercover, U2 etc.

Chapter Eight: CCM Becomes Mainstream – The 1990s. Carmen, Steve Curtis Chapman, dc Talk, Kirk Franklin, Jars of Clay, Rich Mullins, Point of Grace, Michael W. Smith, Jaci Velasquez, delirious?, and worship music.

Chapter Nine: The Expansion of CCM – The New Millennium. The Blind Boys of Alabama, Family Force 5, Michael Franti and Spearhead, Kutless, Lifehouse, MxPx, P.O.D., Six Pence None the Richer, Switchfoot, and Third Day. CCM magazine stops hard copy publication and redefines what Contemporary Christian Music is.

Chapter Ten: Jesus Music Festivals. Just as Jesus music groups followed on the heel’s of secular rock, so did Jesus Music festivals. The ICHTUS festival in 1970 was a direct reaction to the Woodstock festival in 1969, and today there are hundreds of Christian music festivals all over the world featuring every genre and catering to every spiritual taste.

Part III: Interviews with ten CCM pioneers, legends and stars.

Chapter Eleven: Andrae Crouch.

Chapter Twelve: Chuck Girard (Love Song).

Chapter Thirteen: Randy Stonehill.

Chapter Fourteen: Marsha (Carter) Stevens-Pina (Children of the Day).

Chapter Fifteen: Pete Furhler (The Newsboys).

Chapter Sixteen: Dion Dimucci.

Chapter Seventeen: Clarence Fountain (The Blind Boys of Alabama).

Chapter Eighteen: Barry McGuire.

Chapter Nineteen: Bruce Cockburn.

Chapter Twenty: Charlie Lowell (Jars of Clay).

Amazon link for “Jesus Rocks the World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music” https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Rocks-World-volumes-Contemporary/dp/0313377707/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1ESINQQLT4199&keywords=Bob+Gersztyn&qid=1636164130&sprefix=bob+gersztyn%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1

Smashwords link to Bob Gersztyn’s Kindle electronic books: https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=Bob+Gersztyn

“Blues Rock Review Link to Bob’s articles and interviews about Blues Rock. https://bluesrockreview.com/author/bobgersztyn

Link To Jesus Rock in Perfect Sound Forever. http://www.furious.com/perfect/christianrock.html

Fortney Road & the All Saved Freak Band

When Fortney Road was a soon to be published book by Jeff C. Stevenson. Jeff contacted me and asked me to read an advance copy of his book and provide an endorsement that he could use for the book jacket. The reason why he asked me was because of the fact that the book is about a religious cult that had a successful Jesus music band called the “All Saved Freak Band” and I wrote about them in my book “Jesus Rocks The World.”

All Saved Freak Band Utube cuts:

My Poor Generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaQvuEUPx08&list=PLr8mf0wNU_VQzJe5PgjendsW94ZTjLWUv

 

Brainwashed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VSINjCRg5Y

 

For Christians, Elves and Lovers:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEXVVh608wY

 

Sower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBYfdw_GGZQ&list=PLr8mf0wNU_VTFjC5SYYQNSrC7qzTSoztf

The leader of the cult is pastor Larry Hill, who was also a keyboard player and lead singer for the band. Glenn Schwartz became the lead guitarist for the band by the time that they began recording albums in 1973. Schwartz was a renowned blues guitarist from the Cleveland area who formed the James Gang in the late 1960’s. When he left the James Gang to play with Pacific Gas and Electric Company Joe Walsh took his place. Schwartz was in his prime as a guitar player and was considered the most impressive guitarist who played at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival. He was in the same class with, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. At the same time he preached to the crowd about Jesus from the stage to the embarrassment of his bandmates.

Soon after Glenn left the secular music world and joined a religious cult that included whippings for discipline. What began as a sincere effort to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ became a trap that some lost their lives in before escaping from, after a decade of abuse. Read more about it at Fortney Road: https://www.amazon.com/Fortney-Road-Death-Deception-Christian-ebook/dp/B00UMBFU0M/ref=sr_1_1?crid=60LHHDAA4ZJQ&keywords=Fortney+Road&qid=1636082317&sprefix=fortney+road%2Caps%2C159&sr=8-1 and buy the book when it come out. An article came about Glenn Schwartz and the book https://www.loudersound.com/features/glenn-schwartz-the-fall-and-salvation-of-the-white-hendrix

Pacific Gas and Electric Company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdtLhnL1cXY

Glenn Schwartz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEHTNXAaLws

 

Black Francis & Frank Black

Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV was born in 1965 and lived in Boston and Los Angeles as a child. He had a religious background and was influenced by the music of Larry Norman after he saw him at a summer camp that he attended as a youth. His parents played 1960’s rock and 1970’s Jesus music as he began to play the guitar at around the age of 11. After attending college he began to play with other people and in 1984 his college roommate was guitarist Joseph Alberto Santiago who he later formed the Pixies with. To complete the band they added a rhythm section comprised of bassist Kim Deal and drummer Dave Lovering. Thompson changed his name to Black Francis as the front man for the Pixies.

 

The band drew critical acclaim as an alternative rock band and began a new genre for bands like Nirvana and Radiohead. Their fans range from David Bowie and Bono to P. J. Harvey and Thom Yorke. Thompson was the primary song writer and singer and the songs used surrealistic Biblical imagery in much of the music. They released 5 albums during their primary heyday and “Surfer Rosa” was considered their peak in 1988. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3r-xMt9JmM&list=PLZqsyBiYZFQ3IvEJS2LrYkQMxIJWJemDN . A documentary chronicling their career with interviews and music clips tell the story very well at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjAhm82v1es

After the Pixies broke up Thompson changed his name to Frank Black and formed Frank Black & the Catholics.” The band was comprised of Scott Boutier on drums, Rich Gilbert on guitar, David McCaffrey on bass and Dave Philips on guitar & keyboards. Thompson in the form of Frank Black fronted the band as the lead singer and guitarist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW5FolPhmRA Utube 1998 release “Frank Black & the Catholics.”

I saw them play in Portland, Oregon at the Crystal Ballroom in 2001. I covered it for the Wittenburg Door as part of a story I was working on about the relationship that Biblical imagery has to pop music. I photographed it as well and included some of the images. .At the same show David Lovering, the drummer for the Pixies performed a magic act prior to Frank Black and the band taking the stage where he created smoke with a drum and barbequed a pickle between 2 forks using an electric cord.

Then in 2004 I photographed a reunion performance from a Pixies tour in Eugene, Oregon. It was after I became friends with Larry Norman who informed me of his friendship with Charles Thompson and how he influenced his music. I found out that Thompson even recorded and performs a cover of Norman’s song “666.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqTxI5wTAwQ . One day when Larry was over my house in 2002 he was in my office sitting in my swivel chair with his feet up on the desk and he pointed to a box that said “Frank Black and the Catholics.”

“Can I see that box?” He asked.

When I brought it down and gave it to him he asked for my loupe and I turned on the translucent viewing screen for him to view the slides and negatives on. I had some black & white enlargements that I printed up in the dark room and even a contact sheet, along with some 4×6 color prints that I had the custom lab do. I gave Larry the prints that he liked and he told me about how Thompson’s mother was a Jesus freak like we were. Larry went to the same show that I did in Eugene in 2004 and I sent him scans of some of the best shots that I took at the show, which I included in this blog entry.

Chuck Girard Interview Part 2

I forgot to post part 2 of my Chuck Girard Interview. With all the hoopla of the “United We Will Stand” concert last week and the emphasis on the roots of CCM and Jesus music, I thought that it would be advantageous to let Girard finish his story. His interview and dozens of other pioneers of CCM were what I used to write my book “Jesus Rocks The World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music.” It was the first and unless someone rode on my coat tails, the only book of its kind on the subject. In the future I’ll publish other interviews that I did for the book with other primary sources, like Tommy Coomes, Michael Blanton and Billy Ray Hearn, along with dozens of others. My blog and book are 2 places that you can get an accurate academic analysis of CCM. Here is part 2 of my interview with Chuck Girard, which began on December 10, 2014.

Bob Gersztyn: You know an interesting thing while I was looking through your online book, and you had that example that a lot people come up with about some missionary going into Africa, and his kids play some rock song that the natives say sounds like something that their witch doctor would use to conjure up evil spirits with. Did you by any chance see the Martin Scorsese PBS documentary on the Blues that came out?

Chuck Girard: No, I didn’t every actually get to see it but I knew that he had done it, I think I saw a little bit of the segment with the Taj Mahal on it, I saw a little bit of that one.

Gersztyn: Well this one thing that blew me away was when he had commercial blues artist Keb Mo, go to Africa, and they went to this remote village somewhere, and they played a Muddy Waters song for him. These guys listened to it, and they said hey he is one of us, and they start playing this same melody under native instruments, and they start singing, and it is unbelievable. They are singing the same melody, except his words are different, he is talking about a city in his existence where as our song we’re talking about going out, and hunting a lion, and how the harvest was, and stuff like this. They said these are our traditional folk songs. I thought wow that kind of blows the hole in the whole witch doctor thing.

Girard: I’ll have to check that out because that is very interesting, I would love to see that, that is the one with Keb’ Mo in it?

Gersztyn: Yeah I can’t remember what night it was.

Girard: That’s all on DVD now I think so you can probably rent it.

Gersztyn: Yeah, they went to Africa they were there for I think that whole episode, and they were looking for the roots of the Blues, and where it came from. It kind of showed the evolution of the whole thing, and something that was interesting at the same time Robert Darden who’s the senior editor of the Wittenburg Door, he wrote a book called People Get Ready which was on the history of black gospel music. He has a lot of this stuff in it. If you want to read a really good book that talks about how music, Rock music, I mean he is specifically talking about black gospel music, but you can see it coming into doo-wop, and all this stuff, and the melodies he’s talking about, how this came from these ancient folk songs from that period.

Girard: I believe that, I’m not a scholar of it but I believe that would be a very easy case to make, and I’m sure he does a great job of it.

Gersztyn: What are some of your current musical projects right now?

Girard: You know I’m getting older, and I’m not in the public eye anymore, and I’ve been doing my own thing since about 1980, and it’s been kind of difficult because it’s very expensive to make an album. Part of my latest transition in my life was that three years ago I moved to Nashville. I happen to be out on the West Coast right now but I live in Nashville now, and my son-in-law has a studio that I’m able to use free of charge, and then I have a very good overdub room in my house so the cost of albums has gone measurably down. I’m looking forward to in my later years here being able to be a little more prolific because back from 1980 on I’ve really only made about four albums so that’s only one every five years or something.

Gersztyn: So you came here to Salem, Oregon back, boy I can’t remember if it was the late ‘80’s or the early ‘90’s but I took my son to go see you, and you played at a church here. I talked to you briefly, no way you would possibly remember but I just thought I’d throw that in.

Girard: Well thanks, it’s always a thrill to hear those kind of stories. Back to current projects, I put an album out in 1996 called Voice of the Wind that was a live worship album, kind of pre-dating really the worship movement because even though it came out 1996 I had been working on it for ten years because it took so long to make it. So I’m currently developing volume two of that, in fact I actually brought all the basic recording equipment, the computer, and all the outboard gear that I needed here to LA. Actually last night recorded some people my daughter put together from her church for the congregational part of it because we needed to record, you can never really successfully record a group of people singing in a church because of the sound leakage, and all of that, so you have to go back in a re-record it later. So we did that last night and while I’m out here I’ll also put my friend Caleb Quaye who did all the guitar parts on my first worship project. I’m going to have a few days with him to do some guitar stuff out here. Caleb was with the Elton John band in the early days, and he teaches music out at Life Bible College now. So I’m going to be able to be a little more prolific here in my later years, and hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have this volume two of this very different, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Voice of the Wind album but it’s very down tempo, low key, an hour long piece that kind of pulls you into, as I’ve been told, into worship, and into prayer, and into praise. So a lot of people have been waiting for volume two for a long time. The concept of this album is to record it live, the basic song, and then embellish after the fact with adding guitars and bass and drums, and all that after you record the initial connection with the audience. I didn’t want to have bunch of musicians on stage with me because it would be distracting so the basic live recording is just me and a keyboard with a group of people, and then we embellish it after the fact. So that’s the next album that would come out. After that’s done, I’ll make my first studio album with live players since 1991. That will be the project that comes after the worship project and I am really excited about that because it will be my first album of kind of all original tunes done in the studio since 1991. So that’s the next two, and then I don’t know where I’m going to be going from there.

Gersztyn: Well that’s very interesting do you think you might have a Love Song reunion at any point?

Girard: That door is never closed; we actually did a reunion this summer. Calvary Chapel was refurbishing the big sanctuary during the month of April and May, and they set up circus tents again for six weeks, and I flew down. I was up in Canada on tour, and we got together, and we played one night in the tent, and it was web cast, and the whole thing, it was really a brilliant night, and it really came off just great. The guys really love to play together. Tommy Coomes and I have our own ministry direction going so we are less hungry for the opportunity to play. But Bob, and Jay, and those guys they play at the drop of a hat. There’s always talk about touring again, but here’s the problem, you have to get someone to promote it, and in the climate of the way things are today, and the expense involved in mounting a tour with five players it would have to be somebody that really had faith in the project, and was willing to put some money into it. So I don’t really know if we’d ever be able to put together a successful reunion tour because we couldn’t mount it, the financial side if it, we couldn’t do it ourselves, and I don’t know if we could find someone that would believe enough in the idea. At the end of the day they have to make money, and I don’t blame them for thinking that way because you can’t go out there with the idea that you’re going to lose money, and I just don’t know if there is anybody out there willing to take that kind of risk.

Gersztyn: With the Christian radio stations all over the country I would think that somehow there would probably be some way, but again somebody would have to take up and want to do it.

Girard: You’d be amazed at how little interest there is with Christian radio stations about anybody back from the ‘70’s. There is a whole new generation of young people out there that don’t even know what the Jesus Movement was much less who Love Song was.

Gersztyn: Sure, my daughter who’s just going to Bible College right now, she says to me Dad she says I’m finding out all of this stuff about how the hippie movement started the Jesus Movement she said you ought to write a book about that. She said I never even knew about all of that, and these people don’t have a clue about it, and the only reason I even know is because of you. I look at right now why I’m interviewing you about the interest in the 1960’s because of the forty year anniversary of the summer of love, and I would think that the same sort of thing would be going on within the people who want to make money in Christianity. I mean you have to look at it totally not from a spiritual point of view but from a monetary business point of view, well there’s a buck to be made because of the fact that there’s the anniversary of the Jesus Movement. Just like Woodstock, right now you’ve got a two year period between the summer of love, and Woodstock, and they are going to be going crazy for this whole two years with the 1960’s. Well at the end of that the Jesus Movement begins, and so you might just run into somebody, and drop something, and maybe they’ll get interested who knows.

Girard: Well it could happen, and if somebody did it right I think it could be successful. You know it takes some capital. I am actually working on writing my life story right now, and I kind of wish I had that ready right now but it’s quite a project to really just sit there, and remember everything and write it down. I was talking to Jay Truax the Love Song bass player about some chronology. We are e-mailing to figure out what happened when , did this happen first or did this, because so much of it is so mushed together because of the drugs and all of that, so I forget the chronology of it. When I felt like really led of the Lord to write this all down I thought “who cares about my life, and what do I have to write about?” I never even became really famous, but as I really write down the experiences that I had it is amazing. Even I’m interested, and I’m going “wow, this is great if I was reading this about somebody else I would be totally riveted”. I’m going up to Northern California in the next couple of months, and I’m going to have a lot of down time where I’m not going to be around my comfort zone, and hopefully I’m going to try to really just peck out some pages of this book, and get his thing finished because I think it is going to be a very interesting story. It is representative of just what you’re talking about, it is all about the Jesus Movement, and it will be in its own way a history book.

Gersztyn: Well you were right at the epicenter of it, and if anybody would have had something to say about it, it would definitely be you.

Girard: Well you know it is funny because my life, in a way, parallels the progression of rock music. When I became musically conscious rock music was in it’s infancy. So my whole life span kind of parallels the growth of rock and roll from doo-wop to what it is today. In a way my story is not just a history of the Jesus Movement it’s a history of music because I get into a lot of the stuff about starting out in the studios. Back in the days when I first recorded we would use three track machines. I was working in the same studios where Phil Spector cut the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, and a lot of the book is going to cover musical history too, so it is going to be interesting on a number of levels. I’m actually more excited about that almost than I am some of the musical projects, about getting it done at least.

Gersztyn: Who are some of the other people that you would name as being important like yourself who came out of that period?

Girard: I’m not saying I’m important

Gersztyn: When I say important I mean you’re important because of the fact that you were at the epicenter of it. And I’m not saying it for an egotistical sort of reason, but the fact that well here’s an example, Mylan LeFever. I used to go to rock concerts, I’m from Detroit, Michigan originally, and when I was a hippie I would drop acid, and I’d go to the local rock venue called the East Town Theater, and I went to go see Traffic one time, and Mylan had a group. I knew nothing about them but in the middle of the rock concert I’m telling my wife who was my girlfriend then, “I feel like I’m in church,” and then I find out ten years later he was a back-slidden Christian.

Girard: Well I’ll tell you I guess the way to answer the question would be like. who’s book would I want to read. I think Barry McGuire could write a very interesting book. I think he’s been faithful for many years. In many ways he’s the patriarch of the whole movement because among my peers Barry is the oldest one of us. See here’s the deal.. age-wise I’m about ten years older than most of my peers, Randy Stonehill, Larry Norman.Larry is a little older but most of those guys are about ten years younger than I am. Then in my range there are a few people that are kind of in their sixties now but then it goes up to Barry who is in his seventies so he is really a father, and has had a very interesting life. Andrae Crouch would make an interesting book if it is not already out. Some of these guys might have already written a book for all I know. Those guys were pioneers.. they were like the first guys. When I got born again Larry’s album was out, Larry Norman, so he was really the first. Upon This Rock was already out, and Andrae was doing stuff. So for a little period of time there about all there was out there was Love Song, and Larry, and Andrae. Those people would have interesting stories. Larry lives right up there where you are I think right?

Gersztyn: Yeah, I even did some photography for Larry a few years ago.

Girard: So they are interesting people that had something to do with it, I think after it gets into the Michael W. Smiths, and the Steven Curtis Chapman’s it’s already kind of commercialized, and I don’t know that those stories would be as interesting to me as some of the earlier ones, it is just a handful you know.

Gersztyn: I was writing articles for an encyclopedia, and I needed to talk to Barry, and I did. I started to talk to him like I was with you about the early days, and when I brought up the subject of drugs he got very upset so I don’t think he would really want to talk about that early period.

Girard: I know him pretty well but he has some little places, and then he will change his mind too. I don’t know? I don’t get that, why he would get angry with that if it is part of your experience.

Girard: How long ago was this?

Gersztyn: I think it was 2004.

Girard: I don’t know him as well as others do but I know him pretty well but I didn’t know that side of him. I didn’t know that he had that kind of little eccentricity I guess you’d call it.

Gersztyn: I’m interested in the whole, because I came out of the hippie movement, and LSD. It’s like one night I just had a bad trip like you, and I said that’s it I’m done with this stuff, and I flushed it down the toilet. The next day I had a Bible, and I started reading my Bible. Within a few months after that I became a born again Christian. It’s like to say there wasn’t a connection between that would be absurd, so I’m interested, and I feel everybody who was involved in the drugs has that connection, because it’s an obvious connection.

Girard: Yes it’s part of your story, and I’m a little shocked that he’s like that.

Gersztyn: Well even Mike Macintosh I remember listening to his testimony about taking acid, and having a bag over his head, and somebody shooting a gun next to it. And Odin Fromm talking about how he was in the desert and had a hundred hits of the most powerful acid, and he saw a vision of Jesus, and everybody would talk about it. Anyway I think that I got plenty of information here, more than enough that I’ll need for the interview, and the only other thing is I’d like to get some photographs to go along with it, and the thing that is really frustrating is I photographed you in Love Song many times back in the ‘70’s, and I gave somebody all my slides. They were going to do something with them, and they never gave them back to me, and I can’t remember who it was, and these things would be irreplaceable. One set of them if you ever see them they had the name Laverne Campbell stamped on them because I did them for the pastor of my church.

Girard: I know Laverne, he’s dead now right?

Gersztyn: Yeah, he was my pastor, and in fact I photographed Love Song for him; I think you guys were going to the Philippines.

Girard: Yeah he had something to do with that.

Gersztyn: Yeah, and so I think he went with you even.

Girard: Yeah I think he did actually.

Gersztyn: And so I shot a roll of film of you guys, and gave him the slides, and I think I have two of the slides right now.

Girard: Alright, I’m glad we got to do this, and I’m sorry that it took so long.

Chuck Girard Interview Part 1

 

By: Bob Gersztyn

 

June 27, 2007

 

It’s time that I got back onto the main subject of this blog, my book, “Jesus Rocks the World.” As you can well imagine there was a lot of research involved in writing the book. A very important part of that research was interviews with primary sources, while they still were alive. After all the Jesus movement and its creation of Christian rock & roll for white middle class churches helped spawn not only the contemporary Christian music industry but also the entire mega church industry that now exists. Jesus movement pioneers like Tommy Coomes and Debbie and Ernie Rettino are ministers of music today for the Billy & Franklin Graham organization and Saddleback church, respectively. These same pioneers began their Christian music careers at Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, back in 1969/70. That church was the epi-center of the Southern California Jesus movement that spread across the country and around the world to Europe and parts of Africa and the Orient.

 

 

Over the years there have been arguments about who the father of Jesus music is and many people say that it was Larry Norman, while others will name Mylon LeFevre, but the truth of the matter is that there were many fathers and mothers, all of which continued to nurture the new art form until it matured and led the Protestant church into the 21st century. One of the most important groups to come out of the movement was “Love Song,” that was made up of Chuck Girard, Tommy Coomes, Jay Truax, Bob Wall and John Mehler. I already wrote about them in May, but now I want to publish the interviews that I did with Chuck Girard and Tommy Coomes, as my first hand primary sources.
My interview with Chuck Girard will be first. I’ve known the members of “Love Song” since 1972 when I they first came to the church that I was involved with in Los Angeles, California. I talked to Chuch more than the other members, because I booked him to perform at the church as a solo artist after the group broke up in 1974. He convinced me to book Keith Green for a concert, before anyone even heard of him. I interviewed him for the Wittenburg Door on June 27, 2007, and it never got published because the magazine stopped publishing before the interview entered rotation, so I used it for my book when I began it in 2008. This is the complete interview. Chuck was already a pop star who had 3 top 40 radio hits since 1960, before he became a born again Christian, so his perspective went deeper than anybody else’s except maybe Barry McGuire, who I also interviewed and will latter publish. Then in 2010 Love Song reformed and toured the West Coast, so I photographed them in Vancouver, Washington. Then a few months later I booked Chuck to play at the Agape Inn reunion in Los Angeles, California, where it all began. So without further delay, I present to you the “Chuck Girard Interview.”

 

 

 

Bob Gersztyn: How did the Jesus Movement come out of the 1960’s counter culture, and how does it continue to affect the world today?
Girard: From my experience, which is all I can speak from, we started to hear the first rumblings of it around late 1960’s. We were a bunch of hippies who were seeking God through eastern philosophies, and all the different spiritual systems that were out there, the Urantia Book, Aquarian Gospel, and reading the Bible at the same time. By the time we started to hear about Calvary Chapel, which was my first connection to the Jesus Movement, we had pretty much narrowed our search down to the idea that somehow Jesus had to be included. So we were at that point, the description I would make of where we were at is that we were “mostly Christians” as we would say. We were kind of already moving in that direction, and we started to pick up hitchhikers along Pacific Coast Highway, and they started talking about this church called Calvary Chapel where they found God, and God was moving there. So we decided that we needed to check it out even though we personally weren’t all that interested in the Christian thing but we felt like hey, you know if hippies are telling us God is moving somewhere we should at least find out what’s going on. So we went up to visit Calvary Chapel, and really found it quite different, I did at least, from my earlier experience with Christianity. It was very alive and vital, and I could tell that there was a real presence of God in the place. I didn’t know the terminology, what to label everything, but I knew that something powerful was happening, and I needed to look into it. Now historically that still wasn’t really the Jesus Movement. It was “bubbling under”, but hadn’t really exploded, and wasn’t officially named yet. This was the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s; I got born again in February of 1970. But I think that Calvary Chapel really became the media focal point for what eventually became publicized throughout the world as the Jesus Movement because Calvary Chapel had a very photogenic look. It was kind of this un-churchy looking Spanish style California building where hippies, straight people, and business people would come together to worship, and was quite picturesque in itself. So the media glommed onto the idea that they could get it all down at Calvary Chapel, hippies, straight people, the cool look, and the current music, the music that Love Song and other groups were playing down there, so that was kind of the beginning of what the media began to call the Jesus Movement. I guess you would describe the Jesus Movement as the mass salvation of hippies, and from what I understand the actual movement, or counter culture movement, started a little earlier than that. There were already pockets of it happening up in Northern California with Ted Wise and some of the people that were starting Christian communes up there but it wasn’t yet a media event, just more like the underpinnings of what was ultimately to become this movement that had national focus. When we got on board and we started to play at Calvary Chapel it was really kind of the hinge, the crux between the bubbling under into the public expression of what the media was going to call the Jesus Movement, and Jesus people and Jesus music. It was quite impacting for its day. We were a band, and we got saved there at Calvary Chapel, and we had these songs that we had written about our quest for God. We started to play at this little Monday night bible study where there was this hippie preacher named Lonnie, he gave the message and we played the music. The place was running about two hundred a night, and within four months there were over two thousand coming into this little six hundred seat church. The only way we could handle the overflow was to put folding chairs out on the patio, and we had glass walls so the people could see in and listen on speakers outside, and it was quite a “vibe”. Then we moved into a circus tent for a number of years while the bigger sanctuary was being built, and the tent to me was kind of the hot point for the media. From there it began to be publicized throughout the nation and ultimately the world, and became known as the Jesus Movement and this very impacting revival. I would define revival as the mass salvation of lots of different people at one time and that certainly would describe what happened from 1970 to 1975. Then ultimately it branched out in different degrees of impact throughout the world, and really was kind of on the books for about seven years I think, 1970-1977 is when I’d say the main influence of that whole movement was. Really the only way I can reflect on the impact today is by the fact that wherever I go four years later I can personally get a crowd out anywhere of at least thirty-five to fifty people anywhere in the world that will come, that would know my music, andwere part of what was going on back then. So in my opinion it had a lot of staying power because forty years later you have a lot of people who are still walking with the Lord that got converted during that period of time. As far as it being influential today in any active way I don’t think it is but the ongoing influence of the salvations of many people that happened in the early ‘70’s that are still walking with God, that have formed churches, that have become the evangelists and the preachers of today it is still very much in evidence.

 

Gersztyn: You talk about “we”, who were the other people that were included with you that were unsaved, and got saved?

 

Girard: I was involved in a little communal group of about eight hippie guys that just through osmosis got thrown together because we were of like mind. It started out in night clubs, talking to people, and sharing our thoughts on spirituality and all of that, and some people would get into what we were talking about and ultimately we wound up with a nucleus group of about eight people.(X) The founding members of Love Song were involved in that group, and then there were a couple of other people who didn’t wind up in Love Song but started other bands. Chuck Butler who started Parable was part of that little group, and a couple of three bands came out of our little group of seekers (X). When I say “we” that is who the “we” was.

 

Gersztyn: What was it like for you before that? Talk a little bit about from the time you graduated from high school up to that point.

 

Girard: I was pretty much a straight-laced guy, I was into the music thing. I wasn’t really much of a student but I wasn’t really into religious activity or spiritual curiosity in those days. (X) I got bit with the music bug about my junior high school years, and by my senior year in high school I had put together a little vocal group. I’m old enough to where I go back to the doo-wop days in 1961.

 

 

Gersztyn: What is your birth date by the way?

 

Girard: August 27th 1943, so I’m going to be sixty-four. I’m a year younger than Paul McCartney and about the same age as Mick Jagger, by a few months. I was kind of coming out of this more straight-laced type of background, and although I was an alcoholic, I wasn’t really into the drug thing. I was sort of curious when the first coverage of the drug scene started to come out in the mainstream press, mainly focusing on the San Francisco hippies that were up in Haight-Ashbury. I was really curious about what was causing them to grow their hair long and kind of get into this back to (X) nature thing. I remember specifically one photograph of a hippie looking into a light bulb like he was seeing the whole universe, and I did become kind of curious as to where they were at in their heads. So I was (X) open minded to finding out what trip they were on, but I really wasn’t drawn that much into drugs. I was happy with alcohol, and I was into my music thing. Like I say in 1961 I was a senior in high school. I had a hit record that went on to be a top twenty record on the Billboard charts so I had this sense of (X) achievement, and the drug world wasn’t of interest to me at that time.

 

Gersztyn: What was that record?

 

Girard: My group was called the Castells and we had two hits in 1961 and I think 1962 or 1963, one song was called Sacred, and another song was titled So This Is Love. (X) Just to complete that history, later on I got involved in hot rod surf recording, and started working with a guy named Gary Usher who had co-written the song In My Room with the Beach Boys, and had worked with Brian Wilson, and was actually a friend of Brian Wilson’s. He was doing that same kind of hot rod surf music thing, and I got involved in being one of his studio crew members. There was another hit around 1964 with one of the groups I was involved in called Little Honda by the Hondells, and that is more known than the Castells stuff, most people know the song. Most people that go back that far know the song that goes “first gear it’s alright” you know.

 

Gersztyn: I remember that, I’m sixty myself.

 

Girard: I was the lead singer on that song so that was kind of my little brush with fame, and gave me a taste of music business success, and that kind of stays with you even if you can’t maintain it for very long. So I was always on this musical quest to continue to be successful in music, and I wasn’t really that interested in the drug scene that much but like I say I glommed onto alcohol in the meantime, and I’m sure by any standards was an alcoholic at a very young age. As I say I got interested in what was going on with this whole hippie scene, and eventually through my being in music it became easier to get drugs, and eventually I stumbled on to my first experience with marijuana, and I really liked that. It wasn’t until about a year after that, I think I smoked marijuana one time, and then I didn’t take any other drugs like that for a whole year. Eventually I did get hold of some LSD, and that was really kind of what changed my life. That was the drug that for me was a real connection into the spiritual side of the world, and at the time not being a Christian I didn’t realize that it was a counterfeit experience, and that it came from darkness. The Bible says that the enemy will come; Satan will come as an angel of light, a minister of righteousness, so some things that are not of God look very enticing and very positive not everything that’s demonic is scary and evil looking. Sometimes it looks very enticing, and very much like a true answer. So that’s what I thought, I thought drugs were part of how God connected with man, and the whole hippie scene was a spiritual quest. It wasn’t until I got into it that I realized that very few hippies were really seeking God like I was; they were more onto the tripping out side of things, and just having fun. I did manage to connect with this group of seven or eight people who were on more of a serious spiritual quest, and we’re the ones that became the little communal group of seekers. So that is kind of my transition into all of that. As I got more into the drug scene my whole physical appearance changed. I started to grow my hair long, and grow a beard, and I began to understand why the hippies looked like they did as I became one.

 

Gersztyn: So at that point how many times would you say that you had used LSD or any other mind expanding substances?

 

 

Girard: I was a pretty serious drug taker for about four years. from about 1965 is when I started to really kind of get into it until about ‘69, ‘66 to ’69, somewhere in there. You don’t count every trip, but kind of doing the math, I probably took over five hundred LSD trips. Now, you have to realize that John Lennon claims to have taken over a thousand so I was kind of an amateur by some standards, but for me that was a lot. That was about every other day for a few years at least, every other two or three days getting high on some kind of drug, and that was my lifestyle for probably seriously three or four years. Then toward the end of that period which was late ‘60 when God started to lower the boom on all of us, and started to pull us into the net I started to realize that this was really kind of a dead end. I wanted to have a spiritual high without taking a drug, or having some synthetic substance in my body. I thought, you know if this is really something from God than I ought to be able to maintain this level of connection without having to take something. So that was my next step, how can I be on a trip with God without taking drugs? That was probably late ‘69 when I first started to think about the idea of putting the drug thing aside, and trying to achieve some sort of spiritual connection without drugs. Also, by that time (X) several of us in our little commune of seekers had been arrested, and some of us were awaiting trial. The glow was fading very quickly on the whole drug experience. I was living in Salt Lake City for a little while, and I had a very negative experience with LSD up there. It was what we call a real bum trip, and that was the last time I took acid because it was so frightening to me. What happened to me was basically a sense of disconnection and loneliness that was just unbelievable. It was an overwhelming sense of, almost like God wasn’t even in the universe, and I was floating around all alone, and in complete utter darkness and loneliness, and it was just so frightening that when I came back off that trip I thought I’m not taking this anymore. I could never go through that again; I don’t ever want to experience anything like that again. Then I was about another year on smoking weed, and hashish, and the like, and then ultimately we got born again, and delivered from all of that.

 

Gersztyn: That is interesting that it happened in Salt Lake City too.

 

Girard: Well yeah, you talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. The first place we moved was Hawaii because we thought that Hawaii was going to where the New Jerusalem was going to come down to the Earth because it was so pristine, we thought. So we went over to Hawaii, that’s a long story in itself, and lived off the land, and tried to be hippies over there. Then how we wound up in Salt Lake City, my friend Jay Truax who later on became the bass player for Love Song had this connection with a couple of musicians who had moved to Salt Lake City. He had moved there and become a member of what really became the biggest local band for a number of years in Salt Lake City, (X) a power trio called Spirit of Creation. He came over to the islands to invite me to join that band so I went to Salt Lake City for a year, and lived there. (X) The band thing never gelled so I never joined the band, but I lived in Salt Lake City for a year. So that was the beginning of the end of drugs for me that last year in Salt Lake City, and then we moved back to Laguna Beach for about the year before I got saved. So our quest went from Hawaii to Salt Lake City to Laguna Beach, and then we got saved.

 

Gersztyn: What involvement would you say that the hippie counter culture, and drugs, and all of that had on the entire Jesus Movement, if there where no hippie culture and drugs would there had been a Jesus Movement as we know it?

 

Girard: I think not. I actually have a theory on that. The hippie thing was largely about the connection to the art of the day. The music of the Beatles, the psychedelic art, the whole counter-culture reflected how much everybody in the counter-culture was on the same trip. Now as I understand it, there are more people alive today than have ever been born through the whole history of time statistically. The theory I have is that, first of all, at that time, the late 60’s , the world had never seen a time when so many people were on the same wave length or trip in the history of the world. So you had this huge massive counter culture group going through the same changes, if you will, at the same time through the leadership of the Beatles, and other groups that were telling us about their experience, and kind of leading way, and connecting with us, and reinforcing what we were experiencing. We were going hey look the Beatles are on the same trip we are. or this guy Bob Dylan or whoever. So right around the same time everybody became disillusioned kind of like we did. “Okay we’ve gone to the end of this thing and even John Lennon is saying the dream is over, where do we go from here? If even the Beatles who we’ve been following are at the end of their place of bringing us anywhere, where do we go from here? So I don’t know of any other time that I can think of in history where you’ve had so many people at the same plateau: “we’ve done all of this, we’re done, this can’t take us any further anymore.” So there were only two choices as I see it, you’d go back into the world, and back into money and become a yuppie, or over into Christianity. There was a small group of people kind of stayed in that time warp, and for years after I’d become a Christian I met people who had locked into the hippie lifestyle and just stayed there, but they were a vast minority.

 

Gersztyn: They were called “Dead Heads.”

 

Girard: Well a lot of them were, yes. I was really disillusioned because I saw a lot of hippies with supposedly lived by the ideals of peace and love, who had proclaimed “down with the establishment, don’t trust anyone over thirty” then became the businessmen of the ‘70’s, and then the ‘80’s. For most of the rest of us, it was a natural thing to just flow into a relationship with Jesus. That was the only place that was really a step above where we were at in this disillusioned state of uncertainty. That is why I think such great numbers of people became Christians at that time because we were all at that place at the same time. We’d had it, we’d gone as far as we could with the drugs, what the counter culture was preaching, Timothy Leary, and all of that. so what was the next step? For many, many, many people it was Christianity.

 

Gersztyn: During the 1960’s did you have any political thoughts about what was going on, everything from Civil Rights to the Vietnam War?

 

 

Girard: Speaking for myself I was completely divorced from all of that. Our perspective was that we were on a spiritual plane, and I wasn’t personally really watching the political scene. Many were, some people became more politically oriented, and became activists, and all of that, but my group of friends we were more on our own trip if you will. Actually the drug thing is quite a selfish thing. It is really more about what is happening to me than what is happening in the world, or what can we do to help others. It’s more about where am I at. Again I can’t speak for everybody, but for me that is kind of where I was at, and I was not very politically aware during those years.

 

Gersztyn: So you didn’t have any problems with the draft or anything like that?

 

Girard: When I was of draft age Kennedy was president, and he was letting married men out of the draft, and so I actually got married, and I think part of the reason was so that I could get out of the draft. I did that probably about the time that my lottery number, or whatever they were doing at the time would come up. (X). I was married for about a year and a half, and I kind of dodged the bullet that way because after that I wasn’t of prime draft age any longer, and I managed to dodge the draft legally, so I didn’t ever get called.

 

Gersztyn: So you didn’t really have any thoughts about the Vietnam War even afterwards?

 

Girard: Again I wasn’t, it is remarkable how

 

Gersztyn: Well because it lasted up until 1973 so even as a Christian you didn’t really get involved, or even consider it one way or the other?

 

Girard: I understood it more after I became a Christian and I got more connected to what was really happening in the world but by that time in 1970 it was pretty much over wasn’t it? I think all of the POW’s came home around 1972 so I was more aware of it but I wasn’t really connected. It wasn’t a conscience thing; it wasn’t like I had an opinion. I was really kind of apolitical Not disinterested but just politically stupid. I just really didn’t understand the impact of all that was going on with Vietnam and all of that like I would today. I much more understand what’s going on with Iraq and all of that than I would have understood world affairs of that type in those days, because again I was kind of in my own cocoon sorting my own life out, and for some reason that wasn’t a part of my interest I guess.

 

Gersztyn: Well what do you think about the current political situation, the war and all of that?

 

Girard: I’m no political pundit, I can only view it from my own perspective, and I’ve always supported the war. My perspective is that I feel like with 9/11 we were attacked, and some people would say well it wasn’t directly Afghanistan, it wasn’t directly Iraq, it wasn’t directly Saddam, you know it was terrorists, but I think the war was Bush’s attempt to at least try to say, you can’t do that to us or you will pay the consequences. I don’t really know enough about, it’s such a unique situation the fact that we’ve never had a war with a non-entity like terrorists, but they did come from somewhere, and they are funded from somewhere. My other philosophy is that what we don’t know about what is going on in government would probably fill volumes so I can’t really make informed decisions about what the president or the government does. All I an do is say that I’m not for our young people dying in a war, and if it was my own kids over there and one of them was killed I might have a different perspective, and might take it a little more seriously from the standpoint of the consequences to me but for the most part I feel like we did the right thing going in. Now whether we are doing the right thing staying or not is up for debate, but I think that it was the right thing to do at the time. There were good things that have come out of it. What with Saddam, and the Al-Qaeda guy that did all the beheadings was taken out, so good things have happened from it. But I’m not politically aware enough to really, I’m not trying to dodge it, I’m just telling you that I don’t consider myself to be some great political voice. ,I actually feel that most musicians, and I’m probably no exception are pretty politically ignorant. When I hear musicians speaking out for causes I say “go play music, . what do you know about it?” Musicians and actors are so myopic, yet their opinions hold great sway. The media holds great power in swaying public opinion. It’s the blind leading the blind.

 

Gersztyn: That’s true except for like Country Joe and The Fish, or somebody like that there really weren’t a whole lot of political bands.

 

Girard: Dylan claims he wasn’t political, but he was making political statements. The honest truth is that from my own perspective today I just don’t think that we have a clue really what is going on in the world. I know how it is in other areas of endeavor, like I know how the music business is, and I know how people perceive the music business, and where real music is coming from. It’s not coming from the people who win the Grammies, and all of that. So trying to define the times is like trying to explain the book of Revelations there are so many better men that are smarter than I that have studied the book of Revelations and can’t agree on the doctrine of the book of Revelations so who am I to come out and say this is what it means. Same with the world.

 

Gersztyn: Since you bring up music, and where it is coming from why don’t you talk a little about that.

 

Girard: Christian music specifically or music in general?

 

Gersztyn: You can do both

 

 

Girard: I think that there are two levels of what is happening in music. Lets take secular music for a minute because then we can append a perspective on Christian music based on secular music which is more influential to the world. Influential only in the sense more of entertainment because I don’t think we really have that much political, we don’t have folk rock, we don’t have protest songs anymore, there’s not that much political statement out there like there was back in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. I think musically lets just talk about it from a creative standpoint. The Bible says that in the end times there will be an increase in knowledge, and I’ve noticed in the last five years being a music fan and kind of staying current with bands that are out there, I think that there is a lot of excellent music out there. Five years ago I had to really search to find something good, the occasional Coldplay or Radiohead CD would come out that would be musically great, and I would go wow that is really good, that is worth listening to. But recently, largely because of the internet, there is a shift of paradigm from the control of the commercial music business which is losing its grip now in a favorable way in my opinion. I’m glad to see that. Today there’s a new wave of music coming from kids that are just sitting in their garage with their ten thousand dollars worth of equipment with nobody breathing down their neck about what music they can make, or what’s commercial, or what’s not. There’s some really interesting music out there today for the first time in a long time, and lots of it. I go on iTunes sometimes, and they have a feature that suggests “if you like this you might like this”. You can surf from group to group, and I go “where are these guys coming from, nobody has heard of these guys, this is great music”, and then I’ll go to the next one, and I’ll say “well this is great too”, and five years ago that wasn’t the case. No one is telling these kids what to record or what’s politically correct lyrically. It is just coming from their experience, and their gut and we’re in a really good place just from that creative standpoint in music right now. Now the problem with the Christian part of it that I’ve always seen is that we’ve never been the leaders, we’ve been the followers. So more often than any other kind of statement you hear about a Christian group is the comparison of that group to a secular group like “he’s the Christian Sting”, or “this band is the Christian equivalent of whoever”. What I don’t think Christian music has really realized yet, except for possibly some of the worship music that is coming out, is that the only thing that separates us from the world now is the anointing and power of God Maybe we’ve even gotten to the point where we are as good as worldly bands, so we may be on an even par that way, but the only thing we’ve got they don’t have access to is the anointing of God. If we don’t explore that side of music, and get God involved in energizing and giving power to our music then we are just equal to the world, and I don’t think that’s the goal of any Christian artist unless he just wants to win a Grammy or something and he doesn’t consider himself to be a minister, which I think many Christian bands don’t claim. In fact I see a lot of the bands that start out more Christian, like Lifehouse, that started with Malibu Vineyard, and other groups that came out, Sixpence None The Richer, now that girl who was their lead singer, Leigh Nash has an album out, so the CDs don’t have much if any Christian content. Maybe they are satisfied to just be equal with world. But if we ever want to put out something that’s better than what the world puts out the only thing we have that they don’t have access to is Gods anointing, and until we get that into our thinking then the very best we can do is to be either a copy of the world, or at least maybe at the very best equal with it. That’s the sad part that I see about Christian music right now. Because if I’m going to listen to Christian music that doesn’t inspire me or make me think a little deeper about my walk with God, and I’m just going to have to listen to it to be music I will probably pick worldly music because I’d enjoy it more. If Christian music doesn’t offer me anything more than worldly music does I’ll probably gravitate to listening to worldly music.

 

Gersztyn: You know a funny thing last night I was just turning stations on my radio, and I listened to the Christian radio station, and I thought, wait a minute I thought this was a Christian radio station what are they playing this secular song on there for? You know the group Los Lonely Boys, well I’m listening, and I’m going well this is Los Lonely Boys, and then I’m listening and I go well wait a minute those are Christian lyrics, and I realize they were duplicating the Los Lonely Boys the exact song, and singing the Christian lyrics. For a moment there I was enjoying it more than Los Lonely Boys because I’d already heard that song a thousand times, and now it had new lyrics but it was a complete rip off, and I go man they are still doing the same thing.

 

Girard: It’s pathetic, we should be, well I kind of already said all of that. There is a little bit of worship music out there that really does bring forth some good music, and sometimes I’ll be listening to a Christian radio station and they will play a little block of some worship songs that are out there. Even some of the remakes of some of the standard ones, and it’s really good musically, and it has an anointing because it is a worship song so that’s probably the best we have right now.

 

Gersztyn: That is one thing I do enjoy is the worship music, and another thing it’s kind of like you have so many of these Christian groups that are on secular radio stations you don’t even realize, or I didn’t, like the group The Fray. I didn’t even realize that they are a Christian group, and I’m reading somewhere that they were, and I thought well gee that song they have To Save a Life obviously that has a positive theme to it, and every so often you will find these Christian groups that are on secular radio, and nobody even says that they’re Christians.

 

Girard: I think there are about five of them the last time I looked at them, there is some group Anberlin or something that are supposed to be Christians, and I did know about The Fray. Every now and then I’ll be reading along, I follow the charts a little bit, and something about a group’s Christianity will come out, and I think “I guess that’s supposed to be coming out of a Christian perspective” but again it is not specifically identified. So there’s a lot of that. But You don’t listen to The Fray’s song and go “they are talking about Christian ideals”; maybe you pick up on it later. Maybe that’s good; maybe that is not a bad thing, I don’t know. If they are really speaking for Christ in other ways, in interviews, and things then that can be a good thing.

 

Gersztyn: So do you consider a Christian musician, consider his being a musician a calling just like a pastor?

 

Girard: I do the simple answer is I do. The big thing now is bands are saying “we’re not a Christian group; we are a group of Christians”. But if Christianity is a vital part of your life, and that’s part of what you’re expressing however subtle, that’s a ministry, and there is a responsibility that goes along with it. I don’t know that you can just get out there and say “I’m making music, and I happen to be Christian”. Maybe there is a place for that, I mean we had the same discussion about Amy Grant when she first kind of came out with her more secular stuff, and there was a big debate about can you just put out positive pop that doesn’t really particularly stimulate anybody’s curiosity about God but isn’t really saying anything negative. I mean this discussion can go on and on for you know, five years.

 

Gersztyn: Like U2 as an example

 

Girard: Yeah, well I look at U2 like a group of Catholics, whether they are really born again or not, everybody that comes out of Ireland has some sort of either Protestant or Catholic background so that’s the Christian part to me. I don’t know if I’d really call or every would have called U2 a born again band, that is kind of how I judge whether a band is representing Christ or not but a lot of people glommed onto U2 because there was some kind of social conscience at least to their music, and in the early days “Sunday Bloody Sunday” had some political statement and all that. By their fruits you will know them..do you see Godliness coming out in their walk, do you see a testimony in interviews.. I mean Bono is trying to do some good things but lots of people do good things; Jerry Lewis did good things in the fight against Muscular Dystrophy but I wouldn’t call him a Christian. It’s hard to dissect all of that, and at the end of the day I can’t judge anybody else so all I can do is have my opinion but if you’re walking with God, and your not really blatant in your music maybe you can just be a musician that is a Christian, and it’s alright with God. I don’t know that I can be the arbiter of that but I do have my own opinion. I think if you are representing Christ in any way, in an interview or in any kind of a way where you say I go to church on Sunday that’s part of my life that there’s a bit of a responsibility that goes along with the fact that you have a platform. Here’s the other thing, remember the old comparison about a Christian plumber. Does he have to go in and talk about Christ as he fixes your toilet? Well plumbing is not an occupation that expresses ideas and thoughts, music is, and so I never bought that excuse where people would say “I’m a Christian musician I don’t have to talk about God in my lyrics anymore than a Christian plumber has to talk about God while he fixes your toilet.” The big difference is that all music espouses some sort of idea about a lifestyle. Rap has its philosophy and what it is saying, and there is some kind of neutral music where you might say you’ve got some music, Who Let the Dogs Out or something that might not actually influence anybody to think a certain way but in general art is a means by which we convey philosophy, and we convey thoughts, and we reflect life. So you can’t just compare a Christian musician to a Christian plumber in my opinion, so the fact that you have this platform to express a philosophy or a thought about life, if you are a Christian then I think there is a responsibility that goes along with that. Whether you wear the hat and say I’m a minister or not may not be that serious but at least you have responsibility to communicate something about your positive experience with Christ though your music, and through your art, and I think God would call you to account about it I think if you have that platform.

 

Gersztyn: So do you think then that music could be used for importing ideas like take for example Cat Stevens who dropped his whole music thing, and became a Muslim, and now he is starting to get kind of back into music to try to bring some positive impact into Islam. Do you think that somehow Christians can somehow import ideas, the cross, especially with the internet nowadays, and everybody has access to it, and maybe music a certain beat, or whatever is taboo in Islam but some guy in the middle of Saudi Arabia can connect on the internet, and listen to whatever they want. So if somebody could somehow communicate Christian ideas through some sort of an Islamic piece do you think maybe we could eventually integrate our ideas from one culture to another?

 

 

Girard: Well I think you could, again I think that’s a calling. It’s a version of saying can I do punk rock, and still represent Christ to this very specific audience that would not be my grandmother, or would not be my Aunt Minnie. That’s kind of like an evangelistic calling, it is the musical version of saying can I go into a bar, and sit down and have a coke, and wait until I strike up a conversation about Christ, and maybe lead them to the Lord. Some people would say no you shouldn’t even be in a bar. Other people would say yes, Jesus sat with the winebibbers, and he preached to the ungodly so why can’t we? In a way I guess if you had that calling on your life, if you had some sort of a connection to the Middle Eastern musical format that you are a Christen now, or you were converted out of Islam or something then yes I think you could have an impact. I think a lot of it has to do to with the whole package, it’s not so much just about the music. You know my daughter was in Zoë Girl right? Well she is solo now, and she hasn’t put her first album out yet but the songs that she is doing now are very subtle compared to what she did in Zoë Girl. Her current philosophy is “I want to write about life, and I want to write about the things that kind of connect to a Christian perspective but I’m not going to be smack you in the face with it”. But you go to her web site, and it’s the whole picture. It’s not so much whether I have Jesus’ name in every song but if you go to my web site you should know somehow in there that I’m a Christian. I have another daughter that is doing music now, and she’s got a My Space, and she has a very upfront approach. So maybe one daughter will do a more subtle thing, and the other one will be a little bolder about it but at the end of the day, it is kind of how I would describe making an album back in my day. I didn’t think that every song had to have a specific in your face Christian theme, but if you listened to the whole album by the end of any album I ever put out you should know two things, that I’m a Christian, and that God had changed my life. Now you might pull some song like I Will Love you Forever, or something, but the whole work will reflect Christ.

 

Gersztyn: Plain old Joe

 

Girard: Plain old Joe that’s a good example because it is not particularly a gospel song. It’s about this loser who winds up committing suicide but if every song was about that then the album just be about committing suicide, but at the end it is followed with Harvest Time which says we need to reap the harvest, and get on the stick, and not let there be plain old Joes. So the album takes you though a transition, and at the end of the album if you don’t know I’m a Christian, and that God’s changed my life then you’re not really listening to everything on the album. You can pull one song out of context, and maybe you say “Girard that’s not a Christian song”, but it is the whole body of the work that to me is the measure of what people are doing. Now it is even more than just the album, it is the website, the My Space, what you can communicate through so many different areas now that we have the internet, and all of that. As long as it comes out at the end of the day that you’re representing Christ, and you’re trying to do what you can to impact peoples lives then sometimes the music could be subtle I guess. Again that is the heart of the musician, and it’s how much of a calling he feels on his life, and I don’t know if you can separate a truly born again experience from your music. It’s got to come out in your music, or it has to come out somewhere, and I think in a way God requires it.

 

To be continued

Carolyn Arends

 

 

The first time that I saw Carolyn Arrends was in 1996 when I was covering a Jefferson Starship concert in Portland, Oregon at the

Aladdin theater for a Deadhead publication called Duprees Diamond News. She was the opening act and I knew nothing about her, but

as soon as she began to perform I sensed something different about her music. By the lyrical content of the songs and the musical

presentation I concluded that she was a Christian and talked to her briefly during intermission before Jefferson Starship came on. My

suspicions were confirmed and I became a fan. Since that time she’s released 10 albums and written 3 books.  Her official website is at :

http://carolynarends.com/about/#sthash.wcV3DbRl.dpuf

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/bob%20gersztyn

Rock & Roll and Religion

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzr_GBa8qk

Rock & roll and religion is like oil and water to some, who see foot tapping beats as the entrance of the highway to hell. Then to others the combination is as natural as peanut butter and jelly, as mega churches build massive cathedrals with worship bands that have recording contracts. Ever since Alan Freed coined the term rock & roll and Ike Turner and Bill Haley recorded “Rocket 88” and “Rock Around The Clock,” there has been controversy about the place that rock & roll should have in the life of a Christian. One guilt-ridden musician once asked me if I could see Jesus playing an electric guitar, to which I answered, “Yes, He could have put the parables to music and sung them to the crowd.”

Before there was rock & roll there was Black gospel which was the flip side of Blues. Many of the early gospel singers during the early and mid 20^th century played both genres and in some cases were even ministers with churches. One of the earliest gospel rockers, and certainly the most successful was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was born in Arkansas in 1915 and her mother was a COGIC (Church of God in Christ) minister. She began performing in church services at the age of 4 and continued to do so in a traveling gospel show. She married a COGIC minister named Thomas Thorpe in 1934 and after divorcing him, used a variation of his name for her stage name.  She was signed to Decca Records and in 1938 she performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of John Hammond’s Spirituals To Swing concert. Her performance was controversial, since at the time women didn’t play guitar and gospel had never been incorporated with blues and jazz in public performances before secular audiences previously. Then she regularly performed at Harlem’s Cotton Club with Cab Calloway. Sister Rosetta’s popularity continued to soar and she was remarried before a crowd of 25,000 people in Washington D.C.’s Griffith Stadium in 1951. Afterwards she performed a gospel concert in her wedding dress.

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity continued to soar until she recorded a blues album in 1953 and then fell out of favor with her main audience, church going Christians who considered blues the Devil’s music. Her popularity rose again by the time the 1960s brought the rock revolution and a fascination with its primitive music roots. She performed with both gospel and blues stars like James Cleveland and Muddy Waters. Tharpe continued to perform until her death in 1973 at the age of 58, but her legacy lives on in her recording and the proliferation of her performances on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzr_GBa8qk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR2gR6SZC2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrhjgt-_Qc

http://www.biography.com/people/sister-rosetta-tharpe-17172332

http://www.amazon.com/People-Get-Ready-History-Gospel/dp/0826417523

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Rocks-World-volumes-Contemporary/dp/0313377707

How The Hippies Helped The Protestant Church in the 1960s

Back in the 1960s the Mainline Protestant Christian church was declining in membership when the hippie movement began to provide proselytes for Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian churches. The catalyst for the hippie fascination with religion was their use of mind-altering drugs like marijuana, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, STP etc. Huston Smith is a professor of Religion who taught at a number of universities over the past five decades, including MIT and U. C. Berkeley. He has authored a number of books about the religions of the world as well as “Cleansing the Doors of Perception,” a book about “the religious significance of enteogenic plants and chemicals.”

            One of the most famous experiments with psychedelic drugs and their relationship to religion was the “Good Friday Experiment.” It occurred on Good Friday 1962 at Boston University. Walter Pahnke conducted an experiment during the traditional Good Friday service in the chapel, by administering psilocybin to volunteer subjects for his doctoral research paper at Harvard. He was attempting to document the relationship that psychedelic drugs have to religion. Huston Smith was one of the participants in the experiment and wrote an article about it, which was published in his book.

            People that Smith was involved with at the time include Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman. All of them are pioneers of the psychedelic drug revolution that helped foment the cultural, political, and religious revolution that took place in America during the 1960s. At the same time that East Coast intellectuals were undergoing an ontological transformation, West Coast literary revolutionary Ken Kesey was spearheading a counter culture assault on the establishment.

 

            Kesey used the royalties from his best selling book, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” to finance a psychedelic experiment circumnavigating the continental United States. His band of co-conspirators included Jack Kerouac’s real life Dean Moriarty, Neal Cassady, as the driver of the psychedelic painted bus that the Merry Pranksters, which included the Grateful Dead, the house band, travelled on. In 1964 they spread the gospel of LSD as far as New York, where they found their counterpart, Timothy Leary.

            By October 1966, LSD was made illegal by the establishment, which resulted in an unprecedented demand for it. By the end of the 1960s LSD could be obtained more readily than marijuana or other drugs. To say that LSD was not addicting could be misleading, because some individuals took it hundreds of times. However, one thing was consistent with all users, they eventually came to the realization that they had exhausted the drug’s potential for illumination and discontinued using it, voluntarily, at some point.

            When the drug’s potential for illumination was exhausted, other means were sought to continue the journey, and religion was the first area that they looked towards.  John Lennon and the Beatles, Donavan, the Beach Boys and others became followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and other Hindu Gurus. College students at the beginning of the 1960s were scrawling Nietzsche’s quote, “God is Dead,” on bathroom walls, but after tripping on psychedelics and dropping out of college, they began reading sacred scriptures that included the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, and the Bible.

            The search for answers to life’s mysteries and great questions were reflected in the music of the day, which included an assortment of religious compositions including Norman Greenbaum’s top 40 hit “Spirit In The Sky,” to Broadway musicals that produced hit albums and singles like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. There were even straight gospel songs that hit the top 40 like “Oh Happy Day,” by the Edwin Hawkins singers and “Put Your Hand In The Hand,” by Ocean. Song title’s ranged from “My Sweet Lord” to “In The Presence of the Lord, as rock and roll began to reflect religious fervor as much as it had youthful exuberance a decade earlier.

            As long haired hippie freaks became Jesus freaks, they joined together with straight short haired fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical, and Pentecostal Christians. The result was a new paradigm hybrid church that included old established theology with a new way of presenting it. Instead of pipe organs accompanying choirs singing traditional hymns, new paradigm churches featured rock bands leading congregations in free spirited worship. The result was the birth of hippie evangelism and Jesus music led by former hippies that ingested thousands of hits of acid, mescaline, and psilocybin, as well as smoking kilos of marijuana prior to their conversions. Names like Lonnie Frisbee, Chuck Girard, Barry McGuire, and Oden Fong are some of the most famous out of thousands who like them found God through drugs.

Rock & Roll & Religion Class

Rock & Roll & Religion Class Flyer