“I’m Eddie!” I screamed.
That is how it happened. I just didn’t hang up the telephone the second time. Pat went on to say he owned a small record company called Lamb and Lion with his partner Mike Curb. Pat was the lamb, he joked, and Mike was the lion. He explained Lamb and Lion was a boutique label and really only had a couple of other artists outside of himself and his daughters. Pat also said his youngest daughter, Debby, recorded a solo project they were about to release called “You Light Up My Life.”
“I really think I can help you,” he said. “Is it okay if I come to Memphis to meet you guys?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “Just say when.”
“How about tomorrow?” he asked.
Lamb and Lion offered us a recording contract in the summer of 1977, and things suddenly took on a more serious tone for Susan and me. I was a senior in college and was very close to graduation. We had two small children, and we were both working every conceivable odd job to make ends meet. It seemed like every month or two our utilities would be shut off because we were late in paying the bill. I’m glad I knew how to pull the meter and turn them back on. Susan and I got together and had a long conversation about our future and what this recording contract and re-starting the band could mean for us.
She looked at me with those big brown eyes and said, “Honey, I feel God has called us to this mission. I was introduced to Jesus through your music and I think it is important to use it to reach the world with God’s message of love.”
That night Susan and I made an important commitment. We got together and told God we would fully dedicate ourselves to this music venture for four years. We would give it everything we had to help it succeed for that period of time. If, at the end of four years, we couldn’t provide for our family adequately, we would take that as a sign from him it was time to move on.
Over time I have come to believe with that commitment, we stumbled upon an important principle for any new business or venture. The U.S. Small Business Administration states that on average it takes at least three years for any new business to stabilize and survive. If you can’t plan to make it that long, you probably shouldn’t start the business.
Later, as an owner of record and music publishing companies, I shared this “four-year commitment principle” with aspiring artists and songwriters. I told countless young artists they should make a commitment to their dream for a period of years. When we started we chose to commit for four years; I told them they could choose how long they would give it, but it needed to be at least three years. During that period of time they should give it everything they had, come hell or high water. At the end of the time period, if they still couldn’t support themselves and their families if they had them, they should give it up. “Don’t let your dream become a noose around your neck,” I would say. “Don’t let it drown you by allowing it to drag you to the bottom of the river.”
I’ve seen creative and talented people drag their families through the muck and mire too many times as they chase their dreams long past their expiration dates. That being said, I encourage young people to follow their dreams. It is much better to know you tried, even if you fail. Failure is part of the success. If someone hasn’t failed, it just means he never attempted much. You don’t want to look back on your life and wish you’d chased your dream if you were able to. Some people can’t chase their dreams for one reason or another. If you can, though, you should—for a time.
Dana and I were ready and willing to do whatever was required of us. We were willing to be bi-vocational. I was fine with holding several jobs until our music could support us. I did all kinds of things to make money during those early D&K years. I built porches, painted houses, did maintenance work, fixed stuff for people, and even mowed lawns. I was able to hire Dana to help me with that work from time to time. We also both continued to work for Youth for Christ part-time.
We often lost money on those early tours. We came home and had to work odd jobs to pay the tour bills off. We often laughed about it. We definitely weren’t in it for the money. Pat Boone and Mike Curb were true gentlemen to us during that contract period. Later I discovered our agreement gave them ownership virtually of all of our rights for years to come, including all merchandise rights and motion pictures. They never enforced those terms, though. They always treated us very decently. I think they might have been distracted by Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” record, seeing it was the biggest selling song in the history of recorded music up to that time. It was also very good for us. It gave Lamb and Lion the capital to invest in our career. I still should have read the contract, though. That is the last time I failed to read and re-read every word of a contract. It was a good lesson to learn. It could have been a nightmare.
There was a rock band in Memphis called Target. They landed a record deal with A&M Records and were on tour with Boston and Black Sabbath. Dana and I liked their sound and noticed their album was produced by Ron Capone. Ron had a legendary career working with many of Memphis’ own Stax Recording artists like Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and The Barkays. He also worked with the rock-n-roll bands out of our city like Target, Alamo, and others. I mentioned to Dana I thought we should meet with him about producing our album.
Those were exciting days for the recording industry. Ron Capone was on staff at Stax for years before moving to Ardent. He knew how to mix blues, soul, and rock-n-roll together. It was just what the doctor ordered.
We went into the studio in the summer of 1977. I was twenty-two years old. Dana and I were beside ourselves with excitement to record again at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis. We were working in Studio B, which happened to be the same room in which Led Zeppelin III was mixed.
Ron Capone was the true Cajun gentleman. He grew up in New Orleans, and the gumbo still dripped off him. He was a sliver haired, short, stocky southern dude who sounded like he just left the bayou when he would shout, “Who Dat?” He was a good fit for us, but I knew our old friend Lewis Willis was hurt by our decision not to record at Allied Studios. We had a good reason. Allied was still just an eight-track studio, and Ardent was a sixteen-track. That gave us much more flexibility in the recording process.
DeGarmo and Key was always signed as a duo to our recording, publishing, and management contracts. That meant we always needed to hire a band to back us up. As you can imagine, we were very particular about the musicians we hired. Dana and I strove for excellence in everything we did. We took great pride in the skills we cultivated and intended to constantly push ourselves to new levels of professionalism. But a band is a unit. We needed the musicians we hired to have that same kind of drive and passion. You also spend a lot of time with the members of your band, so it’s important they are like-minded and easy to hang out with.
We heard through the grapevine David Spain, the drummer of local rock heroes Target, became a Christian. I was able to look him up. David was a great help to us on our first record, This Time Thru. He played drums on about half of the songs. Max Richardson, the drummer who played with “Christian Band” in our early days, played on most of the others as well as contributing as a co-writer on a couple of tunes. The drums on one song, however, were played by the night doorman at the studio. About a year later I had that job (the doorman gig, not the drumming gig).
The title track of the album, “This Time Thru,” had a fairly complicated rhythm track. It had a middle section that switched from 4/4 to 5/4 time. Both David and Max had a hard time playing it. Ron Capone bragged on how good the doorman, John Hampton, was as a drummer and suggested we hire him to play on the track.
So we did. He nailed it.
That’s how we met the man who would become an integral part of the D&K production team for years to come. He co-produced and engineered many of our albums.
Years later we learned Ron Capone had never even heard Hampton play drums before that day. Ron just took a shot at it. In fact, it was the first time Hampton ever play
ed on any album. You could have fooled me. Well, I guess he did fool me.
During our This Time Thru era, Dana and I were heavily influenced by what I call the “British Cape Bands.” In other words, the music best played while one is wearing a cape. You get the picture. Those were bands like Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Yes, and Jethro Tull. I think we melded that influence with Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top, and the Memphis Blues. It was kind of like mixing barbeque with fine wine. It was a little eccentric and unconventional, but it tasted good!
* * *
I recall the first time I ever used a synthesizer in concert. It was a few years before we recorded This Time Thru and our “Christian Band” was invited by students from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to play at a school assembly at Germantown High School. We were to provide the music, and Dr. Adrian Rogers would be the featured speaker. Dr. Rogers was the well-respected pastor of Bellevue Baptist, one of the biggest churches in Memphis, and one of the flagship churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. Adrian Rogers was indeed a great orator and renowned preacher. He appeared on TV every Sunday morning all around the mid-south. He also was elected as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention several times.
The assembly was held in the gymnasium as the first event of the day for the entire student body. We arrived very early in the morning to set up our equipment and at show time the place was filled to the max. There were bleachers on both sides of the gym, and the floor was lined with rows of chairs. Kids were stuffed in every open spot, nook, and cranny.
I remember being a little intimidated by Dr. Rogers as he sat stoically in the front row. We were committed to putting on a good performance for the students. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes students were beyond excited to be given a full assembly by the school’s principal. They wanted to take advantage of every moment to share Christ with their peers. A couple of them heard us play before so they knew to expect our brand of rock ‘n’ roll. I’m not sure everyone did, though.
As the young leader of the FCA at the school introduced us I could feel the eyes of the crowd follow me to my keyboards. I pushed up my microphone and spoke a simple, brave, phrase.
“I just want to tell you how Jesus has changed my life,” I said.
I then used my synthesizer to create noises that sounded like helicopters dropping napalm bombs in Vietnam. Imagine a sonic rendition of a nuclear holocaust. The audience’s shoulders recoiled when I hit the first note. Our soundman had turned the volume all the way up! The sound was loud enough to loosen the bolts holding the basketball goals in place. You could feel eardrums exploding. It wouldn’t have shocked me to see heads flying off necks. It was shocking.
It was also very cool—at least that’s what we thought.
Unfortunately, when I caught a glimpse of Dr. Rogers, he seemed frozen in horror. His face was rigid, like he had been struck with rigor mortis. His eyes shot lasers of malice my way. His face was frozen in a blank stare, as if he was a victim of a zombie attack.
As the years went by, and DeGarmo and Key became more and more popular in Memphis, it was always peculiar that Bellevue Baptist never once asked us to play or be involved in any way. The Tennessee Baptist Convention never invited us to play at the annual youth rally either. We were invited to play at all sorts of Southern Baptist events in surrounding states, but never in Tennessee. I always suspected it had something to do with that high school assembly. First impressions can be hard to overcome, especially when it involves any degree of rigor mortis.
Susan and I attended Germantown Baptist Church with our family for many years. Those folks embraced us with open arms and helped us in many ways. Their youth minister, Rob Mullins, was an awesome influence on our girls. Ken Story, the pastor, and I rode motorcycles together. He would laugh about him being bald and me looking like the beast from Beauty and the Beast.
Well, a few years later a couple friends of mine who worked at Bellevue Baptist shared with me that, behind closed doors, Dr. Rogers was deeply critical of D&K and our music. I was grateful he was discrete and private about his opinions. He was a very influential man.
When I released my second solo album, Phase Two in 1990, I included a remake of Bill Gaither’s classic Gospel song “There’s Something About That Name.” Russ Taff and Mark Farner (Grand Funk Railroad) joined me on the song. We made a trio out of it. Larry Howard, the consummate blues guitarist, played the solo. We decided to make a music video for it. Ron Griffin, my producer, thought it would be really cool to invite Bill Gaither to appear in the video with us. Bill readily accepted and we had a blast shooting in a creepy old abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of Nashville.
I met Bill a few times before that, but the night shooting that video was an awesome and unforgettable experience that created a friendship that continues today. A year or so later, The Bill Gaither Trio was booked to perform a concert at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis. It seems they were a favorite of Dr. Rogers. Bellevue’s sanctuary was the size of an arena. It could probably seat up to ten thousand folks.
Bill called me that afternoon and I was lucky to be home on a short tour break.
“Hey Eddie,” he said on the phone. “The trio’s in town tonight at Bellevue. Why don’t you come by and say hello before the show? We can have dinner together in the green room. We would love to see you. Just come around back to the tour bus and someone will lead you inside to where we are.”
“I would love to see you, Bill,” I said. “I’ll be there at about five. I can’t stay for long because we are leaving tonight on tour.”
“That’s great. I look forward to seeing you.”
We had a rule in our band back then. Any time we went out in public we were to dress and carry ourselves in a manner befitting our image as rock ‘n’ rollers. I know, to some of you that probably sounds totally egotistical and self-absorbed. As an entertainer, though, you learn your fans want to see you look like you do in your pictures at all times. In fact, they are kind of let down if they see you looking “normal.” They’ll let you know about it too! So I dressed up in my leather fringe jacket, snakeskin boots, and shades to go see Bill Gaither.
Bellevue Baptist is a huge complex. When I arrived, there was already a long line forming. Since it was a church, it was general admission and folks tended to show up early to get a good seat. I drove around back to the tour buses and trucks, as Bill instructed. When I got out of my car I was immediately met by a church security person sporting an earpiece like the ones used by the Secret Service.
“We’ve been expecting you,” he said professionally.
Ok, I was already creeped out a little, but that response definitely sent my radar up. He led me down a long corridor to a large and nicely appointed sitting room near a massive set of doors. The security man knocked on the doors. A second later Bill Gaither opened the door and saw me standing there. He came out and gave me a big bear hug and then walked me into the inner sanctum.
There was a lone man sitting in there. I immediately recognized him as Dr. Adrian Rogers.
He stood to greet me and Bill said, “Adrian, this is Eddie DeGarmo. Eddie, this is Adrian Rogers. You guys need to get to know each other.”
With that, Bill Gaither turned around and left the room. I couldn’t believe it! It was just like Bill to do that.
Dr. Rogers and I spoke for about fifteen minutes. We talked about family and friends, but mostly we talked about Christ and what God was doing in our lives. We made friends that day. That is the way it is supposed to be.
* * *
Dana and I met a guy named Kenny Porter years earlier when we were playing with Globe. He was a student, and the student activities leader, at the University of Tennessee campus in Martin, Tennessee. He brought Globe to town from time to time to play for dances and events at the university. He was also an excellent musician and remarkable bass guitar player. Kenny became a Christian at some point, though totally separately from Dana and me. We reached out to him through a mutual friend and asked if he wan
ted to play bass on our album. That began a great friendship between us. I’m forever appreciative of Kenny’s contributions to our band during those early years.
We recorded This Time Thru over the late summer and fall of 1977. Dana and I were both college students at the time. We went to classes in the morning and off to the studio in the afternoons until late in the night.
My folks owned a second rental house out in Whitehaven, not too far from where I grew up. They offered it to Dana and his wife Suzy to live in, rent free, while we were trying to get the band off the ground . . . hopefully. The fact is, without my folks’ help—as well as the help of several others along the way—we may not have survived the early years.
On a very hot and humid August day in 1977, I was driving from our little house on the north side of town out south to where Dana lived in Whitehaven. We had just begun to record our first album and I was going to his house for something.
I needed to stop and buy some gas on Highway 51 just a half mile or so from Graceland. I would stop in those days and buy a dollar’s worth of gas. Believe it or not, that would buy you three or four gallons.
While I was stopped there I noticed a fellow putting gas in his chromed-out, tricked-out, custom trike (three wheeled motorcycle.) As sweltering as it was, this rather large fellow was wearing a powder blue, down-feather winter jacket with matching powder blue down-feather pants. He looked a whole lot like “The Michelin Man” in the advertisements. You know, the cartoon man made out of tires.
As I was buying my dollar’s worth, he turned to take a look at me. It was only then I realized I was looking at Elvis himself. There, with a plastic-tipped cigar in his mouth, wearing a down-feather snow suit, the King of rock-n-roll was putting gas in his motorcycle. Our eyes locked for a moment. There were a few other folks around filling up their cars, but I’m fairly sure I was the only one who recognized him that day. It was probably because he was so large and puffy. I saw him many times while growing up in Whitehaven, so I recognized him.
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