Many years later, in the mid eighties, Susan and I—with our two little girls in tow—went to visit my folks at the farm for Easter. We enjoyed going to their little country church that still had my brother’s initials carved in the back of one of the pews. I guess he wasn’t listening to the sermon much that day.
We arrived mid Saturday afternoon before Easter. I came home from the road in the morning and had just enough time to pack a bag of clean clothes before we needed to get in the car and drive up to the farm.
It was Easter, 1984, when a remarkable thing happened to me at the farm. We loaded up the old Volkswagen to drive the 120 miles north from Memphis to get there. We went through Rector and had a blast on the rollercoaster highway leading to Crowley’s Ridge and on to the farm. The girls squealed with delight going down the hills, airborne in the back. If you have ever been to Rector, you know there is not much to it. There is an old car dealership that went out of business in the 1940s and rumor has it they kept their inventory of cars when they shut down. They were all still supposedly stored in pristine A-1 condition hidden in the old closed and sealed up brick building. That was the local folklore anyway.
Rector also had a one-chair barbershop with the old-fashioned red and white barber pole outside the door. Now, my dad was the sharp dresser in his day. He was a real estate man, always wore a suit and tie, and always wore shined shoes. Once, when my brothers and I were kids, we visited the farm to see our grandparents. I can remember us four boys sitting all across the back seat in my dad’s Chevrolet Impala, driving home to Memphis one Saturday afternoon. Dad had an appointment to show a house later that day and wanted to look his best.
He decided to drop in that little barbershop in Rector on the drive back to Memphis to get a fresh haircut and shave before his appointment. We all sat out in the car sweltering while he was inside. He came out about fifteen minutes later and all seemed well for a little while. Dad cranked up that old Chevrolet, and we took off in a cloud of dust down the road.
I noticed my Dad kept looking at himself in the rearview mirror. I could tell he was studying his hair cut. Something just didn’t sit right with him. Then I heard him cut loose with a little profanity.
“Damn if that barber didn’t cut off one of my sideburns. He only left me with one!”
You’ve got to understand what this meant. This was 1966, when everybody in Memphis, including women and pets, sported sideburns to match Elvis and to show solidarity with the King. This was not an ordinary size sideburn. It was an XL size Elvis sideburn. The old man was steaming. We didn’t dare laugh then, but I do now.
Susan, our girls, and I loved our visits to the old farm. It seemed the whole world slowed to a halt there. The farm sat three miles outside McDougal, Arkansas. The biggest and closest town was called Piggott. They had the Hoggard Funeral Home in Piggott. No lie. Truth can be stranger than fiction. It just all fit together. Piggott’s claim to fame was being the filming location for the Andy Griffith movie A Face in the Crowd. That was a popular movie when it came out in 1957.
On this particular visit to the farm with Susan and our little girls, we were planning on joining my folks at New Hope Baptist Church in the little hamlet of Pollard for Easter morning services. Seems like my whole family, except my brother Mike, are planted in the church cemetery out back. My oldest brother Shelton had a Harley Davidson carved on his tombstone. It looks good, but he should have had it set up on concrete blocks like he used to do with his hot rods back in Whitehaven when we were growing up. It would have fit his persona better.
But I digress. Let’s get back to the story from 1984. Somewhere around eight in the evening that Easter eve I began to notice a little toothache in the back of my mouth. Around ten o’clock it was hurting very badly. By the time the girls, Susan, my parents, and I finished our tradition of playing a game of Scrabble and decided to roll it up and go to bed, I was in a heap of pain. My only remedy was to take an aspirin. There were no dentists, doctors, or emergency rooms open for a toothache victim in McDougal or Piggott.
We all went upstairs to bed. We always rolled the sheets back to check for spiders at the farm. It was tradition. There was an old closet halfway up the staircase in the landing. I would usually hide in it and reach out and grab the girls as they passed by. We were sure a farm ghost haunted that old closet. I huddled in that closet as the deranged farm ghost and scratched the walls as the girls ran past. They screamed and giggled a little.
Every hour my toothache got worse and worse. Somewhere around 2:00 a.m., I decided I had to get out of bed and go downstairs to moan and sit it out. Nothing worked. I was in a great deal of pain. As the sun began to rise that Easter morning I wrote the lyrics to the song “Destined to Win,” which was fated to be one of D&K’s most popular songs ever.
It seems like more often than not, there is some suffering to endure before the blessings come into our lives. It was that way with me. It took a toothache, and staying up all night in wrenching pain, for “Destined to Win” to be birthed. It’s just like God to do it that way.
So, my parents decided to retire and move to that beautiful family farm in Clay County, Arkansas, while Susan and I lived with them after my surgery in 1976. Their move from Whitehaven, Tennessee to the farm happened slowly over a few months. I hope we didn’t run them off when we moved in.
As I mentioned, Dana and I were working for Youth for Christ then, occasionally performing our musical duo gigs at small gatherings or coffee houses around town. Dana called me one day and told me Campus Life Magazine, which was a big deal in its heyday, called to let him know it was sending a writer to Memphis to cover a story about a high school kid in Dana’s Campus Life club. The young man had been operating as a drug dealer when he had a lightning bolt conversion to Jesus. He created quite a stir in his local school by shouting his miraculous salvation story to everyone he met.
Dana called me to let me know about the magazine writer, and then asked if it would be all right for the man to stay with us for a couple of days. With my parents moving out he knew we had some extra room. He and his wife Suzy had a tiny place. I immediately agreed.
TWELVE
Matter of Time
A couple weeks later Campus Life Magazine sent a young writer, a fellow named Stephen Lawhead, to Memphis to stay overnight with Susan and me. His task was to cover the story about the young ex-drug dealer in Dana’s high school club. Stephen and I hit it off quickly. It turned out he was also the music critic for the magazine’s “What’s New” feature. Every month Campus Life, which had the largest magazine subscriber base of Christian high school students of its day, reviewed new music and films. Stephen was the critic.
That first evening, after he interviewed the kid he came to see, Dana dropped Stephen off at my folks’ house. We spent the next several hours together, sharing our stories. I told him how Susan and I met during the “Christian Band” days, and how Dana and I came to Christ and left our mainstream rock band and recording contract behind to follow Jesus. I also told him about my back injury and how, as a result, Susan and I lost everything we owned and had to move in with my parents or be out on the street. As I told him the tale his eyes widened with every twist and turn. At the end of my story, Stephen said, “Man, I need to write a story about you guys. You can’t make this stuff up.”
Then he asked, “Did you record any of your Jesus rock music?”
“Only four songs Susan’s Uncle Jim helped us with,” I responded.
“Can I hear ‘em?”
“Sure, let’s go upstairs to our room.” Mind you, this was mine and Susan’s bedroom that doubled as our tiny living room.
“I got a stereo in there with a reel to reel tape recorder.”
That night I played Stephen Lawhead the four demos Jim Dickinson produced for Dana and me a couple of years before. That evening at my parents’ house changed all of our lives forever.
Stephen shared with me his dream of becoming a novelist. In time he would prove to be just that
. Today, Stephen Lawhead is a world renowned, best-selling author of many books, including the Song of Albion series, The King Raven Trilogy, The Pendragon Cycle, Byzantium, and many more. Back then, though, he was a young man from Nebraska with an oversized mustache making a living as a magazine writer. We had a lot of dreams in common.
After I played the demos for Stephen on our reel to reel tape recorder, he asked if he could take a copy back to Chicago with him and listen a few more times. He went on to say, “This is really good, but something tells me you guys can do better.”
Stephen left to return to Chicago the next morning. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks. I shared with Dana I played our old demos for Stephen and he seemed to like them. Dana didn’t realize Stephen was the music critic for the magazine either. Both of us were excited but also unsure what any of it meant.
Over the next few weeks my folks continued to move to the family farm in Arkansas. They also owned a couple of small rental homes in Memphis, which proved to be crucial to the beginning of DeGarmo and Key over the next few years. One house became a lifesaver for Susan and me and our little family.
My folks came to me one day and sat me down for a discussion. Dad said, “Son, you’ve been through a lot. The good news is you are now back in college. Your mama and I have been talking. You know we own that little rental house on the north side of town. We are happy to let you guys live there, rent free, for as long as you stay in school. We’ve sold this house, and we are going to the farm.”
Susan and I took a drive out by the little rental house. We were appreciative, but it really needed a lot of work to make it livable. I was good at fixing things, and Susan was good at decorating things, so we went to work. I had to lift the floors with a jack to make them level and replace the floor furnace, which was all the heat the little six hundred square foot house had. We painted it inside and out, and I was able to trade our hot rod van to a carpet company to install new carpet on all the floors and new linoleum in the kitchen and bath. We made it our own and that little house became a blessing to our family.
The neighborhood was a bit of a revelation, however. It had definitely seen better days and was in serious decline, but we made some great friends. Next door lived Mr. Bill and Mrs. Katy. Mr. Bill retired from being a heat and air repairman. Mrs. Katy still worked at a factory around the corner. They had a parrot named Mike that would whistle at our girls when they passed by and shout “Hello” to them. It was funny and creepy at the same time. Across the street lived a little boy about five years old named Gator. He kind of looked like an alligator, actually. So did his mom. But she was the sweetest lady.
Down the street lived a little boy named Randy who played with our girls. Sometimes Randy showed up with bruises. Too many bruises, if you know what I mean. We tried to figure out what was going on, but never could get to the bottom of it. So, we just loved on Randy. Sometimes you might see someone walking down the street who’d had a little too much to drink. We had a couple of fights break out in front of the house, and one time a woman tried to run down her husband in a pickup truck for cheating and running around on her. Other than that, the neighborhood was fine. It was home.
When Susan left the mortgage company to deliver our second baby girl, Shannon, her company decided not to offer her the job back. She went on unemployment. It was needed. In those days, employers could get away with that sort of thing.
Life was full of miracles during that time. Stephen Lawhead called me and said he had been listening to the demos over and over. He then said, “I think you guys should write some more songs and figure out a way to record them.”
Dana and I spent the next month getting together every chance we could to write songs. I took a part-time job at an apartment complex doing maintenance work. I could fix most anything back then, before computers. Now, it seems harder. You need a technical degree and little fingers to replace all the transistors, chips, and stuff.
I was in college in the mornings, working at the apartment complex in the afternoons, and running a high school Campus Life club three nights a week. Susan did her part too. She was home with our girls. She did some sewing from time to time and sold the pieces. She also signed us up to be “tasters” in the test-marketing efforts of a local food processor and distributor. We got all kinds of stuff delivered to us weekly to taste test and report back to them. We never died. Life was good. Some of it tasted good. Some—oh well, it was free.
In the meantime, Dana and I wrote a new batch of tunes and were trying to figure out how to record them. I mentioned to Dana we ought to go visit Lewis Willis, our old rock band manager, and ask for his advice. I knew that would hopefully perk old Lewis up.
We played a couple of our new songs for Lewis at Allied Recording Studios down on Looney Street in the hood north of downtown Memphis. “I’ll tell you what,” Lewis said. “I’ll give you boys a week of studio time and help you record your songs for three hundred bucks.”
That was basically the cost of the tape.
“I only have one condition,” he went on to say. “I want to take them over and play them for Willie Mitchell and London Records when we are done. I want to see what they think of this new “Jesus Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
We agreed immediately, but told Lewis we would need a few weeks to raise the three hundred greenbacks and find a couple of musicians willing to help us out.
I went to work on finding us a band. I met a bass player at our church who came out of the local rock scene about the same as Dana and I. His name was Mel Senter. Mel played on those demos for free. We later offered him a spot in the band. He declined and went on to become a pediatrician. Mel always was smart.
For drums I went to Max Richardson. Max played with Globe in the beginning. He had been on a spiritual journey that began when Dana and I became Christians. I’m still not sure he has found what he is looking for all these years later. Max did a great job playing on those early demos, though.
Dana and I went into Allied Recording Studios in June of 1977 and spent a week, almost around the clock, with Lewis Willis. We came out with seven new demos of our songs. We were really pleased. It was comfortable for us in that old funky studio down by the muddy river. We helped Lewis build that place during our high school years. I met Susan there. She and I went there sometimes in the Christian Band days when no one was around to make out. It wasn’t fancy, but it was home. Lewis helped us tremendously by producing those seven demos.
True to our word, when we finished we gave Lewis first shot to pitch the demos to Hi and London Records. He came back discouraged and said, “Boys, they really like your sound and music. They just can’t figure out how to market and sell rock music about God.”
I think Lewis deeply regretted their decision. He really wanted to work with us.
I immediately sent a copy to Stephen Lawhead. He called me as soon as he listened and in his soft-spoken way he said, “This should do the trick. Do you mind if I send it around to a few folks?”
THIRTEEN
Ready Or Not
Over the first year of D&K we were flat broke. At one point our cupboards were actually bare. I called Dana and told him I needed to raise a few bucks to buy some groceries for our little girls. I asked him if he had any ideas or knew of someone who needed an odd job done. He said he was dead broke too. He invited us over later that afternoon and decided to get some folks together to pray about it. Susan and I packed up the girls and drove over. We went inside, gathered with the band and began to ask God for food. After a minute or two I decided it was my time to pray out loud. As soon as I started my first sentence, though, there was a startling knock on the front door. Since I was closest I got up and answered it. There, standing on the porch, was our friend Buddy Abbott, with a sack full of groceries under each arm.
“I was driving home from work and the strangest feeling came over me,” he said. “I felt like I was supposed to stop and buy you some groceries. So here I am!” Buddy then handed me the bags of groce
ries.
Needless to say, I was freaking out. Buddy and I walked back into the room and we all freaked out together, shouting and praising God. It was a miracle for sure. Later, as I began to process what had just gone down, I realized Buddy, who was an attorney, worked about forty-five minutes away from where Dana lived. When God laid it on him to buy us some groceries, it was a good half hour before we began to pray. God knows what we need long before we ask.
Over the next few weeks Stephen Lawhead sent me a few letters from record companies that had decided to pass on us. Our music was too rock, too preachy, too didactic (I had to look that definition up), or too bluesy. We received letters from Billy Ray Hearn at Sparrow Records and reps from other labels. Even Larry Norman, who had his own label called Solid Rock, turned us down. They all gave different reasons, but had one thing in common; they didn’t want us.
One day our telephone rang at home and Susan answered it. She listened for a second and then hung up.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Some weirdo saying he was Pat Boone.”
“Oh.”
“I hung up on him.”
Pat Boone was a major star in the seventies. He was still making movies, still singing, and was a frequent guest on late night shows like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It did not make sense that he would be calling us.
The phone rang again. This time I answered. The voice on the other end said, very quickly, “I’m Pat Boone. Please don’t hang up on me. I’m looking for Eddie DeGarmo. Someone sent me a tape with this telephone number written on it. I don’t even know who sent it to me. You see, I like this music very much and I think I can help you.”
Rebel for God Page 10
