Tag Archives: Ministry

#297: An Objective Look at The Extreme Tour Objective Session

May 22, 2019 M.J. 5 Comments

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.

Music

#296: Found Free Lost

May 15, 2019 M.J. 1 Comment

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.

*****

The series to this point has included:

Bible and Theology, Music

#292: Rising Resurrection Band

March 30, 2019 M.J. Leave a comment

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.

*****

The series to this point has included:

Bible and Theology, Music

#290: James the Other Ward

March 14, 2019 M.J. 4 Comments

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.

*****

The series to this point has included:

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#285: An Expression of Gratitude

February 21, 2019 M.J. Leave a comment

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.

As the picture says, thank you.

Bible and Theology, Music

#283: Keith Green Crashing

February 7, 2019 M.J. 1 Comment

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.

*****

The series to this point has included:

Bible and Theology, Music

#281: Keith Green Launching

January 31, 2019 M.J. 1 Comment

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.

Side two opened with Your Love Broke Through, the song he co-wrote with Phil Keaggy and Randy Stonehill, and then the genuinely fun song No One Believes In Me Anymore (Satan’s Lament), which is not a lament at all but the devil’s boast that he can work without being recognized. This is followed by the heart-breaking Song to My Parents (I Only Want to See You There), then Trials Turned to Gold, and the album concludes with his rousing rendition of Annie Herring’s famed Easter Song (the only version of which I am aware that has the second verse lyrics he sings).

This was only the beginning, but every song on that first album was a classic–and he would follow it in the next year with No Compromise. This opened with the soft rock Soften Your Heart, then the heart-rending Make My Life a Prayer to You, written by his wife Melody. This is followed by the album’s fun song, Dear John Letter (To the Devil), then back to the heart-rending How Can They Live Without Jesus?.

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.

*****

The series to this point has included:

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Music

#279: My Journey to Becoming a Writer

January 14, 2019 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #279, on the subject of My Journey to Becoming a Writer.

This is a response to a question asked by Georgia Bester on the Christian Music Network Musician’s Corner at Facebook, which reads:

Hello [emoticon omitted]
For those of you in writing ministry. I would love to hear about your journey. How did you know for sure that this is where the Lord wanted you?

That link probably does not work if you do not belong to that group, as it is a closed group, but that is her entire post.

Uncertain exactly what she meant, I asked for clarification, specifically whether she was talking about songwriting or bookwriting, and she answered:

Christian Author+-songwriter

–which I take to mean both books and music. I write both, and there have been separate but connected paths that brought me to them.

By the time I was twelve I had settled in my mind that I would be a professional musician, in the popular vein. I already played piano, clarinet, oboe, saxophone, ukulele, and I think fife and recorder, and my singing was noteworthy–my kindergarten teacher had identified me as her “little songbird”. I could hold a part in a choir, and had a significant range for a boy. I had even tried writing music, but none of it was any good, and it was frustrating.

I was introduced to another boy my age (John “Jay” Fedigan) who played the guitar, sang, and wrote songs. Working with him I learned how he wrote songs, and started doing so myself. Because in order to play keyboards with him I was going to need to know what he was playing on the guitar (and he was clueless when it came to notes and chords) I learned to play the guitar. Before I’d finished high school I’d added bass guitar, tuba, flute, and several other instruments to the list, but I got good on playing the guitar, singing, and writing my own songs. This was the late sixties/early seventies, so these songs were all love songs, usually sad, or protest songs.

The Jesus Movement hit our town in a big way. I actually had become a Christian when I was thirteen, in 1968, but it hadn’t had a lot of impact on my life because I’d always been a reasonably decent churchgoing kid. The Jesus Movement was something different, people for whom faith was the center of their lives in a real way. I got dragged along the edge of this, and became more involved, and realized that the songs I was writing weren’t really worth singing, in a message sense, so I started to shift more toward writing Christian songs, and by 1972 (middle of junior year high school) that’s pretty much all I wrote and all I sang. (I did write a piece for my high school band, and a setting of the Lord’s Prayer which my high school chorus performed, and of course performing with school groups I did the music chosen by the directors.) The band that had been a precision rock band called BLT Down became an evangelistic Christian vocal rock band called The Last Psalm, and for a couple years made a splash in coffeehouses and colleges in northern New Jersey.

I went to college and decided to major in Biblical Studies (rather than music) because I thought having that degree would open more doors for music ministry than the other. I did take a music theory class, but I also took a creative writing fiction class, mostly because it sounded interesting and I imagined that I might one day write the next major Christian fantasy novel, akin to Tolkien’s work. I played in a couple of bands, including Jacob’s Well and Aurora, which sometimes included some of my songs in the repertoire.

Coming out of college I mostly spun my wheels for years trying to get some traction. My wife’s theory was that I would get a good paying job with my college degree and pursue music on the side until it reached the point that it paid for itself. That never happened. Instead, the Lord worked some strange circumstances to land me on the air at a small but important Christian radio station (it had been the twelfth most important Contemporary Christian/Rock radio station in the country shortly before I arrived, despite being in the sticks and reaching part of northern Delaware as its primary audience–no offense to people in Delaware, but it’s not one of the top markets in the country). I did some solo concerts with teaching included and continued to write songs for them. I met a lot of people in the Christian music world, but by this point my recording equipment had died and I had no recordings to give them and no spare money with which to repair the recorders.

During this time I headed up a project to launch a radio station news letter, and wrote much of the content for it. We had it printed by a local newspaper, who traded printing costs for advertising time, and so I became acquainted with the associate editor of The Elmer Times. In our chatting we hit an idea by which I would write a few pieces of political satire for his paper, under the byline M. Joseph Young, so that it wouldn’t be obvious that this was written by the DJ on the local Christian radio station. I think two were published, and I might have copies of them buried somewhere.

After five years I parted ways with the radio station; God had in essence told me it was time to go, and I was so burnt from the struggle I didn’t ask where I was going. That turned out to be nowhere fast. I was asked at this time to head a band called TerraNova, which I did for a couple years, but a guitarist who came to us very humbly then made himself indispensable then fell apart and quit pretty much put an end to that. I was going through jobs fairly quickly, four jobs in two years none of them going anywhere, and my wife, who finished her nursing degree, said I should go back to school. I could tell you about the very strange search for continuing education and how I wound up going to law school, but suffice it that I did, and graduated with a Juris Doctore and a mountain of debt, only to be denied admission to the New Jersey Bar because of the debt.

While I was trying to resolve this problem, I was asked to help a friend of a friend who was trying to write a role playing game. I was good at role playing games and good at writing; he was quite creative and had a core of excellent ideas for the game, but he was a terrible writer, had no head for game mechanics, and was very disorganized. We collaborated, and after five years of work and personal tension he dropped out and left me to publish Multiverser: The Game. I kept the nom de plume M. Joseph Young for that project, and for most of what came from that.

I attempted to launch another band, Cardiac Output, which played a bit locally before the pressures and problems of my family life created by the combination of the debt and the fact that getting a law degree wasn’t solving anything was too much and the band collapsed.

In order to promote the game I started writing web pages, first as my own sites. I wrote on multiple topics–Bible materials, but also role playing game stuff, time travel pages, some stuff on law and politics. My own originally several web sites grew (eventually I consolidated them into one huge site, M. J. Young Net) and I was invited to write material for other web sites, most of it role playing game stuff, but some on other subjects. I was occasionally paid small amounts for these.

The company that published Multiverser got a crazy idea to create a comic book based on the concept, and it fell to me as the company’s chief writer to create the characters and stories. I had written enough for three issues (six stories, two for each of three characters who would rotate) when the tiny company’s art department said it couldn’t be done without increasing the size of the department sixfold, so the stories got shelved for a few months–and then I suggested that they could be turned into the beginning of a novel. The company agreed, and eventually published Verse Three, Chapter One. A lot of what brought that about is discussed elsewhere.

Something had been nagging at me ever since TerraNova had dissolved: a lot of Christians had come to Christ and were never told what to do next. I felt that a need existed, and in very short order wrote What Does God Expect? A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct. The company that published the novel did not want to get the image of being a “Christian” book publisher, so I talked to a lot of people about it, and wound up self-publishing it. This was followed by two more short books.

Laced into this, when I was at the radio station I became aware that one of the most Christian games I had ever played was being attacked by Christians, and so I spoke in defense of the game on the air, and put together notes for what might be an article. A few years later I wrote that article, and tried to find a magazine interested in publishing it, but I’ve never been good at self-promotion so it didn’t go anywhere. When I started putting things on the web I finished that article as Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons(tm) Addict, and it caught the attention of Reverend Jim Aubuchon, who was co-founding an online group then called the Christian Role Playing Game Association. He invited me, I wasn’t interested, again circumstances intervened and I was just about forced to join. I was then asked to head a committee, and from that told that put me on the board of directors. The group changed its name to Christian Gamers Guild, and the Vice President and the President both resigned in short order, the Chaplain decided that that made him President, and we needed a Chaplain, so he asked me to fill the slot just until we could finish the group’s constitution and hold elections. I’d never won an election for anything in my life, and as far as I could see the Chaplain didn’t really do anything, so I figured I could wear the title for a couple months and then someone would replace me.

After those couple months there was an election, and I was nominated and elected to continue in the position. After wearing the title for a couple years I decided that I ought to do something, so I started writing a monthly column entitled Faith and Gaming. (I had also simultaneously started writing a weekly column for one of the role playing game web sites, Gaming Outpost, entitled Game Ideas Unlimited.) I wrote this series for four years, disrupted by a computer crash. People occasionally asked me if I was going to write more, or if I was going to put the material in a more accessible format, so I self-published Faith and Gaming. A few years later a publisher in the industry approached me with the suggestion that they could republish an expanded edition with a few other articles I’d written on the subject in other venues, and I agreed.

In the end, I write and I compose because it’s what I do. Much of what I write and all of what I compose is Christian, but then, that’s because I am Christian, and even when I’m writing about law or politics or role playing games there is a degree to which my Christianity is part of that–C. S. Lewis once commented that the world did not need more Christian books, but more books by Christians. I’m not persuaded that he was right, as Christians need Christian books, but I think he was onto something with the notion that if the best books on secular subjects are written by Christians, unbelieving readers are going to find traces of the faith reflected in those books, undermining their unbelief.

So Georgia, if you’re asking how I knew God had called me to write, I don’t know that I ever really gave it much thought. Writing is not one of the ministries; it’s one of the tools of ministry, and if you’re called to ministry and you can write, you’ll probably find yourself using writing as one of the tools of that ministry. I write because I cannot help writing, and I sing and compose because I cannot help doing so, just as I teach and explain because it is innately part of me to do so. If you are called to something, you will find yourself doing it, or doing something like it, without thinking about it.

I know this has been long, but I’m going to close with a few links to other articles you might find helpful on the issue:

#72: Being an Author which examines the definition and qualifications of the title.
#97: Ministry Calling which discusses how to recognize if you are called to ministry, as distinct from having talents and skills.
#216: Why Are You Here? which distinguishes purpose from function.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Music, Reviews, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#278: The 2018 Recap

January 1, 2019 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #278, on the subject of The 2018 Recap.

A year ago I continued a tradition of recapitulating in the most sketchy of fashions everything I had published over the previous year, in mark Joseph “young” web log post #219: A 2017 Retrospective. I am back to continue that tradition, as briefly as reasonable. Some of that brevity will be achieved by referencing index pages, other collections of links to articles and installments.

For example, on the second of January, the same day I published that retrospective here, I also posted another chapter in the series of Multiverser novels, at which point we were at the twenty-third chapter of the fourth book, Spy Verses (which contains one hundred forty-seven short chapters). We had just published the first of seven behind-the-writings web log posts looking at the writing process, but all of that is indexed at that link. Also on that same day the Christian Gamers Guild released the second installment of the new series Faith in Play, but all of those articles along with all the articles in the RPG-ology series are listed, briefly described, and linked (along with other excellent articles from other members of the guild) in the just-published Thirteen Months in Review on their site. That saves recapping here two dozen more titles in the realms of Bible/theology and gaming, many of them excellent. It should also be mentioned that six days a week I post to the Chaplain’s Bible study list, finishing Revelation probably early next week, and posting “Musings” on Fridays.

Spy Verses wrapped up in October, and was followed by the release of an expansion of Multiverser Novel Support Pages, updated character sheets through the end of that book, and by the end of that month we had begun publishing, several chapters per week, Garden of Versers, which is still going as I write this.

Now would probably be a good time to mention that all of that writing is free to read, supported by reader contributions–that means you–through Patreon or PayPal Me. If you’ve been following and enjoying any of those series, your encouragement and support through those means goes a long way to keeping them going, along with much else that has been written–and although that may be the bulk of what was written, there is still much else.

Since on January 10th the first of the year’s web log posts on law and politics appeared, we’ll cover those next.

#220: The Right to Repair presents the new New Jersey law requiring manufacturers of consumer electronics to provide schematics, parts, and tools to owners at reasonable prices, so that those with some knowledge in the field can troubleshoot and repair their own cell phones and other electronics, and none of us need be at the mercy of price-gouging company stores.

#221: Silence on the Lesbian Front addressed the ramifications of a Supreme Court decision not to hear a case against a Mississippi law permitting merchants to decline wedding services to homosexual weddings.

#222: The Range War Explodes: Interstate Water Rights arose at the Supreme Court level when Florida claimed Georgia was using too much of the water that should flow downstream to it.

#225: Give Me Your Poor talks about our immigrant history, the illusion that it was entirely altruistic, and the question of what we do going forward.

#229: A Challenge to Winner-Take-All in the Electoral College looks at a federal lawsuit claiming that the standard electoral college election system violates the one-person-one-vote rule.

#230: No Womb No Say? challenges the notion that men should not have a say in abortion law.

#231: Benefits of Free-Range Parenting discusses the recent idea that parents who do not closely monitor their kids are not being negligent.

#241: Deportation of Dangerous Felons considers the Supreme Court case which decided that the law permitting deportation of immigrants for “aggravated felonies” is too vague.

#247: The Homosexual Wedding Cake Case examines in some detail the decision that protected a baker from legal action against him for refusing service to a homosexual couple, based primarily on the prejudicial language of the lower court decision.

#251: Voter Unregistration Law examined a somewhat complicated case upholding a law that permits removal of non-responsive voters from the registration lists.

#253: Political Messages at Polling Places presented the decision that non-specific political clothing and such cannot be banned from polling places.

#255: On Sveen: Divorcees, Check Your Beneficiaries examined a convoluted probate case in which a law passed subsequent to a divorce dictated how life insurance policy assets should be distributed.

#259: Saying No to Public Employee Union Agency Fees is the case the unions feared, in which they were stripped of their ability to charge non-members fees for representation.

#261: A Small Victory for Pro-Life Advocates hinged on free speech and a California law compelling crisis pregnancy centers to post notices that the state provides free and low-cost abortions.

#270: New Jersey’s 2018 Election Ballot was the first of two parts on the election in our state, #271: New Jersey’s 2018 Election Results providing the second part.

#274: Close Races and Third Parties arose in part from the fact that one of our congressional districts was undecided for several days, and in part from the fact that Maine has enacted a new experimental system which benefits third parties by having voters rank all candidates in order of preference.

One post that not only bridges the space between religion and politics but explains why the two cannot really be separated should be mentioned, #224: Religious Politics.

My practice of late has been to put my book reviews on Goodreads, and you’ll find quite a few there, but for several reasons I included #223: In re: Full Moon Rising, by T. M. Becker as a web log post. I also copied information from a series of Facebook posts about books I recommended into #263: The Ten Book Cover Challenge.

There were a few entries in time travel, mostly posted to the Temporal Anomalies section of the site, including Temporal Anomalies in Synchronicity, which is pretty good once you understand what it really is; Temporal Anomalies in Paradox, which is a remarkably convoluted action-packed time travel story; Temporal Anomalies in O Homen Do Futuro a.k.a. The Man From the Future, a wonderfully clever Brazilian film in which the time traveler has to fix what he tried to fix, interacting with himself in the past; and Temporal Anomalies in Abby Sen, an Indian film that is ultimately pretty dull but not without some interesting ideas.

In the miscellaneous realm, we had #227: Toward Better Subtitles suggesting how to improve the closed captioning on television shows; #228: Applying the Rules of Grammar encourages writers to understand the rules and the reasons for them before breaking them; and #273: Maintaining Fictional Character Records gives some details of my way of keeping character information consistent from book to book.

This year we also began a subseries on the roots of Christian Contemporary and Rock Music, starting with #232: Larry Norman, Visitor in March, and continuing with

Looking at our Bible and Theology posts, the first of the year landed in the end of March, as #233: Does Hell Exist? attempts to explore how the modern conception of hell compares with the Biblical one; #245: Unspoken Prayer Requests finds theological problems with asking people to pray without telling them what to pray; and #267: A Mass Revival Meeting explains what is really necessary to bring about a revival.

There were also a couple of entries related to gaming, including the republication of a lost article as #237: Morality and Consequences: Overlooked Roleplay Essentials–the first article I ever wrote to be published on someone else’s web site. There was also a response to some comments made by #239: A Departing Member of the Christian Gamers Guild, and a sort of review of a convention appearance, #249: A 2018 AnimeNEXT Adventure.

A couple previously published pieces appeared in translation in the French edition of Places to Go, People to Be, which you can find indexed under my name there.

So that is a look at what was published online under my name this past year–a couple hundred articles, when you count all the chapters of the books (and more if you count all the Bible study posts). In the future, well, I have a lot more to write about Christian music, I’m only getting started with Garden of Versers and have another novel, Versers Versus Versers, set up and ready to run, several Faith in Play and RPG-ology articles are in the queue (one publishes today), and there’s a study of the Gospel According to John ready to post and the Gospel According to Mark being prepared to follow it, plus some preliminary notes on Supreme Court cases, an analysis of a time travel movie that’s taking too long to finish, and more.

Again, your support through Patreon or PayPal.me helps make all of it possible. Thank you for your support and encouragement.

Bible and Theology, Music

#276: Best Guitarist Phil Keaggy

December 7, 2018 M.J. 1 Comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #276, on the subject of Best Guitarist Phil Keaggy.

The rumor was always that Jimi Hendrix claimed Phil Keaggy was the best guitarist in the world.

The way I eventually heard the story, Hendrix was being interviewed and was asked what it was like to be the best guitarist in the world, and he replied, “I don’t know, ask Phil Keaggy.”

Keaggy always maintained that Hendrix never said he was the best in the world, and I suppose you could take that version of the story in a way which doesn’t say that. On the other hand, Keaggy was and still is an amazing musician.

He began with a band called Glass Harp, and they were a more than moderately successful ensemble–they recorded a live album in Carnegie Hall sometime in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t released until the late 90s, after Keaggy was more than established. For most aficionados his first Christian album was the breakthrough, and the title song What a Day put him on the map, showcasing his lead stylings.

It was again the title song of his next album, Love Broke Thru, which caught the ear; it was also recorded by its co-writer, still ahead on our survey, and although people still debate which version is better, the song propelled both of them into the spotlight. It led to a tour and concert album with 2nd Chapter of Acts, under the title How the West Was Won, a good album which never achieved the greatness of To the Bride.

This was followed by a more fusion-styled album, The Master and the Musician, from which the only track I remember was the instrumental Agora (The Marketplace).

Not long after I arrived at the radio station, Ph’lip Side landed on our desk. It was a much-played album, from the rocky opening A Royal Commandment to the gentle mostly acoustic closing I Belong to You, but the big cut for us, coming out when a major movement was bringing a Crisis Pregnancy Center to our local city, was Little Ones, still one of the most powerful songs in defense of the unborn.

I don’t recall ever having seen, let alone heard, the album Town to Town, but somewhere I still have a vinyl copy of Play Through Me, and whenever I think of Keaggy the first song that comes to my mind is probably the opener of that album, Happy, which is instrumental for probably four-fifths of its run. Obviously, if I owned the album I heard it, probably many times, and would probably recognize any of the cuts from it, but the only other title that rings a bell is Nobody’s Playgirl Now.

Keaggy is still recording, so there’s a lot of his stuff I’ve never heard; but there was one more album he released in that last year before I left, and as 1983 came to an end I put it on a list of the ten most significant Christian albums of the year. The album was double-titled, The Private Collection Volume I (there doesn’t appear to have been a Volume II) and Underground. I recognize one track title from it, What a Love, but the quality of the music or the memorability of the songs was not what was significant with this. It was the way it was produced.

TEAC, one of the leaders in recording equipment of the era, had released an all-in-one recording studio that used two cassettes–that’s right, cassettes, those tiny little tapes that were always getting chewed up inside the players but which abruptly produced a remarkable audio quality with the development of “metal tape”–to record four tracks on each and permit mixing from one tape to the other. Keaggy sat at home and laid track upon track, drums, guitars, bass, multiple vocals, all using this gadget, and came up with an album that was at least passable by the standards of the day.

I say passable, but in a sense it wasn’t. Sparrow Records, which at the time was contracted as Keaggy’s label, felt it was below their production standards, and if you listen to the album on good equipment and attend to the background tracks, you can hear the kind of distortion one gets from copying one tape to another repeatedly (I’ve done it, using a pair of TEAC 3340 reel-to-reel decks and a Tascam 3 mixer; alas my children destroyed those tapes). Sparrow found itself in a bind, because the music was excellent but the production was below par, so they created a new label, Nissi Records, for the purpose. I understand the label eventually carried more of Keaggy and several other artists, but I was no longer in touch with the industry so I don’t know the details.

To me, though, this was significant. In the late 50s and very early 60s it was still possible to record a song in your garage on a small reel-to-reel recorder and have it break through to be a national hit. By the early 80s hourly rates for studio time for the quality required to make a major label record ran six digits. Keaggy’s record was the first glimmer of the possibility that it was still possible to make good recordings of good music at home at a not completely unreasonable cost. It was well outside my budget as a barely-above-minimum-wage Christian radio DJ and PD, but it was not impossible to imagine being able to afford such a thing, even though I never could.

To wrap up, in college I knew someone who said that Keaggy was technically brilliant and undoubtedly impressed other musicians with his skill, but he found the music boring. He did impress other musicians. I attended a live solo concert of his in the early 70s, and he would perform these incredibly difficult pieces, and then give an embarrassed laugh and comment that he should have practiced that one. However, I recently encountered evidence that Phil might just be the best guitarist in the world, in his live rendition of True Believers (video begins with an extended spoken intro). He is obviously using some fancy equipment on his acoustic guitar, such as one or more ditto boxes, but even so the performance is technically brilliant, and the audience recognizes it. He does things I’m not sure I could even tell you how to do, and I’ve been playing for almost as long as he has.

*****

The series to this point has included:

mark Joseph "young"

Tag Archives: Ministry

#297: An Objective Look at The Extreme Tour Objective Session

#296: Found Free Lost

#292: Rising Resurrection Band

#290: James the Other Ward

#285: An Expression of Gratitude

#283: Keith Green Crashing

#281: Keith Green Launching

#279: My Journey to Becoming a Writer

#278: The 2018 Recap

#276: Best Guitarist Phil Keaggy

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.