This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #302, on the subject of Might Be Truth and the Cleverly-named Re’Generation.
When I was in college I heard a rumor about a band–I’m not sure you could characterize it quite that way, though. I heard that there were these guys, one of whom traveled around the country listening to high school musicians and collecting a group of the best, the other then taking them, managing them as a band, taking them on tour, and finally producing an album. Then after a year on the road they disbanded, presumably continued their educations, and the new crop of high school graduates took the stage.
I think that band was called Truth.
I have a couple reasons for thinking this. In about 1974 I was given a pirated copy of several albums and a few extra songs which included an album by a band called Truth. (Others were the debut albums from Love Song and Malcolm and Alwyn, and a live cut from Larry Norman. I’m pretty sure that part of the point Jeff had in giving me the tape was to demonstrate that a brass section did not make a band better–I liked brass in my work.) I remember very little of that album, but it was probably We Want to Love, We Want to Shine, because I specifically remember their versions of He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother and One Solitary Life (neither of which I can find online as videos). Then I remember encountering a band called Truth at the radio station, a sort of MOR (that stands for Middle Of the Road, and is a technical term in the music industry) Contemporary vocal group with a bit of brass, but with entirely different vocalists from the album I knew.
I also heard a story, that every year Truth was a new band, until one year when they came to the end of the tour and made the record they looked at each other and said, why would we want to do something else? So the band Truth stabilized into that group. (I have no idea what happened to those poor high school graduates who had anticipated being part of a touring Christian band, but I got the story so poly-handed that it could be completely wrong.)
What I don’t remember, really, is any single song or album that they recorded during my time at the station other than that logo in the picture of that album cover. I can tell you, though, that they did well-produced covers of popular Christian hits, toning down some of the rockier ones and spicing up some of the calmer ones to get a sound that could be played by most radio stations. Unfortunately, it was apparently an easily forgotten sound.
I’m pairing them in this article with a band called Re’Generation, because what I remember about them is that they were very similar in sound to Truth. The only other thing I remember about them is that Found Free teased about their sound in their song Individually Wrapped (“Should we change our style and sing just like Regen–?/Oh, one of us hot-dogs would surely wreck the blend.”). Seriously, even looking over their online discography, I see no familiar album covers and no familiar titles beyond that they are mostly covers of songs known from elsewhere. They produced twenty-some albums over a decade, and were as I recall good at what they did, but nothing from them is remembered as remarkable.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #301, on the subject of The Song “Holocaust”.
On my recent trip to Nashville for The Objective Session it was recommended to me that I start my own publishing company, and so publish my own songs.
That would be excellent advice for anyone with a knack for business. I have more than once proven than I have no such ability, and so I will add that to the list of good advice I hopefully wisely did not take.
However, I am going to publish my songs, so consider me self-published.
The plan is this: I have mostly poor recordings of perhaps sixty of the hundreds of songs I have composed over the decades. In anticipation of the aforementioned Objective Session I selected thirty-some of these for consideration in inclusion in a package of materials to be submitted to Nashville professionals, and ultimately gave them copies of the top three. I am now going to give those songs to you, my readers/fans, beginning with those same three, continuing through the list of thirty-some others, and adding a few that I have since been told ought to have been included.
There are other songs that ought to have been recorded which never were, or which were long ago on tapes no longer in existence. If there is enough support through the Patreon and PayPal me links (at the top of the page) I’ll obtain new recording software and work on laying tracks for some of them. (The old software, Record Producer Plus, was actually rather good, but Turtle Beach decided not to support it when I attempted to reinstall it after a computer crash, so I recommend avoiding anything from them because they are unreliable in terms of future support for older products.)
In compiling this list, I went through all my recordings and eliminated a few for specific reasons–a couple of them because they are part of a nearly finished opera from which very few songs have been recorded (I will remedy that if I get the software), a few because the recordings I have of them are more severely flawed than I can reasonably permit myself to release publicly (although with the caveat that some of the recordings I am releasing are seriously flawed). I used a pocket digital recorder to record, live with an acoustic guitar, a few more songs I thought should be included which I could manage that way. I then made two copies of the list of songs I had compiled, one listing them in what it my opinion were best to worst songs, music and lyrics, the other listing them in what in my opinion were best to worst recordings, performance and technical. I averaged these and also asked a bunch of people (family, mostly) to comment on the list, and one, my son Tristan, responded, selecting eighteen of the songs which he thought definitely should be included, divided into the four best, the next four, the next four, the next two, and the final four. I averaged his opinion in with mine, and that gave me the list I am using.
The first song on his list was the first song on my list of best songs, although it was only fifth on the list of quality of recordings. It is entitled
Holocaust.
I suppose it makes sense that the song both I and my third son list as the best would already have appeared on the web. My wife included part of the lyrics on a site (a long time ago, one of the GeoCities web sites), and I put the lyrics up in a section of this site dedicated to the songs of a defunct late 90s band called Cardiac Output (who never actually did the song, although TerraNova did back in the mid 80s), and also gave a rather detailed recollection of the process of composing it in connection with the history of the band Collision.
It may be the most powerful and is probably the most poetic of my songs (which I must again mention is co-written with my wife Janet Young and our friend Robert Leo Weston) despite its frequent disregard of rhyme and meter. Its double meaning metaphor carries through the sung portion of the song and is cemented with the spoken poem at the end. It was written as a duet, and in the places where both voices are singing each is regarded its own melody, neither a harmony of the other.
This recording was made using Record Producer Plus with a Soundblaster sound card; the instruments are all programmed midis, and I sang both voices. Here are the words:
Reality has come over me as I slip away from myself.
The people I know can’t tell the truth,
And I don’t think I even care.
I can see the face of a thousand people passing by on a train.
The silence of a world as they pass on by still resounds in my brain.
Shed a tear (shed a tear) for all the earth (for all the earth),
For she has closed her eyes to all the pain!
What will you do when it comes to you?
Will you run or will you hide?
I can hear the screaming–
Lambs to the slaughter, they open not their mouth.
A sacrifice displeasing to their God
(The innocent must die).
Smoke is rising from eternal fire.
The one we would expect
Would be there to protect
Now breaks his vow and deals the fatal blow.
Shed a tear (shed a tear) for all the earth (for all the earth),
For she has closed her eyes to all the pain!
What will you do when it comes to you?
Will you run or will you hide?
I can hear the screaming–
I was dumb when they took my neighbor
(I hear those footsteps getting closer),
Held my tongue when they took my friend
(Oh, my heart, no need to be afraid).
I was still when they took my brother
(They’ll never take me).
Who will speak up for me?
The sacred dream is ended in the silent scream!
The breath of life is stifled by the surgeon’s knife!
A holocaust inevitably comes
To those who place themselves too high,
To those who teach themselves the lie
That life and death is in their hand–
Mere men! Too small to understand
The truth, the value of one soul.
And so their wisdom takes its toll
In infants shattered on the rock–
Such pain! And yet it does not shock
Our hardened hearts, our souls of ash–
We throw their bodies in the trash
And tell ourselves, it’s for the best.
And that is how we treat the rest–
The useless crippled, and the old.
With every death our heart grows cold
‘Til someone puts us in our tomb.
The gift of God comes in a maiden’s womb.
I can only hope you benefit from the song in some way. I will continue with additional songs in the future.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #299, on the subject of Praise for Dallas Holm.
It must have been 1977; it can’t have been later than 1978. Jeff Zurheide and I met with a young singer interested in forming a band, who was absolutely focused on doing music from Dallas Holm. He did a passable job on Holm’s signature song, Rise Again released on the 1977 album Dallas Holm and Praise Live, which had become a major Christian hit. We might have met with the guy twice.
Almost a decade and at least half a dozen albums later that was still the song people wanted to hear from Dallas Holm. It came from the first certified gold Christian contemporary music album, was recorded by him and many other artists over the years, and the only negative thing that can be said about it is that it overshadowed the rest of his career. Even I, who heard quite a few of those albums and aired many of those songs, can only remember one other, itself a powerful if slightly country song that is mostly forgotten, (He Died of) A Broken Heart, and I barely remember that one myself, and I recall even less well Jesus I’m an Open Book, in the same stylistic vein.
This happens to Christian artists quite frequently. Despite his long career both with and after Love Song, Chuck Girard was mostly remembered for Sometimes Alleluia. Still ahead in this series we’ll see other artists who are remembered for one song despite long careers with many hits–Don Francisco, Evie Tornquist Carlsen, Karen Lafferty, Kathy Troccoli, Randy Matthews, Scott Wesley Brown, David Meece, Wayne Watson, Dan Peek, and if I thought long enough I might remember more. Listeners latch onto a song and that’s the one they want to hear, and so the stations play what the listeners request, and the new songs never have a chance against the old ones. Rise Again so dominated Dallas Holm’s career that it is doubtful whether anyone other than diehard fans and music industry people could name another song of his that charted.
Still, to have produced one great song that is still remembered is a noteworthy accomplishment, and if you have not heard that song, you are the poorer for it.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #297, on the subject of An Objective Look at The Extreme Tour Objective Session.
Late last year I received an invitation from someone representing something called The Extreme Tour inviting me to investigate mutually the possibility of participating in their program. The big piece of the puzzle was something called The Objective Session, a long weekend of meetings in Nashville which they correctly say defies characterization as a convention or conference or retreat or just about any other label we might put on a large gathering of persons for a specific purpose. The Greeks would probably have called it an ekklesia, which means a gathering of people called together by a common interest, but which we typically translate “church”–and there is a sense in which church is not a bad name for what this is, but it’s very unlike any church I’ve ever attended, and I’ve attended many in many different denominations.
The odd thing was that I could find very little online about either The Extreme Tour or The Objective Session. Then many events conspired against any hope I might have had of attending–our car’s transmission died to a tune of almost as much as we were still paying for the car, I was hospitalized twice, money was getting tighter. I wasn’t investigating the trip as diligently as I otherwise might have done because it was beginning to look impossible–but I was still praying about it.
Then with literally less than a week to go the last pieces were falling into place; it transitioned from a ridiculous impossibility to a very difficult possibility. I posted to all the Christian musicians groups I knew to see if anyone could advise me on this, and got almost no response at all, and none that was informed. On Tuesday morning I was literally weeping, for reasons I cannot really explain in this post beyond that it had looked as if an opportunity to do something with the music had been placed in front of me and I was going to have to decline it. That’s a lesson for a different forum, but an hour later the last piece of the puzzle fell into place and the decision was made: my son Adam and I were going to Nashville to attend The Objective Session.
It was then that we started getting advice from musicians, and it had three things in common. The first was they were universally against our going. The second was they knew no more and probably less than I did about the program. One person asked if I had ever heard of a concert being presented by The Extreme Tour, which was a pretty useless question because I’m pretty sure that of all the concerts I attended and even promoted when I was at the radio station, I knew who presented or sponsored very few of them. Another person seems to have a very odd view of divine guidance, suggesting that no believer would ever be uncomfortable doing anything that was what God was directing him to do. The third commonality was that most of them had received invitations and ignored them.
The decision had already been made, so this advice had less impact than it might otherwise have had. We went. It was a twelve-hour drive, and over the course of Wednesday night through Monday morning we probably spent between two and three hundred dollars on food, gas, and tolls; lodging at a cheap hotel less than half an hour from the site even in morning traffic was less than two hundred dollars for three nights, although with how intense the event was it probably would have been better for us to have stayed in the area the nights before and after. Parking at the venue was free for the event, but we made a point of arriving early and not moving the car until we were done, because it was very crowded. Because we had been invited the meeting itself cost us nothing, and I don’t want to quote the price I heard for tickets for those not invited.
What I want to do in this post is provide information for those who have been invited and don’t know whether it would be worth going. I’ll give you the short answer up front: I don’t know what will happen from it, but for us it was worth going.
To fully understand The Objective Session you probably need to understand The Extreme Tour. Ted Brunn, founder, has one of those testimonies on the order of he should have died and the doctors don’t know why he lived and were themselves using the word “miracle” (fell seven stories and landed on his head on rocks). At some point he became extremely sensitive to the fact that there are a lot of lost people out there who don’t believe that anyone cares about them, and he began an organization that works with local non-profit groups to put on free shows in places no one wants to perform. The shows include select artists and talented extreme sports athletes (e.g., skateboarding exhibitions), and the message to the people is that someone does care about them. All of the performers, as well as all of the staff, are volunteers; the money that the organization collects really does go to the expenses of doing what they do, such as hiring sound equipment for venues. For some situations they defray costs of performing artists, but this is not an organization designed to make you rich. It is rather designed to enable you to contribute your talents alongside those of others to take the good news into places you probably could never go alone.
The Objective Session is from their perspective an opportunity for them to meet potential volunteer performers; to facilitate that, they also gather many music professionals from the Nashville area. Although in spare moments throughout the weekend I tackled the program book, I never finished reading all the names and credentials, and I’m only going to name a few here. I will also mention that there were said to be six hundred of us in attendance, and I met many of them and have CDs from a few. Probably the last thing I did was give a couple CDs of my own music to a young artist who was probably the first person I met when I arrived; it seemed the right thing to do at the time, as he wanted to hear the rest of the song I had partly sung the day before, and I was in no condition to attempt to sing it.
I will tell you that from the moment we arrived things were happening. Because of the fact that we drove eight hundred miles and twelve hours with one break for dinner and gasoline (don’t tell my hemotologist) arriving around noon central time and staying up to reach our hotel twenty minutes outside the city after midnight, so I was immunologically compromised, we left the event a bit early on Friday and Saturday nights. There are no meal breaks; there are food trucks in the parking lot said to be some of the finest in the city (and the ones I patronized were very good) and they recommend you slip away and bring back food to eat during the meetings.
Let me say I have been to several retreats for Christian musicians over the decades. This one was what all the others only dreamed of being. Here are some of the highlights of my experience.
Many of the speakers were excellent. I apologize that with that intense a schedule I can’t specifically pinpoint what we heard from Wes Yoder (one of the original business names in the CCM world), Tom Jackson (the go-to guy for staging a musical show), or any of the others; I do remember that Dr. Ken Steorts, founding guitarist of Skillet, delved into a Biblical understanding of the function of artists (he has a book on the subject). I had private meetings with Ezra Boggs and Vince Wilcox for the specific purpose of gaining some career advice, and I attended a songwriting session led by early Petra member Rob Frazier, at which I was invited to sing a portion of my song Free.
There were some things for which there was a charge, or an extra charge, and I took advantage of one, submitting a few of my songs and some biographical information to be distributed to a list of Nashville professionals who wouldn’t take anything like that from a stranger but would take it from people they know at The Extreme Tour. That was just under two hundred dollars, and I don’t expect to hear the outcome of that for at least a few days, probably a few weeks. I did not get tapped for a recording contract or management representation. However, I did not pay the extra to be one of perhaps a dozen performers who played two songs each for a panel of industry judges on Friday and Saturday evenings. Adam said it sickened him to watch eight strangers critize the performances of these mostly wonderful artists, although I sometimes found myself agreeing with their criticisms as things I would have said. He felt even worse when I told him that those artists had paid somewhere around five hundred dollars each for the privilege of being so criticized. However, while we watched a young band called Zoe Imperial absolutely wowed the attendees (and most of us fancy ourselves professional caliber musicians) with a rock/hip-hop blend in a show choreographed and performed as well as anything I’ve seen since Servant, one of the judges, Lamont Compton a.k.a. Supreme, leapt up on stage to offer them a management deal with him, so it does happen.
Recording artist Jennifer Knight playing with kids at inner city picnic
What Ted Brunn hopes will be the real impact, though, is that on Saturday night we were broken into teams and sent to Broadway in Nashville to make music and get attention and talk to people about the hope that is in us. Because it was so late and my condition was deteriorating I did not attend these, and Adam took me back to the hotel; I’m sorry he missed it, but I did that kind of thing at the Boston Common and the Topsfield Fair decades ago, so I’ve seen it. On Sunday afternoon we put on a concert (I really just watched) supporting a local church barbecue (O.K., so I also ate a hotdog and some chips) in a field that was supposed to be a park but there were too many shootings there for people to feel safe outside in it ordinarily. Most of us were to interact with the people, to let them know, once again, that someone cares about them. I watched a recently signed Universal recording artist attendee dancing with young ghetto children, and a Christian rapper hold a children’s dancing contest on the portable stage someone had loaned the Tour at the last minute when transportation for the stage they were going to use failed. This organization is really about taking the message to the hopeless, and it was worth every minute of it and the respiratory distress I was still fighting to overcome the night after.
It struck me that this might seem like a lot of effort for the opportunity to play a bunch of free concerts. I can’t speak to participating on the tour because I haven’t yet done so and have no guarantee that I will be invited. However, it seems to me that my experience is fairly typical, that most of us play most of our concerts for free, mostly in venues which reach only Christians. That’s not a problem for me, because my ministry is to be a teacher, which is primarily a ministry to believers, and my music frequently reflects that; but Paul told Timothy to do the work of an evangelist, and there’s good reason to think that that instruction is for all of us, or at least all of us doing any kind of ministry at all, so the opportunity to do for free what you are already doing for free but in front of people who need to hear the message alongside others doing the same might be worth the time and effort.
So to all those who thought it was some kind of scam, I am persuaded otherwise; and to those who wondered whether it would be worth it, I am persuaded that it is. Probably you won’t get a Nashville management deal or recording contract; those are few and far between. Maybe you won’t be convinced to volunteer for free concerts in ghettos and such, but you will still benefit, I think probably enormously, from the experience. Maybe you will get something from it that will move your music and ministry career forward in a significant way. Maybe that’s not the point of what you’re doing, and maybe you’ll discover what it is God really wants from you.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #296, on the subject of Found Free Lost.
I first encountered Found Free when they played at Gordon College, probably in 1975 or ‘6. I was in the cafeteria (I have previously mentioned that Gordon did not have an auditorium, and the chapel was not large enough to hold the entire student body, so large gatherings were always in the cafeteria or the gym) in advance of the show, while they were setting up, and I approached their guitarist, Wayne Farley. I approached him because he was playing what I still on some level consider the “Holy Grail” of instruments, an electric guitar that sounds like an acoustic when amplified. I asked him what it was, and he gave me an unfamiliar brand name; I believe he said it was from Australia. I failed to remember that information, partly because on my paltry budget everything was too expensive to consider.
My good friend Jeff Zurheide walked out of that concert, and I understand why, although it might be said that he lacked patience. The band had a well-organized and well-performed show designed for college campuses generally which began with covers of secular oldies coupled with nostalgic reminiscences to draw in the audience, and then eventually shifted to delivering the gospel message with a few Christian covers and originals. Jeff was not interested in hearing a secular music concert, and did not anticipate the shift; I stayed to see what they were going to do, although I don’t know why I expected something different. They were talented.
A couple years later I was out of school and out of work, and I heard they were auditioning for a guitarist. I arranged an audition. I had lunch with David Michael Ed, keyboard player and vocalist, and then played for him and vocalist Keith Lancaster, but my fate was sealed at lunch when they learned that I was married–it had been their plan to find someone who could share an apartment in the city with Keith, and so keep expenses down. They said that my playing and singing were certainly good enough (although I am not at all satisfied myself that I could have replaced Wayne Farley, whose departure from the band had occasioned this opening), but they couldn’t afford my wife.
I often wonder what might have been, but I doubt I could have saved them, as sad as that is.
They did give me a copy of their recently released Greentree Records album Closer Than Ever, saying that I apparently did not know what they sounded like at that point (which was correct, as they had changed significantly in the couple years since I’d heard them). It was a well produced album with good but not great songs, and the vocal work was very impressive. I remember many cuts from that disc, but not many of them have been preserved on the web. Ed’s song I Won’t Turn Back was a gentle opener, but Stone Heart exemplifies the processed sound typical of the LP. Lancaster’s Do You Want Him? is a gentle call, and Starlight Praise has been described by someone as “brassy gospel swing”. Touched by Love closes the first side with a bouncy touch, and the B side opens with the title track, smooth and a bit schmaltzy. Farley contributed the track Still Up Walkin’, a song that prefigures his complicated compositions which appear later elsewhere. I always liked Lancaster’s Stained Glass Window, but I don’t remember the closing song If You Know by Ed.
I know a few facts that come next, but not the sequence in which they came. David Ed and his wife Joy separated, and both left the band. They never actually found a guitarist to replace Farley, but instead found a new bass guitarist and shifted their former bass guitarist to guitar. I think Lancaster took over on keyboards, and they put together an impressive array of musicians that filled the stage. I managed once again to catch them in concert, as they released another album–sort of. They had apparently lost their contract with Greentree, and it was pretty obvious that Sparkal Records was a vanity label, that is, they had produced their own album and paid to have it pressed. We had a copy at the radio station, and I had my own copy, and it was a superb album throughout, under the title Specially Purchased, Individually Wrapped. However, it failed to find national marketing, and was the last gasp for the band.
Still, I remember some great songs from it, including Front Lines, I Need You Lord, Just Like a Child, Don’t We Need to Know, and of course the title song, Individually Wrapped, about being who God made each of us to be, instead of trying to copy what someone else is doing (in which they humorously copy several other artist styles in the midst of a group rap). Not a one of those was found in online video, which is sad because I think it some of their best work.
On an only loosely related subject, I would later try out for a guitar and vocals spot in a band called Daybreak. They lived together and worked out of a farmhouse somewhere in Pennsylvania, and became the go-to people for festival sound systems, but they never told me why they didn’t take me. They were so insignificant that their discography isn’t published online that I could find (there’s another band of the same name around the same time), but the song I most liked from them was the a capella novelty title track from the one album I ever saw, You Can’t Stand Up Alone, and it appears that there must have been an earlier LP, from which the title track After the Rain is online. I don’t know–I think I could have helped them, but I am impressed with their vocal work on other videos. Probably I’ll never know what they didn’t like about me.
When I first arrived at the radio station early in ’79, I had heard of Resurrection Band. They were known to be the cutting edge of Christian rock music at that time. However, I had never heard them. My first exposure came when our program director handed me the recently arrived copy of Rainbow’s End and told me we were never going to play it, so I might as well take it home and enjoy it.
I’m sure I listened to it once.
I don’t think I would say it was too much for me. Rather, the distortion levels were so high that I couldn’t make much of it. Wendy and Glenn Kaiser shared the vocals, and they both had very gravelly voices. I often thought Wendy sounded a lot like Janis Joplin, although I’ve read others say she was reminiscent of Grace Slick. I never cared for Joplin’s voice, and Wendy’s grated on me similarly. Its best feature was that it blended well with Glenn, who although rock-rough was easier to hear. When I try to think of the band’s typical sound, I always recall Wendy’s song Area 312, a somewhat cryptic reference to living in Chicago (312 was the Chicago telephone area code–remember those?).
I met Glenn sometime in ’82 at a local concert, where he gave me a copy of the DMZ album about a week before the record company released it. I immediately fell in love with No Alibi; it is still my one go-to Rez Band song, and I have a good story for it. You’ll remember that our station management had trouble with the concepts of Christian Contemporary and Rock Music. The first time I played this song on the air I did so with some trepidation, concerned that we were pushing the envelope beyond what the management would accept. In the middle of the song the general manager walked into the studio and said, “What is this?” A bit nervously I replied that it was No Alibi from Resurrection Band‘s newly-released album DMZ. She said, “Those are great words,” and turned and walked out of the studio.
I believe I said, “Yes!” in a most emphatic way. It is a fabulous song.
I next encountered Glenn at Creation (’82, I think), where Resurrection Band was leading Sunday morning worship with songs like I Need Your Love. I was backstage with Jeff Duffield, who with his wife Sue toured the church circuit with a Gaitheresque Inspirational/MOR sound. He commented to me that he simply did not understand how music like this could be used for worship, yet it was obvious that the people in the crowd had hands raised and eyes closed and were singing along with their focus on Christ. A few minutes later Glenn came our direction, and I mentioned this to him. He recounted being at a festival on the west coast where one of the artists was a Christian punk rock band. As he listened from back stage, he was thinking, “Lord, how can You use this? How does this glorify You?” Yet as he looked out at the crowds, he saw that the band was reaching the audience–and he felt so convicted, because he was passing the same kind of judgment on the new musical styles that had been passed on him.
I have had contact with Glenn over the internet sporadically since then. Wendy turned her attention to raising their family, and Glenn shifted to Christian Blues with The Glenn Kaiser Band. They’re leaders in the Jesus People USA organization in Chicago.
One does not stay the leader forever, though. Not long after DMZ came to us, we received a single–a six minute single on, if memory serves, a ten-inch disc–from a new band called Barnabas, under the title Waiting for the Aliens, from their forthcoming album Approaching Light Speed. I believe we played it once, just so our listeners would know it was out there–although it was very good and very well done. Rez Band had blazed the trail for such bands to follow, and more would follow in the years ahead.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #290, on the subject of James the Other Ward.
I have several times asked myself why I listed James Ward for an article of his own, instead of grouping him with the batch of male vocalists in one article still to come. Part of the answer, I think, is that my cousin the Reverend Peter Grosso would probably kill me if I overlooked or minimized this artist who is, I understand, a friend of his, but part of it is that his Mourning to Dancing album is among my favorites, so he has at least earned that much from me. I also heard him live once, but that’s part of the story.
One of three known covers of Ward’s Mourning to Dancing LP
It is of course not uncommon for persons with the same surnames to be unrelated, and although James Ward has the same name as Matthew Ward of Second Chapter of Acts, same as the maiden names of Matthew’s two sisters Annie Herring and Nellie Greisen from that same band, it does not appear that they are related; at least, no one ever suggested this, and in the entertainment world you usually do hear about such connections. The Ward family of Acts appears to have been west-coast based, while James was on the east coast. I know this because Peter, my cousin, apparently knew him through a New York state area summer camp called Peniel. Sometime, possibly when I was still in high school (graduated in ’73), certainly before I got to Gordon (started in ’75), he was waving an album in front of me and raving about it–as “raving” as my soft-spoken older Presbyterian cousin ever raved. Somehow, I don’t think he played any of it for me, and I can’t tell you anything about the sound, but my recollection of the cover was that it was that of a low-budget self-produced release, and in perhaps my own youthful hubris I was not impressed.
When I was at Gordon College, Peter was at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary right up the road (the official connections between the two schools were finally and formally dissolved during my first year there), and when Ward played in our cafeteria (we had no auditorium, and the chapel wasn’t large enough to hold the entire student body) with his band Elán, Peter came. After the concert, Peter wept.
I, a musician in my own mind, found the concert interesting and enjoyable. Elán was an avant-garde jazz band that did a lot of atonal and non-metered instrumental music. They were very good at it. I don’t know that I would have bought an album had they offered one, but it was the sort of music a composer should hear at least once so he has some idea of what’s beyond the traditional boundaries of music.
Peter was a pastor, in training, and his memories of the performances of James Ward were that they ministered. Elán did not minister; they performed, and they talked about how they achieved some of the effects, like a song that really was a musical version of an impressionist painting of a sunrise. For Peter, every good thing about a James Ward concert was lost.
Perhaps half a decade later, when Mourning to Dancing was released, Ward commented in an interview that people “didn’t understand” Elán. I thought at the time that he was wrong, at least that in relation to his earier fans–such as Peter–it wasn’t about whether or not they understood the music, but that they missed the ministry. I once sat on the edge of a conversation between some listener who had opinions about the nature of music (possibly reflecting Francis Schaeffer’s work) and some Christian musician who had grown up in church (and it may actually have been Ward after that concert) in which the musician was attempting to elicit from the listener an explanation of what made particular kinds of music “Christian” or “not Christian”. As a composer, I am inclined to agree with the musician: if modernist tonalities communicate what I want to say, they are Christian to the degree that I am communicating a Christian messsage through them. However, if I have placed this conversation correctly in my memory, both parties were missing that critical element: it isn’t whether the music fits a particular style or mold, but whether it is communicating a worthwhile message. Pendereki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima is one of the most discordant atonal non-metered pieces ever written, but it communicates something significant. There is no particular reason why avant-garde jazz could not be a medium for a Christian message. The problem with Elán was that it wasn’t.
Peter and I never talked about Ward again. He left Gordon-Conwell for a pastorate in Pennsylvania, and I became a Christian disk jockey in southern New Jersey. Thereafter we were rarely at the same family gatherings, and the matter never arose. However, I received Ward’s Mourning to Dancing album at the radio station, and the spare copy went into my collection and was much enjoyed here. It is the kind of album that has no losers on it, and which is best heard straight through. From the opening strains of Highway (reminiscent of the the Elán days until the verse shifts into light rock), the album gives insights into the life of an on-the-road Christian musician along with solid Christian songs such as Hold Up My Hands (no online video found), Who Can Separate Us (again, no video found), and then the mellow title song Mourning to Dancing. The “B” side began with another glimpse into the life of the musician, Late At Night Again (again, no video), and the intriguing Holy Observer (need I say it?), then Gotta Get Home (“…to her own bedroom….”) (again), in which the life on the road includes that he traveled with his wife and young daughter. The bouncing Precious Is Your Mercy follows, and I am really disappointed at just how many of these are not available online, but the final song, the wonderful So His Honor, was covered by the band Truth in this recording.
I find myself very confused as to why I recognize the cover of his next album Faith Takes a Vision, but none of the titles are familiar and the music is barely so, despite being very good. Maybe it was just that I didn’t get a copy so it slipped into forgetfulness. Listening to the vaguely familiar Not How, Maybe I’ll Trust You Now, Take Hold, Don’t Blame It On My God, and others, I can’t help feeling that I missed something good.
Those were the only albums I heard; I wish I had heard the one Peter had, which does not appear in online discographies, although I don’t know the title and barely remember the cover.
I feel I should mention that Ward’s talents lie in his musical compositions and lyrical content. His piano work and arrangements are always solid. His voice, though, is unique, and it would be easy to fault him there. He does his own backup vocals quite well, but it would be difficult to imagine someone else blending with him. He is in the category of singer-songwriters carried by the strength of their songs rather than their singing. That’s not, from me, a criticism. I just sometimes notice the flaws in his voice, as one does often with other popular singer-songwriters. I like it overall; it’s expressive. It certainly is not operatic, and probably wouldn’t win any television competitions. Yet it makes for comfortable listening.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #285, on the subject of An Expression of Gratitude.
I need to thank a lot of people.
The complications include that I do not know who you all are, and I’m not sure of the propriety either of naming those whose names I have or contacting you personally.
Thus I am thanking you all, however many of you there are, through this web log post.
This arises from the fact that I recently had a myocardial infarction–a heart attack–which put me in the hospital. I posted that in this Facebook post, and somewhere about twenty responses down I posted again with news of the Friday and Monday procedures, and my Tuesday discharge and such.
Many of you sent what I guess would be called “good wishes”, that is, comments, messages, whatever, hoping that I would get better. Thank you. I have done so to a significant degree, although I am still a bit weak and officially convalescing (and my wife has already scolded me for overworking once she knew how much I did yesterday, the day after my discharge, but someone had to get the boys to work and someone had to pick up my prescriptions, and more often than not I find that someone is me, particularly when she is working a string of night shifts, driving herself for the first time since her broken hip, and needing to sleep during the day). So I am not fully recovered, but I am back at work.
Many of you prayed, and for this I am particularly grateful. You have, of course, obligated me to let you know about the answers to your prayers so that many of you can give thanks to God for the grace extended through the prayers of many of you (cf. II Corinthians 1:11). I have largely done that in the Facebook post. I am not out of the woods entirely–I have a bag of new medications (and of all things the pharmacy couldn’t fill the “aspirin” prescription (chewable baby aspirin–how could they not have that?), so someone has to go back for it today), and I have two appointments for a cardiac stress test and a followup to decide what the test results mean. Those are in the second week of March.
At least two of you made a point of spreading the word of my debilitation, and of encouraging people who at least know who I am to support me financially during this time. That has resulted in a few gifts of significant amounts through my PayPal.me account–the first real activity there since it opened, and enough to pay for this bag of prescriptions and a bit more. I have not seen any new Patreon patrons yet, but Patreon’s notification system is sometimes wonky so I’m going to include mention of that–because I am grateful to those of you who have made an effort to keep me going, and thankful to God that you are there, to those who contributed and to those who encouraged others to do so.
I’ll extend these thanks to those who have been meaning to send a bit of help my direction and simply haven’t yet done so; I know what that’s like, as there are often times when I have something I need to do soon that goes for days or weeks or even months before I manage it. So thank you for the prayers and support you are going to send in the future. You really do make a difference.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #283, on the subject of Keith Green Crashing.
As we already covered (in web log post #281: Keith Green Launching, linked below), Keith Green had two excellent and successful Christian albums without a weak song on them. Now he produced So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt, of which the somewhat goofy title song was an instant hit. There were several other excellent songs on this album as well, such as Pledge My Head to Heaven, Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful, and Grace By Which I Stand. However, whether it was because they weren’t quite as good or because by the early eighties the Christian music field was starting to get more crowded, it was not the music on this album that made it significant.
When Keith delivered the masters to his company Sparrow Records, he told them he did not want them to sell it–he wanted it to be given away, to anyone who requested it, for whatever they chose to give, even if it was nothing at all. He thought it more important to get the music into the ears of people than to worry about paying bills, and was confident that the contributions would cover all the costs of the record.
Sparrow didn’t see it quite the same way. They were certain that donations would cover the costs of Keith’s record, but that’s not how the music industry worked, even in the Christian field. The problem wasn’t whether those donations would cover the costs of distributing Keith’s record but whether there would be what we would call profits–a dirty word for some, but an essential facet of the way the system worked. You see, when Keith made his first album, Sparrow Records took a chance, advancing a considerable sum of money to pay for professional level production of an album by an unknown artist which might be completely lost. Sparrow was still in the business of finding and funding new artists, paid for from the profits from the established artists, and a new album from Keith Green was a guaranteed best seller which would provide a lot of money for that purpose. Keith was taking that away from them, on the grounds that he thought he should be able to give away his record free if he paid them the cost of producing it.
A compromise was reached. In the United States, Egypt was released by Pretty Good Records; Sparrow handed the standard distribution channels–record stores, radio promotion–and all overseas releases. Keith and and his wife Melody set up an organization to mail copies to anyone who wrote to them requesting one, putting the donations toward costs and future recordings. In a sense, he had cut himself off from helping any other Christian artists; in another sense, he had focused his ministry on reaching the listeners.
Two years later he released Songs for the Shepherd, which was a good but not remarkable recording, again through Pretty Good Records with Sparrow’s assistance. Several other Keith Green albums would be released in the years to come, but this was the last one he would see. That year, 1982, he had visitors at the ranch where they ran everything, and wanting to show them all they were doing he took them up in his private airplane. The plane was already heavily loaded with records and literature that went to concerts with him, and the number of passengers exceeded recommendations, and it crashed killing all on board. Melody was not on that plane.
Many in the Christian music world were upset; many said that apparently God had decided to take Keith home. That was not the unanimous opinion. At least one Evangelical author at the time wrote to say that Keith died because he broke God’s law–in this case, God’s Laws of Aerodynamics, trying to fly a plane that was overloaded. If, he argued, you violate the laws of God, the end is death, and sometimes it comes swiftly, as it did here. This is on some level a bit ironic, because Keith often veered toward legalism–his The Sheep and the Goats misses the point of that parable, and Glen Kaiser (of Resurrection Band) informs me that more than once others in ministry felt it necessary to admonish him on that point.
I cannot begin to guess who is right. I know Keith has been missed since, and that he would have continued as a popular and successful artist, but it seems likely that, as with quite a few of those we have already covered and will cover yet who were huge then but are barely recognized now, he was probably past the zenith of his career and on the slow decline. Those first two albums are still among the best Christian music has ever produced, and it is doubtful that even he could have surpassed them.
This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #281, on the subject of Keith Green Launching.
We come to someone whose perhaps brief footprint in the Christian contemporary music world was huge, so big in fact that we’re going to cover him in two articles. Keith Green might have been a footnote in the history of contemporary music, a one-hit wonder in the 60s who recorded a few singles for Decca and one for ERA, one of which charted at some point. Then, as he was facing the frustration of already being a has-been in a field in which maybe he never was, the Christian musicians of the area met him and brought the young Jewish boy to faith in Christ.
He embraced his new faith strongly, and became something of a prophetic voice in contemporary Christian music, challenging believers to live the lives they claimed in words. In 1977 he released his first album, several of the songs co-written with his wife Melody, For Him Who Has Ears to Hear, packed with powerful, challenging, and excellent songs, beginning with You Put This Love In My Heart, continuing with I Can’t Believe It, Because of You, and When I Hear the Praises Start, and as the first side ends with the playful He’ll Take Care of the Rest, things get even better.
The flip side opens with the tearful and demanding Asleep in the Light, which on the original segued electronically into My Eyes are Dry, which faded in over the fadeout of the other, and then faded out. I am persuaded that it was a mistake in later releases to separate these two songs, as Keith clearly intended them to be heard together that way. After this heavy opening, it lightens with the rocky You!, and then another heart-felt song, I Don’t Wanna Fall Away From You (interestingly covered by Petra on their Keith Green tribute album). The bouncy Stained Glass gives a bit of relief before the intensely challenging To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice. He then does a cover of the Jamie Owens (Collins) The Victor, which was her break into the Christian music field as the song gained popularity and was also picked up by The Second Chapter of Acts, who along with Phil Keaggy were part of Keith’s recording, and wraps the album with Altar Call, a closing call to salvation.
There wasn’t a weak song on two albums, and Keith was one of the stars of Christian music, but things were about to change significantly.
