Rebel for God

by Eddie DeGarmo

  After Dana bought that old house, I went over from time to time to help him fix it up. He was going through a really tough time with the divorce, and I wanted to be with him as much as I could. Dana went to Bible College and really wanted to be a pastor someday. He felt like damaged goods because of the divorce, though. He thought he would never be asked to pastor a church.

  It became obvious to us both it was going to take more time for our band to be able to support us financially. Dana, living down the street from Ardent, began to hang around the studio quite a bit. Over the course of a couple months, the studio offered him a job answering the door and telephone at night. A few weeks after he started to work there he called me and said John Fry, the studio owner, wanted to offer me the same job. That was a real Godsend for both of us. John Fry was quite the peculiar character. He grew up in a prestigious Memphis family and he still carried that sophisticated air around him. His voice sounded exactly like Jimmy Stewart’s in It’s a Wonderful Life, and he spoke with the same disarming stammer. He also seemed to wear the same outfit every single day, but upon further inspection, he just owned thirty pairs of beige khaki pants and thirty powder blue cotton twill, button-down, ivy league dress shirts hanging in his closet. He really took a liking to us, but he was eccentric.

  I started the night job at Ardent in the fall of 1979. Dana and I swapped nights. The job had bizarre hours. We clocked in at 5:00 p.m. and often wouldn’t clock out until after the sun came up the next morning. Sometimes the clientele in the studio were legendary artists. Other times we were dealing with free-spirited local artists who just hung out until the wee hours of the morning. I met a ton of very talented and interesting characters during those long nights at Ardent. There was a lot of late night storytelling and even some amazing spiritual conversations. I’m sure some of those people were under the influence of serious drugs or alcohol, but I was used to that, having grown up around the music scene.

  John Fry threw Dana and me a major lifeline. We came to an agreement that while we worked there, it would be okay for us to take a few weeks off in the spring and fall to tour. That was not only extremely accommodating; it also kept Lamb and Lion happy that we could promote our records.

  I was doing odd jobs during the days while working at Ardent three or four nights a week. Dana and I came to a very tough decision during that season. DeGarmo and Key couldn’t tour enough to support us, so we needed to set our band free to pursue other things to survive. That was a tough call. We met with Kenny Porter and Terry Moxley to let them know we took full time jobs with Ardent, and we planned to consolidate our touring to a few weeks in the spring and fall combined with a smattering of summertime events. It wasn’t enough activity to support a full time band. We understood we would probably lose those guys for good. They were going to need to go to a full time band or take jobs elsewhere. That was tough on all of us.

  Shortly after I began to work at Ardent, John Fry seemed to notice I had a deeper interest in the business side of things. He began to groom me to take over Joe Hardy’s position as studio manager. That’s right. Not only had Joe Hardy co-produced Straight On, he also performed all of the daily tasks of a studio manager. Ardent was bustling with activity then. There were two recording studios, a mastering lab, and a video room under construction. There were about thirty-five employees. That was a lot to manage.

  One night, after a few weeks of being the “night guy,” there was an occasion when one of the staff recording engineers became ill and couldn’t make it to a session. Joe and John asked me if I could fill in as the engineer. Now, I had recorded a couple of albums with D&K at Ardent by then and knew my way around, but I had never engineered a session for someone else. They seemed confident in me, though.

  John said, “Go set up a radio on the studio floor, put a microphone on it, and experiment with the patch-bay for a couple of hours. You’ll be fine.”

  That is how I began my recording engineer career at Ardent. Dana was on the same engineering track and both of us became staff engineers. That proved invaluable to me as we began to produce albums for other artists throughout the late seventies and into the eighties. John also promoted me to studio manager around that time. I booked all the sessions, negotiated the rates, collected the payments, and kept the financial books. It was a great experience for sure. I learned a lot and was pretty good at the job.

  In many ways it seems I have always been somewhat torn between the creative, the technical, and the financial aspects of the music business. It’s a tension that has existed at the center of most of my career. I always loved writing, recording, and performing, but I was also the guy who had to think about how we were going to buy a tank of gas in the next town. Some creative types seem to hate the money side. Not me. I’ve always been fascinated by how things work and how I might be able to make them work better. Being the studio manager at Ardent was definitely one more way of being bi-vocational in the early days of the band, but it was more than that. I can see now, unlike repairing apartment buildings or painting houses, the work at Ardent built skills in me that would come in very handy down the road in a different sort of way.

  DeGarmo and Key was definitely a ministry. But it was also a business. It would have to be operated as such if we wanted it to survive and wanted to support our families with it. Ardent was helping me learn how to do just that.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Rise Up

  Like I said, I met some pretty eccentric characters during my days as studio manager at Ardent. Take Allen Jones, for instance. Allen was a part of the Stax Records scene and wrote some big hits in the sixties. He became a notable record producer and managed several disco artists in the late seventies and early eighties. One of his acts was the platinum selling disco/funk band The Bar-Kays. They were at Ardent recording an album for several months and Allen and I became friends over that time.

  Allen was convinced he came from a planet called “Motah.” I thought maybe he was just referring to Detroit, aka “Motor City,” with a thick accent. But he was convinced he was an alien of sorts. I kinda agreed with him, actually. He was definitely a cultural leader in the black music scene in Memphis. He had a very magnetic personality and a larger than life persona. He spoke with an animated, street-wise, husky voice.

  At around 9:00 one morning, Allen came storming into my office, shouting. “Eddie,” he hollered. “Eddie! All this time I thought you was different! Turns out you just the same. Same as every other white SOB ‘round this damn place. You a racist, man. You a racist!”

  I stood up and asked him, “What’s wrong with you, Allen? What are you talking about? You’re acting nuts—like you must’ve stayed out all night!”

  Allen ranted on, “Come out here with me! I wanna show you sumthin.’ ”

  We walked out the front door and around the side of the building to the parking lot. Ardent had just built an additional recording studio for the facility. It was a room attached to the back end of the building. As a result of the new space, though, we lost some parking spaces.

  Parking at Ardent was always at a premium. The first people to arrive each day would park in proper spaces, but later arrivals tended to just pull in and park along the side of the building in a way that prevented the other cars from being able to back up. So, when we had to have the parking lot resurfaced after the construction, we decided to paint “No Parking” several times along the side of the building on the new asphalt in the area where the problem parking tended to happen.

  As Allen and I stared at the parking lot, he screamed, “Jus’ look at that. Look at that! That’s what I mean! You’re a racist, talking about us like that.”

  As I looked at the parking lot I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw the words “NO-PARKING” stenciled four or five times on the asphalt along the side of the building, just as we had requested. The problem was, however, that the parking lot painter misspelled it. By reversing the “i” and the “n” the words read “NO-PARKNIG”! Allen took that as a racial slur
against black people.

  I immediately looked in his eyes and promised him it was a mistake that didn’t mean anything. Thank God the parking lot painter was still there. Also, thank God he was a black man—a very, very old black gentleman who just goofed up.

  Needless to say, Allen settled down when he realized the truth and we both had a good belly laugh about it. “You want me to leave it this way?” I joked. He hit me and ran away. We fixed it immediately.

  Joe Hardy, Dana, and I forged a strong working alliance when we made the Straight On album. It got some good attention from people in the industry due to its sound and production quality. Frankly, at that point few Christian albums had very good “production.” Making good records required a conducive space with certain acoustical properties, good technical equipment for recording the sounds, and people who knew how to use it all. There was also value in knowing what music should and could sound like, and how to identify, or craft, the best possible songs. Between the three of us we had all of those skills, and we enjoyed working together. I thought it might be possible for us to expand our impact by inviting other like-minded artists to Ardent to record, with us as their production team.

  A producer is in charge of just about everything that goes into the making of a record or an album. The number one task of a producer is to assist the artist in accomplishing his or her best possible work. A good producer helps a solo artist or band achieve peak performance and creativity. The producer also assists artists in finding the best songs to record. If the artist is a songwriter, the producer should act as a sounding board for the artist to to improve his or her craft and make the best possible decisions about the songs. The producer should also help artists find a unique sound they can own, and then help them stay true to that vision. The artist has to be the originator of the work, but the producer helps sculpt and craft it with him or her. It’s an intricate, sensitive, and sometimes very challenging creative process.

  At times the producer’s job is also very practical. He or she will help find and hire the best musicians for the style and the best recording facilities and engineers the artist’s budget will allow. The producer will also manage the budget, deliver the project in a timely fashion, and act as a go-between for the record label and the artist.

  Joe, Dana, and I felt we could provide those services to other Christian artists. We liked the idea of bringing a creative and sonic lift for artists in our budding genre. Ardent was a world-class studio and we believed that with our combined skills and talents, we could raise the creative bar for Christian music. In fact, we believed we could help it compete sonically and artistically with the best mainstream music out there.

  I went to Joe and Dana with my dream of starting a production company. They both thought it was a great idea. We came up with the name “Mint Productions.” In our insider cool slang, if something was “mint” it was top notch and of the highest quality. John Fry was into the idea of new clients coming to work at Ardent, so we were ready to go.

  My first call was to Myrrh Records. Myrrh, then based out of Waco, Texas, was arguably the hottest Christian music label at that point. It had a large and talented roster of artists. The head of A&R was a fellow named Mike Blanton. I introduced myself to Mike over the phone and invited him to Memphis to tour Ardent and to talk about production. Mike was familiar with DeGarmo and Key and was already a fan of our work. I explained to him we formed a production company and would like to see if we could help with any of Myrrh’s artists. We hit it off over the phone, and he agreed to visit Memphis. That was a big moment for us all. Mike came the next week. We gave him a tour of Ardent and spent several hours discussing the various ways we might be able to work together.

  Mike called me a few weeks later and said he would be coming to town in a few days with a young Myrrh artist named Amy Grant. Amy was scheduled to perform at Ellis Auditorium down by the river. Mike invited Susan and me to come out, see the concert, and meet Amy.

  I was aware of Amy, but not overly familiar with her music. Word Records was the parent company of Myrrh. Word was also the distributor of Lamb and Lion’s records to the Christian bookstore world. In 1978 Word launched a marketing plan designed to simultaneously promote twelve “contemporary Christian” artists. It was called “Bringin’ a New Song” and it included the release of a compilation LP of the same name and some corresponding print and in-store advertising. Amy Grant was one of the artists in that campaign, as was DeGarmo and Key, and Farrell and Farrell (more about them later). That was my first introduction to Amy and her music.

  Amy had just released her second album, My Father’s Eyes, which was becoming a big success on Christian radio and in sales. Her music was in a different wheelhouse and not really in the same stylistic world as ours. She was more inspired by singer songwriters and light pop artists, which was a bit of a foreign realm to me coming from rock ‘n’ roll. I spent the next few days listening to her first two albums and getting to know them. There was plenty to like in her sweet, gentle, sound.

  Susan and I went to that show at Ellis Auditorium in 1979. Amy was still just a teenager. A lone guitar player by the name of Gary Chapman accompanied her on stage. They were very good as an act, playing off of each other constantly and adding a nice blend of humor, charm, and poignancy to her songs. Also, the auditorium was packed. It certainly was a different crowd than we would see at a typical DeGarmo and Key show. There were more adults, for one thing, and there were a lot more people in general. Mike brought us backstage after the concert and introduced us to Amy and Gary. Amy’s manager, Dan Harrell, was also there.

  I learned a lot that night.

  Mike called me at Ardent a few weeks later and told me he resigned from his role at Myrrh Records and was forming a management company with Dan Harrell. He also let me know they would be managing Gary Chapman, and Gary was going to record an album. He asked me if Mint Productions would be interested in taking a meeting about the possibility of producing it. We met with Gary shortly after and we had a great connection. He was a really charismatic and rambunctious guy. He was also very talented. So Gary made his way to Memphis, and we got busy making his first album.

  Mint Productions went into Ardent Studios with Gary Chapman and emerged two months later with his debut LP, Sincerely Yours. Gary is a wonderful songwriter, so it was easy to produce a great project for him. It was the beginning of a very different kind of career for DeGarmo and Key, too.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jesus Is Coming

  I first met Dan Brock in 1979. I knew of him and his Nashville-based management and booking agency, called The Tame Agency, for a while before I met him. Dan was the manager of the Christian rock band Petra. Even though Petra formed the same year Dana and I formed our “Christian Band,” they got established much more quickly than we did. Their first album came out in 1974, four full years before This Time Thru. By 1978 they were on their third album and touring quite a bit. We felt like we were still just getting started.

  I invited Dan to come see us perform in 1978. We were playing a concert in Memphis at our home church and I thought it would be good for Dan to see us in action. He said he’d come and I was excited to see what he thought of us. I was pretty sure we needed some additional partners in the music business to help us get to the next level, especially in terms of touring. Unfortunately, he stood us up that night.

  I was determined to meet with him, though. I talked Dana into driving to Nashville, unannounced, to just show up on his agency’s doorstep. It was a brazen move, and could have backfired big-time, but I thought it was a risk worth taking. So that’s what we did. We drove to Music Row in Nashville and waltzed right through the front door of The Tame Agency. We asked the receptionist, Darlene, if we could see Dan Brock.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked politely.

  I told the truth. “No we don’t,” I said. “We were just driving through town and thought we’d drop in.”

  Darlene, who later became Mrs. Dan Bro
ck, got up from her chair, went into Dan’s office, and closed the door. A couple of seconds later his door opened and Dan came out. “Hello guys,” he said, inviting us in. “Glad you could drop by. Have a seat.”

  Dan was a tall drink of water. He towered over us at six foot six inches, but we had him on the weight. One of my legs probably weighed more than him. He wore long dirty-blonde hair down past his shoulders parted down the middle and had a goatee about four inches long. He kind of looked like Greg Allman.

  We’ve laughed about that meeting many times over the years. Dan once told me, “I figured I had better meet with you just to keep you from breaking down my door.”

  He was right. I was one determined fella in those days. I guess it was hard to tell me “no.” Maybe I just have a hard time hearing that word. Dana was always less forward and aggressive about our business dealings. He was fine to let me take the lead in those areas. When it came to ministry work, however, he definitely grabbed the reigns. I was cool with that, too.

  When we met with Dan Brock in Nashville that day, I must have asked him a thousand questions about how things worked with Petra. It was a great learning experience for Dana and me. Petra was more developed than us, but they had their own challenges, too. Before we left that day Dan agreed to work with us as our booking agent for a “trial period” to see how it would go. We didn’t talk about management issues, as Stephen Lawhead was still working with us in that capacity, but The Tame Agency would take us on as clients. We were ecstatic. Things were definitely about to hit a new gear for us. I could feel it.

  As we were preparing for whatever would come next for the band, however, we continued to dial in the Mint Productions project. One day, when I was at Ardent, I received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Mylon Lefevre. Mylon was a member of the Atlanta Rhythm Section, and did a string of solo albums for Mercury. But I only knew of him from a set he did with his band “Holy Smoke” opening for the group Mountain in their heyday of Mississippi Queen. I actually wasn’t even at that show, which took place at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis in 1972, but Dana was and he told me all about it.