Rebel for God

by Eddie DeGarmo

  Sure, some of our most devoted fans were upset about the changes we unveiled on Mission of Mercy, but most of them eventually came around. When they did, they definitely must have noticed a lot more fans singing along.

  Bob Mackenzie had little time for esoteric questions about artistic integrity.

  “Nobody liked it but the people!” he proclaimed. That proved absolutely true.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Don’t Stop the Music

  On the eve of the release of Mission of Mercy and a few days before the release of the “Let the Whole World Sing” single to radio, D&K were invited to participate in “Gospel Music Week” in Nashville. It was a weeklong gathering of the whole Christian music industry under the auspices of the Gospel Music Association. The week eventually came to be known simply as GMA. Being from another world and culture, it was our first time at GMA.

  The Benson Company encouraged us to attend. In fact, they were slated to host an evening showcase at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC) in downtown Nashville and invited us to perform three songs in a premier time slot. That kind of opportunity had never come our way previously.

  The showcase went well. Then the next day Bob MacKenzie hosted a reception for key radio people from all over the country. He held his private gathering on a balcony at Benson’s offices with the singular purpose of introducing the new DeGarmo and Key, and our new music, to the entire Christian radio world in one fell swoop. He wanted to play them some of the new songs, but even more importantly, he wanted us to share our hearts and our mission with the radio folks. We experienced such an uphill climb over the years to gain acceptance from radio, but Bob and Dan Brock thought a private audience with programmers and station managers could make a real difference for us. They were right.

  That evening the balcony was packed with radio programmers, DJs, and station managers from all over the country. We played a few songs from Mission of Mercy to a very warm response and then we addressed the radio folks, sharing our personal stories of faith. We described our mission to take the message of Christ around the world. We explained we understood radio played a crucial role in allowing us to fulfill that mission. Dana did most of the talking—he was better at that than me—but we both shared our hearts.

  That night was another major milestone for DeGarmo and Key. From then on radio fully embraced us. “Let the Whole World Sing” was the first of a long string of our songs that raced up the radio charts. It was a new day.

  Mission of Mercy sold like gangbusters. “Let the Whole World Sing” climbed up the charts and held the number one position on virtually every Christian radio chart for an amazingly long time. The album produced seven number one hits in various formats and outsold any of our other albums by a margin of four to one.

  It finally seemed the Christian music world was making room for our little band from Memphis.

  A short time earlier, while we were recording Mission of Mercy at Ardent, the mainstream music industry came knocking on our door again. This time it was through legendary manager and producer Bill Ham. ZZ Top was at Ardent recording their massive hit album Eliminator in Studio A while we were recording in Studio C. I got to know Ham fairly well during my tenure at Ardent. All of the groups he managed recorded there and at that point ZZ Top made all of their records there.

  He would ask me from time to time how our record was coming. He also met Dan Brock when he came to town several times while we were recording. Dan played Ham some of the rough mixes from our project and he loved what he heard. He thought “Special Kind Of Love” and “You Can’t Run from Thunder” had a lot of mainstream radio potential. He thought they could be hits. He and Brock began to have conversations about co-managing D&K with Ham helping us secure a mainstream record partner for promotion and distribution. He even discussed wanting to see us on tour with ZZ Top.

  Brock made a trip or two to Texas to Ham’s management office to discuss the relationship and to move it forward. Bill had never seen us perform, and he wanted to do that. We were scheduled to play a show in Memphis at a popular mainstream rock club named Poet’s Music Hall. That seemed the perfect place for him to come see us play.

  We played that night to a packed house and, true to form, we didn’t hold back any of who we were spiritually. We shared how Christ changed our lives. We also rocked the house.

  I saw Bill Ham sitting with Dan Brock intently watching the whole show. I could also see how visibly uncomfortable Bill Ham was acting. He was squirming in his seat.

  The next day the two of them met at the studio. Ham was careful to be respectful when he spoke. “I don’t know how this can work with these guys talking about Jesus so much,” he said. “They would have to tone that down to fit with the mainstream world.”

  He was right. It wouldn’t work and we weren’t going to tone it down. That was the end of that.

  THIRTY

  Holy Hustle

  Life definitely got a lot busier with the release and touring of Mission of Mercy. You don’t ever want to stop when you’re on a roll. We completed a very successful, but demanding, ninety-city tour with the band Servant. No sooner had we wrapped the tour then I was asked to help produce Farrell and Farrell’s next studio album, Choices. Plus, once the record was done they wanted us to go on tour with them, too.

  We recorded the entire record at Ardent in Memphis. One of the songs Bob and I wrote together was the quirky, new wave, pop single “Get Right or Get Left.” I saw the slogan painted in graffiti on the side of a railroad boxcar and thought it would make a great song. We wrote the lyrics at my house. It was a fun song with an underlying serious message fans really seemed to love.

  Sometimes Bob and I went to one of the piano rehearsal spaces at Memphis State University to write together. That’s where we wrote “People In A Box,” another quirky synth pop song that came out on their Jump To Conclusions album a couple of years later. I knew those rehearsal spaces well. I studied music there for about fifteen minutes years earlier.

  My professor met with me one day and suggested, “Don’t quit your daytime job.” He was certain I would never make it in music. He was right, actually. I began to study classical music way too late in life. I could play rock ‘n’ roll and the blues, though. That was different, probably because I started so young and loved it.

  Bob and Jayne stayed with us during the recording of Choices. Jayne traveled back and forth between Oklahoma City and Memphis every few days while Bob stayed for the duration. He and I became good friends during the recording of that album and we remain close to this day.

  Star Song, their record label, wanted us to mix the Choices album at their Dawntreader Studios outside Houston so they could be close by to check mixes and hear the progress. That worked out pretty well, but it kept me away from home more. We spent eight straight days mixing there and just a couple of days after we finished we left for a three week long Farrell and Farrell/DeGarmo and Key tour of Europe. The Farrells toured Europe previously and had an audience there, but that was D&K's first time across the pond. Dan Brock and Associates also managed Farrell and Farrell, so it made the business of the tour easy to put together.

  Touring Europe was definitely a different experience for us. Our music was better known there than we expected. We enjoyed fairly packed auditoriums wherever we played, although the rooms were smaller than the venues in North America.

  At that point, communication from Europe to the U.S. was clumsy, at best. When I called home, Susan and I had to say “over” at the end of each sentence like soldiers did in WWII movies when they were talking on walkie-talkies. Susan couldn’t join us on the tour because it was her last semester of college. Dana had just remarried to a wonderful girl named Anita and they were able to be together on the tour. Dana and Anita made a great pair.

  When I got home from that tour I was beyond happy to see everyone. I was away for almost a month in Europe, and worked on Bob and Jayne’s record just before, so it seemed like I had been gone forever. I walked
in the front door, grabbed the girls, and jumped on the sofa tickling them. After a few minutes with hugging all around I sat back on the sofa, extended my feet, and rested them on our coffee table.

  Susan stared at me. “Eddie,” she said sternly. “Kindly get your feet off my coffee table.”

  Shannon, our youngest, protested, “Mommy, can’t he do what he wants? He’s company.”

  “Ouch!” I thought to myself. I realized right then and there I had been working too hard. I was going to have to change that.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Six, Six, Six

  Our reset with Mission of Mercy was more successful than we could have imagined, so when we began to dream up our next album we wanted to ride the momentum. We wanted to bring the guitar back a bit, though. Both Dana and I missed it.

  I wrote, “It’s a Shame” and “Perfect Reflection” and Dana wrote “Rejoice” and “Every Day a Celebration.” As usual, we both contributed to each other’s songs in one way or another—iron sharpening iron.

  The biggest story from Communication was about an apocalyptic song called “Six, Six, Six.” Dana wrote the slightly dark tale about how the end-times prophecy concerning the antichrist might have looked in 1984. It sounded very cool to us, but we were really concerned about how the newer additions to our audience would receive it. We were so worried, in fact, we tried to “soften” it a bit by having some little kids, including my own daughters, read verses from the Book of Revelation to start the song. I’m not sure how we thought that would help. Sweet little kids reading about the antichrist just made the whole song creepier. Stephen King writes children into his stories sometimes to make them feel more creepy. What were we thinking?

  The real explosion of the song, however, was centered on the music video we made for it. Music videos were a relatively new medium at the time. MTV had become extremely popular and was a highly effective way to get a song out to the younger audiences. Even some of the major networks were hosting music video shows. It was an exciting and creative new thing for sure. I give Dan Brock the credit for pushing us to create music videos early on.

  We felt “Six, Six, Six” was our best shot for a compelling “mainstream” video. Ardent launched a film and video production facility just a few years earlier. Marius Penczner, the head of Ardent Video, directed several concept videos, including some for ZZ Top and other notable rock bands. We met with Marius and asked him to develop a treatment for our little ditty about the antichrist. He came back with the idea to visualize the story in the song as a young man’s dream, more or less. First it’s a dream, anyway, but then he is being stalked by the antichrist.

  Marius showed us a storyboard of the shots, including a scene with the antichrist totally engulfed in flames. The idea was he was showing the world he was invincible and couldn’t be harmed or destroyed. We loved it. We asked him to make a video that would be consistent with MTV’s style, format, and production quality. We wanted to make an impact on young people’s lives and felt MTV was the right place to reach them. If we had a video that fit their format, maybe they would play it. D&K’s presence in the “Six, Six, Six” video was really secondary to the story being told in graphic detail. That was fine with us.

  The filming of that brief “burning man” scene was a big deal. It took place on a humid spring night in the parking lot at Ardent. The city was abuzz! Our families were there to watch, as was the whole band and several of our friends. There were even local newspapers and TV reporters on hand to capture the drama. The Memphis Fire Department had a truck parked on site, and there were three or four firemen with extinguishers and asbestos blankets ready to quench the flames.

  The scene was not synchronized to the track, so there was no music playing, just a parking lot crammed full of media and civilians watching a stunt guy get suited up and torched. They painted his suit with a sticky, paste-like substance and wired him with a simple igniter to use when the time came. He was going to light himself like a matchstick and then walk menacingly across the parking lot, being as scary as possible. They called “Action!” and he did exactly that. After a few steps he fell to the ground and a bunch of guys put out the flames with fire extinguishers. It went off without a hitch. It was exciting to see how it worked. Pretty cool, I must say.

  The local hype and attention was fun. I guess the notion of a Christian band filming a man being burned alive was pretty radical. But that was nothing, it turned out, compared to what was about to happen.

  When the video was finished we knew we created something very special. Cindy Dupree, the head of marketing at The Benson Company, began to distribute it to the Christian television broadcasters and virtually all of them began to air it. She also sent it to the programmers at MTV for consideration. It actually made it on air a few times, much to our delight.

  As a result, we were officially the first Christian music group to have a video played on that famous, or infamous, network. We were thrilled and waited to see what kind of impact it might have when, just as suddenly as it played the video, MTV dropped it like a hot potato. We called and asked why they pulled it. They said it was too violent.

  Too violent?!

  Right as we heard the news the Wall Street Journal ran a feature story on how ironic it was for MTV to ban a video from a Christian band while religious TV networks all over the country were heavily airing the same video. Soon after that article got out the story was picked up by CBS Evening News and The Today Show.

  The headline was the same wherever the story was told. “Christian Band Deemed Too Violent for MTV.” Several international news agencies even picked it up and re-ran the WSJ article all over the world.

  It was the biggest publicity bonanza that D&K ever experienced. It seemed everyone wanted to talk about D&K and our video being banned from MTV. When the story hit the proverbial fan, Cindy Dupree and Dan Brock were finally able to get through to MTV to find out what happened. They explained they were under extreme pressure from Congress to reign in on-screen violence and to remove it from the airways, or face censorship and fines.

  Our burning of the antichrist was suddenly “over the line” for them. They did say if we re-edited the scene to remove the burning man, they would place the video back into rotation. Marius went back into the editing room and replaced the burning man with a crystal ball showing a nuclear mushroom cloud explosion and other scenes of horror. That did the trick with MTV. Somehow the nuclear holocaust wasn’t as violent as a dude in a burning suit. A little strange, don’t you think? Scarecrow even had a burning scene in The Wizard of Oz.

  It’s ironic indeed that the biggest headline of our entire career was “Christian Band Banned From MTV.”

  “Six, Six, Six” made a huge difference in our name recognition. I only had to spell my name once for people, instead of several times. Kidding aside, the popularity of the video was a big moment in our timeline. I still get asked about it to this very day. The “Six, Six, Six” video was also the only time D&K ever won a Dove Award. It was before videos were an official Dove Award category, so we got a “Certificate of Merit,” instead of an actual statue, but it was something. D&K went on to be nominated thirty or more times for Dove Awards, but never took one home. We did get inducted into their Hall of Fame eventually, but that came much later.

  We made a second video from the Communication album, for the song “Alleluia, Christ Is Coming.” It was a much more standard clip of us performing the song in front of a church choir dressed in robes. To spice it up we issued black sunglasses to all the choir members. It was a little tongue in cheek nod to our rock ‘n’ roll roots. It was pretty funny to see that big ole’ choir all wearing dark glasses like Ray Charles or gangsta rappers.

  When we were on the Communication tour, we were booked to appear in-store at a Christian bookstore in Minneapolis for an “autograph party.” We did a slew of those types of appearances throughout our career. They improved greatly from that strange first one I told you about in Oakland. In-store appearances w
ere a good promotional tool. They were designed to let us meet the fans and support the stores where our music was sold. The stores would be jam-packed with people. This particular autograph signing was in a large store inside a shopping mall. The store was thoroughly modern and even had several large television monitors around the store playing music videos.

  The crowd was big that day, and I remember seeing an elderly couple way back in a line of mostly young folks wanting to meet us. When they finally got to the front of the line they were staring behind us at a large TV on which our video of “Alleluia, Christ Is Coming” was playing. The old woman leaned over to her husband, and I heard her say, “Henry, where do you think they got all those blind people from to sing in that choir?”

  No joke! That is what she said. I laughed out loud.

  Susan was the art designer for the Communication album cover. She came up with the concept to put us on the video monitor and then take a photo of the monitor. It was Dan Brock’s gloved fingers coming into the frame from the right and adjusting the knobs. The cover concept fit the music well and projected our new music video image.

  We toured Communication as a four-piece band. I used a sequencer to play additional keyboard tracks to beef up the sound the way we sometimes did with an extra guitarist. Greg wore headphones and played to a click track like a metronome, so he could keep us all in sync with the sequenced keyboard parts.

  I was in the final stages of co-producing Farrell and Farrell’s Jump To Conclusions album after the Communication tour. Bob and I co-wrote several of the songs on the album. Our standout was that crazy new wave song I mentioned writing at Memphis State called “People In A Box.” I came up with the title and was saving it for a while. I shared it with Bob, and we wrote the song. As peculiar as the song is, it turned out to be a big hit for them. I think the satirical lyrics about TV personalities may even be more fitting today with the twenty-four-hour news channels and reality shows we have.