Rebel for God

by Eddie DeGarmo

  “May I speak to Brenda?” I blurted out before losing my nerve.

  And those frightening words that I’ll never forget?

  “This is she,” the gruff voice replied with a mild chuckle.

  Embarrassed, I immediately blurted out our story as fast as I could get the words from my mouth. “Sir, you don’t know me,” I began. “My name is Eddie DeGarmo and I’m down here at the ‘so and so’ café, stranded with our band. We’re a Christian rock band from Memphis, Tennessee, and our tour bus broke down on the side of the road. We walked a cold mile through the snow to make it here to the café. We have a sold-out concert in Winnipeg tonight, and we are desperately trying to figure out how to get to the ‘so and so’ theater there. We’ve tried everything from renting a car to an airplane to helicopters. You name it and we’ve tried it. We can’t find anything that will work. I confess I saw this name and a number written inside the men’s bathroom stall at the café with a magic marker. We’ve tried everything else, so I figured I would call you and see if you have any ideas.”

  I could feel the pitch of my quivering voice rise with each sentence until it faded out with the wounded whimper of defeat.

  “Well, I guess I can take you,” he offered. “I’m not doing nuttin.”

  “Really?” I screamed. “I’ll pay you whatever it takes.” We settled on a price of a few hundred dollars and discussed some other details.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

  A few minutes later a sprawling, full sized Oldsmobile pulled up to the café and a young man about as big as a lumberjack got out and came into the café. “Is Eddie here?” he bellowed.

  A few of the locals, whom he obviously knew, called out greetings to him. I figured at that point the whole phone number on the wall thing was probably a prank. I didn’t dare ask. There are some things in life you just don’t want to know.

  We gathered up our stuff, piled all six of our bodies into “Brenda’s” Olds, and drove back to the bus to get our stage clothes. Fortunately, the roads were plowed by then, so once our rock gear was secured we made flight for Winnipeg. I call it “flight” because Brenda drove about one hundred miles an hour to get us to the theater. We left the café at 4:15 p.m., and pulled into the parking lot of the theater in Winnipeg right at 7:30. Show time. We made almost three hundred miles in three hours and fifteen minutes. Carman had already started.

  Judging from the salty vocabulary Brenda used often and liberally, I didn’t think he was necessarily God’s angel. He cussed like a pirate. I liked him, though. He was a good talker and we chatted the whole way. He asked about us being Christians and playing in a rock band. We were able to share our stories with him while I kept one eye on the road, scared beyond belief. He politely asked if he could stay for the show. “Of course,” I said, “And I’ll get Charles to pay you.”

  “No hurry,” he shrugged. “See you after.”

  He stayed for the whole concert, watching every move and listening to every word. Dana shared the Gospel at the end of the show, and we gave the invitation to accept Jesus. Brenda even sat through that. I went up to him after the concert and asked him what he thought of it all.

  “Man, that was unbelievable,” he said. “I’m glad I came.”

  I asked if Charles paid him. He said, “You know, you don’t owe me anything. I don’t want to be paid for this. It was my pleasure. I needed this tonight.”

  I learned that day God definitely moves in mysterious ways. Even when you think there is no way out, he can provide one from the most unlikely places. Just don’t forget to read the writing on the wall.

  We chose to headline the No Turning Back tour for almost two years. Dan Brock encouraged us to do that. He felt we needed to firmly establish ourselves as a headline act, especially coming off a high visibility tour like Amy’s. He encouraged us to build our audience, even if it was just a few people at a time. That was good counsel. Over the course of our career we always enjoyed the unwavering support of our core audience. We always drew more people to our concerts than our record sales reflected. That investment in our fans allowed us to be able to book and control most of our tours for years.

  No Turning Back/Live was our biggest success to that point in our career. That being said, we knew that in order to crest the next hill we needed more media exposure. That meant radio. It was the primary driver for an artist to accumulate an audience on a mass scale. But Christian radio had already levied a judgment on our music. They screamed that we sounded “too mainstream” and that Dana’s voice was “too bluesy” for most stations. We believed we needed to win radio over in order to have the kind of impact and sustainability we desired. That would probably mean a musical compromise for us. But like Amy’s tour, we suspected it was a compromise worth making.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Let the Whole World Sing

  As the No Turning Back/Live tour came in for a landing we knew it was time to get back to the drawing board creatively. The long tour was effective at building our fan base, but we were still seen as being too “out there” for Christian radio. The Christian music industry was growing, and radio was a huge piece of that puzzle. It was the best mass media the industry could offer. We definitely saw significantly better sales for the live album, but it was still not enough to sustain our vision. I felt we really needed to reach for the next level musically and creatively. We needed to make some changes. Some of them weren’t so much a natural fit for us at first.

  Dan Brock introduced me, or actually re-introduced me, to a singer, songwriter, and producer named Bob Farrell. He was one half of the very successful Christian pop group Farrell and Farrell. His wife Jayne made up the other, much prettier, half of the group. I say, “re-introduced” because I met Bob way back in 1973. He played in Memphis with his band, Dove, at a large city-wide crusade Susan and I worked at on our wedding night (yes, that’s true). Dana and I helped Dove move their equipment around between high school assemblies the week before the big crusade night. Talk about strange coincidences. I was just getting started with our “Christian Band” and Bob was very encouraging. Here we were, nearly a decade later, and Dan was managing both of us. It definitely felt like a divine appointment.

  One afternoon, at a sound check in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I began playing a hooky little riff on my keyboard that had just flown into my brain. The band immediately fell into the groove. Brock came up to me after sound check and asked me what it was.

  “Just something I came up with on the spur of the moment,” I replied.

  Dan told me not to forget it.

  A month or so later, I invited Bob Farrell to write with Dana and me at my house in Memphis. That was different for us. We never really wrote with others, especially for D&K. But this was part of the stretching process. Bob was an excellent pop writer who really understood what worked at radio. We thought maybe he could help us find something true to our own Memphis-shaped musical DNA, but was also accessible to a wider audience.

  I began to play that riff from Albuquerque, and we turned it into a song. I still remember Dana singing out the chorus. Right there, in the room, we had a feeling we tapped into something special. It was another defining moment for us as a band. “Let The Whole World Sing” was way outside our comfort zone, but it became a huge number one hit for us across all Christian radio formats in 1983. That song, and the album it appeared on, opened us up to a whole new, and much larger, audience.

  It also opened us up to a wave of criticism from many fans of our brand of bluesy, southern rock-n-roll. Just like the pushback to our tour with Amy, many screamed we “sold out.” As I look back on it, I think there is some truth to that.

  To compromise one’s work for commercial success is always an uncomfortable stretch for an artist. But, I firmly believe the moment artists decide to sell their art for money, they begin to make that compromise. When your livelihood depends on selling your art, you had better have art someone wants to buy. It might seem crass,
but it’s true. The challenge is to manage that compromise so you maintain your integrity.

  It’s human nature to want a hit song. For us, though, having a hit meant survival. It meant we could carry on as a band. It meant we could reach more people for Jesus. And hits are like sugar; once you have one, you just want more! Years later, when I became a producer and then record label owner, I told my artists, “Put three songs on your album for me to sell, then, make the rest of it totally for you.” The clever, and successful, artists figure out a way to do that while maintaining their artistic credibility. That’s the trick. Sure, it’s a compromise, but not necessarily a bad one. It’s a river all commercially successful artists face and figure how to swim across eventually.

  Sometimes, though, you’re better off sticking with what you’re good at. Some artistic compromises don’t work at all. All artists find themselves facing this dilemma.

  Let The Whole World Sing began a long and fruitful creative relationship with Bob Farrell.

  As we continued to write songs for our next record we were taking note of some changes happening in mainstream music. Groups like Men and Work and Human League were climbing the charts with hooky, synth-driven pop. At the same time, one of the big taboos in Christian music was the dang electric guitar—especially the bluesy rock guitar style Dana played so well. Between those two facts we saw an opportunity. We decided to attempt to craft a new sound that would overcome our barrier at Christian radio by leaning heavily on the keyboard sounds we were hearing on mainstream radio. Synths were a huge part of our sound from the very beginning, obviously, so this wasn’t completely out of left field, but taking Dana’s guitar out of the mix was definitely a departure. Many of our fans were not thrilled. Many others, however, started to hear us for the first time.

  We began to record the album that eventually became Mission of Mercy long before we had the album title. We wanted to go into the studio and experiment with new sounds and the new direction. We decided to demo the entire album so Dan could take some songs to MacKenzie and the rest of the staff at Benson. Demos are basically rough sketches of songs designed to get the ball rolling, but without all the bells and whistles of final masters.

  No Turning Back/Live officially fulfilled the last album of our first recording contract with Lamb and Lion. We were now out of contract and wanted these demos to demonstrate where we were headed musically so Benson would hopefully catch the vision and get onboard. We rented Crosstown Studios in central Memphis for recording. Howard Craft and his son James built the studio and Greg Morrow was close friends with James for many years. Actually, a few years later they became partners and upgraded the studio. I recorded my first solo album, Feels Good To Be Forgiven, there. ForeFront also recorded the first dcTalk album and several other albums at Crosstown. It was the ForeFront hangout in the early years.

  Crosstown felt familiar and comfortable to me in many ways. It was located in the shadow of the gargantuan Sears and Roebuck store downtown. The Sears building was the size of a couple of city blocks and was several stories tall. It was one of the star attractions of the mid-south in its day. I spent many Saturday afternoons there with my family shopping when I was a kid. In 1983, however, it was vacant; a home to the homeless. Its ghostly presence arched over that entire part of the city, hearkening gloomily to its long-dead glory days.

  That neighborhood had also been the home of The Crosstown Movie Theater, and the Crosstown Pharmacy next door to it. My older brother and I often rode the city bus to the Crosstown Theater on Saturdays, back when movie houses were grand temples to the glory and glamour of Hollywood. We saw Spartacus and Cleopatra at the Crosstown. In high school our music teacher took the whole class to see Fiddler on the Roof there. I remember that day well because Larry Brown licked his “Dots” candy, making them extra sticky, and threw them at the movie screen. They stuck to the screen and gave Tevye’s daughters zits.

  The theater was also where I took Susan to see the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar the very night I proposed to her. That was right before our gourmet meal at IHOP. At least I thought I was being romantic . . .

  So I felt right at home at Crosstown Recorders when we set up. Greg, Tommy, and I laid the basic tracks down, and then I added track after track of synthesizer overdubs. I worked 24-7 for the first three days. Poor old James Craft hung right in there with me as I experimented with different sounds, effects, and arrangements. I was determined to find a new sound for our music. I knew what was at stake for us.

  Those sessions produced “Ready or Not,” “Special Kind of Love,” “Let the Whole World Sing,” “You Can’t Run from Thunder,” When It’s Over, and “All the Losers Win.” As you might guess, I wrote several of the new songs due to the new musical direction. Dana contributed “Ready or Not” and “All the Losers Win,” which still stand as some of the best songs he ever composed.

  I had been up the better part of four days and was borderline delirious when Dan and Dana walked through the studio door on the morning of day four to hear what we came up with. James, Greg, and I stayed up all night mixing the demos and giving them their final touches. I believed our entire future and destiny just might depend on our work. James was convinced I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. Maybe Dana had too. But it was time to play the songs for our manager to see just how crazy we were. He was going to be flying the tapes to Nashville to play them for Mac and the Benson folks later that day.

  I played the songs for Dan Brock from top to bottom. As the final song ended he looked at me, with all seriousness, and gave us his opinion.

  “Eddie,” he said, “This changes everything.”

  He took the tape and went to Nashville.

  Dana and I were on pins and needles at my house by the time the phone rang later that afternoon. It was Dan and the meeting was over. “Guys,” he said, “Bob MacKenzie was dancing around the room, laughing and shouting like a Pentecostal preacher. He loves it! In fact, Benson wants to release these demos as your record!”

  We were elated and, maybe for the first time in a week, breathed a huge sigh of relief. We felt even though it involved a compromise of sorts, we made a significant turn in our career. We thanked God for the favor we found with Benson, but we weren’t ready to release the demos as our record. We knew we could make it better.

  Mission of Mercy was the first studio recording Dana and I produced without the help of a co-producer. We did ask Ron W. Griffin to help produce our background vocals, though. Ron was a trained Southern Baptist choir director and also a rock-n-roll aficionado. He was a little bit of an odd blend of things in a good way. We played at Cumberland College when he was their student activities director. Dana and I also signed songwriter contracts at Paragon/ Benson Publishing when Ron was managing that business. We believed he could help us achieve a new sing-a-along quality to our vocals. We were fans of groups with iconic vocal sounds like Three Dog Night, Queen, The Beatles, and The Cars. We wanted to see if we could capture that sound on the record. Ron helped us immensely.

  In addition to the new sound, we felt it was important to craft a fresh visual image as well. I started an exercise and running regime to get physically fit. Married life, eating junk food, and late nights in the studio all took a toll on my body. I made a commitment to get into shape.

  During my years as an artist, and into my years as an industry executive, I’ve come to realize how important it is for an artist, or any public personality, to maintain his or her physical fitness. I preached to my artists many times, “If you are going to play on the field, under the lights, you should be in shape.”

  “When you show up for practice out of shape, don’t expect to play much.”

  Dan, Dana, and I asked Susan to help us craft our new image. She had been designing our t-shirts and merchandise for years and was about to graduate from Art College. She had a new level of expertise in her bag of tricks. She designed the set for the photo shoot and picked out the wardrobe we wore on the album cover. We were happy wit
h the results. The photos fit the music. The critics hit us pretty hard on both the music and the image, though. Even the album art was too “pop” for a lot of our diehard fans at first.

  We’ve been criticized for our stylistic shift on Mission of Mercy, and I accept that some of the criticism is justified. What I don’t accept, however, is the notion we didn’t make great music. The music on Mission of Mercy is solid. I believe that with all my heart.

  I can’t emphasize enough that once an artist makes a decision to sell his or her art, it’s virtually impossible for that artist to not recognize the audience that is attracted to his or her work. When something works, whether that means a good audience response to a show, record sales, or spins on the radio, the artist will be impacted. Most of us want to be successful. That’s human nature. We just have to be careful not to lose ourselves in the pursuit of that success.

  Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive. You heard me right. That’s amazing. He lived in poverty and took his own life at the age of thirty-seven. Now he is recognized as one of the most brilliant painters of all time. Was he a success? That’s a tough question. While he was still on earth and breathing, he was certainly not a commercial success at all. What if he had hung in there? Would the market have come around to him in time? Who knows? Today, he still might have a hard time getting signed.

  It’s a conundrum that has haunted artists for the ages. How should we properly handle the commercial exploitation of our work? Do I recognize what the audience has to say and how the marketplace reacts to my art with integrity—or not? And where does ministry fit into the whole thing?

  Again, it all comes down to the difficult concept of artistic integrity. The clever and effective artists journey through these murky waters as they experience the natural tension between their creative instincts and the needs of their audience. That is the stream DeGarmo and Key decided to traverse. I hope we passed the audition.