The card Steve Schneider handed me had the words “Messiah Productions” printed in gold letters. Turning the card over, I saw excerpts from the Bible and promptly handed it back. “You guys are a Christian band,” I shrugged.
Steve just smiled at me. “Surely you have some kind of spiritual curiosity?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied. “Who hasn’t?”
At that, Steve began to talk. His voice was quiet but compelling. He told me about a trip to Israel he and Koresh had taken. They weren’t conventional Christians, Steve assured me, but they wanted their music to have a sacred meaning. “Our band is great, it’s going to be huge,” he said, coming off like a salesman. All the while his partner kept his own counsel.
When Steve wound down, I looked at David. I liked his smile, and when he spoke I detected a soft, down-to-earth Texas twang.
“Look, it’s like this,” he began. “I’ve been all over the world, talked to a lot of people. I have a knowledge of the Scriptures other people don’t have, though I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything. There’s a lot of stuff in the Scriptures that has to do with music. I feel that, basically, if you’re spiritual that’s all you need. I’m not out to convert anyone. I’d like to play some music with you and see where we can go from there.”
At that moment, Scott and Ryan came racing up the stairs to get me. They were in a sweat, so I grabbed Steve’s card and left. My residual feeling was, Don’t call me, I’ll call you. At that moment in my life the idea of getting involved with a bunch of religious nuts didn’t grab me.
The card stayed in my pocket for a couple of days. I wanted to throw it away, but for some reason I thought I ought to call Steve and David. When I did call, Steve seemed surprised but friendly. “I’ll pick you up, take you to our place in Pomona, show you our setup,” he said.
During the forty-five-minute drive out to Pomona a few days later, I listened to Steve talk. He told me his home was Madison, Wisconsin, that his family was very close-knit. I noticed he sprinkled his speech with folksy midwestern sayings, like his greeting to me that afternoon: “How’s yourself?” When he said, “I was always looking out at the stars and wondering how I got here,” I caught a glimpse of an earnest boy troubled by the mysteries of the universe, just as I had been.
Steve’s mother was a Seventh-day Adventist, and he had followed in her faith, enrolling in the Adventist Newbold College near Nottingham, England. “I was expelled for a bout of drunkenness,” he said, jaunty but apologetic for having shamed his mother. “I went from England to Hawaii, changed into a heathen, lived a swinging life of booze and broads, partying with the fast crowd, the likes of Pat Boone and Clint Eastwood.” In 1981 he married Judy Peterson, an attractive blonde he’d met at a Madison dance hall when he was in his early twenties. He enrolled in the University of Hawaii and worked toward a Ph.D. in comparative religion.
In 1986, a friend he knew through the Diamond Head Adventist Church in Honolulu introduced him to the teachings of David Koresh. The way Steve said this, I realized he revered Koresh, that the man was far more than a guitarist he was managing. This made me wonder, but I was too fascinated by his quick-talker story to stop him right there.
“To start off, I doubted David,” Steve confided. “I plagued the man with questions, argued the hell out of him, trying to catch him out. Both the academic and the spiritual seeker in me took him through a fine wringer to detect flaws and inconsistencies in his scriptural system. It took many transpacific phone calls before I was ready to come to California to meet Koresh. Even then, I was still a doubter. Hell, I even took David to dispute Scripture with a professor!”
(Later, I heard someone say of Steve, “This guy could sell you smog.” Echoing this, someone else said, “It’s like I sold them a toothbrush and he comes along and sells the house that goes where the toothbrush hangs.” He boasted that, during a trip to England in 1988, he’d made more than twenty converts to David’s teachings.)
In the rush of his story, Steve mentioned Mount Carmel, which he described as “a spread we own near Waco, Texas—a hellhole in the prairie!” That was the first time I heard the name that was to take on such significance. “We just think of ourselves as ‘students of Scripture,’” he said cheerfully.
In an abrupt shift of mood, Steve suddenly exclaimed: “To tell the truth, I really don’t like this world!” Startled, I asked him what he meant. In a quiet voice, he continued. “Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, once said, ‘It’s better to spend your time at a funeral than a party.’”
Steve paused, his profile grim. “I know what he meant. If you’re at a party, the next day you wake up with a hangover, haunted by the sense that everything passes away, leaving hardly a memory. A funeral, on the other hand, brings the issues of life and death before you.” He was silent for a moment, staring through the windshield at the freeway rolling under our thrumming tires. “I look for absolute truth,” he murmured. “But where is absolute truth? Only one thing’s absolute, as far as I can see, and that’s death.”
His tone chilled me, and I was glad when the conversation switched to music. Instantly professional, Steve filled me in about Messiah Productions. The outfit was more than just the music, though that was the heart of it, he explained. They had an artist, Cliff Sellors, who customized Koresh’s guitars, airbrushing biblical scenes onto the wood. Steve spoke about getting into the guitar business and said that they also had a landscape company called the Yardbirds. He talked about their goals for the band, David’s ambitions for the music, and I had the sense that this was a bunch of guys who could make things happen, maybe lift me out of my rut. I began to think that this might be the answer to my appeal to the heavens that day in Mann’s Chinese gift shop.
Since it was built of stone, the Pomona place was referred to as the Rock House. The group also owned another suburban residence in nearby La Verne. I couldn’t quite make out who was living in Pomona, but I was introduced to several people, including Jaime Castillo, Greg Summers, Mike Schroeder, Scott Sonobe, and Paul Fatta. The living room was a music studio complete with drum set, and soon after I arrived David got us together and we started jamming.
David played electronic guitar and sang his own songs with a scriptural slant, including the psalms as well as snatches of the prophets. At times, he switched to a classical-influenced hard rock that was more upscale and orchestrated than I was used to, but we clicked at once. He seemed to groove off my energy and told me my hot style inspired him to play better. When I asked who taught him the guitar, he said he’d learned on his own. “I had a vision of the way I wanted to play and I tried to achieve that.”
I could see he was the sort of musician driven as much by ideas as instinct, and that intrigued me. We didn’t talk Bible, and David just seemed to be a guy who had money and some talent and wanted to rock. But he could play, and he had good people around him. Messiah Productions seemed like a professional outfit with a real business plan, unlike my own past projects.
That night, after jamming, we sat out on the neat lawn in the cool summer night and downed a few beers while rapping about rock and the bands we dug. David was just one of the guys, but there was something else about him, a kind of quiet gentleness and sincerity that drew me. As yet, no one in the group had asked me to believe in Jesus or tried to con me out of the money I didn’t have. In fact, they didn’t come off at all like a religious bunch, and I appreciated that. I didn’t know exactly how David’s mix of music and gospel shook down, but I liked him and we played well together, and that was good enough for me. On the drive home I told Steve I’d be interested in jamming with the group again.
The next time Steve drove me to Pomona he began to talk about David’s scriptural message. I only half-listened, watching the landscape go by, my inner ear focused on the rolling thumpety-thump of rubber on road, imagining how I might work that rhythm up into a melodic line.
Steve mentioned that he wanted to have a study of Scripture at my place and that I sho
uld invite my roommates and any other friends. I told him outright that I’d never been able to come to grips with the Bible, but he just nodded and insisted that he wanted to come over and give us a study session; being my usual easygoing self, I consented.
At the time, I was sharing an apartment with some other musicians behind the Roosevelt Hotel. “Hey, guess what,” I said. “I got some friends coming over for a Bible study.” Their faces fell, and they reached for their coats when Steve knocked.
Opening the door, I was surprised to see a whole delegation—Steve, Jaime, Paul, and a couple of others. “You guys want some brews?” Steve said, brandishing six-packs. Easily seduced, my friends and roommates squatted on the floor around Steve. He got out the biggest Bible I’d ever seen, with wide margins filled with color-coded notes. The size of that tome, and the obvious diligence with which it had been studied, impressed me.
Steve talked about Isaiah, describing a kingdom to be set up during the earth’s last days. In his voice the rhythm of the King James verses lulled my ear, seeming somehow very American, like the flowing passages from Leaves of Grass that I’d heard in school. My fingers began to tap on my thighs as I listened: The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea, roar; he shall prevail. Steve’s delivery was not like the Bible-thumpers I came across while channel-surfing on TV; he was clearly not a Jimmy Swaggart type, drunk with fakery and false potency. His voice offered a quieter and more thoughtful music.
The Bible was put together like a puzzle book, Steve said, a coded manual for the human race. The image caught my fancy, and I could see that, two hours later, all my friends were still sitting there, rapt. For the first time the Bible came alive for me; I sensed its innate force. “These people might have something,” I said to one of my roommates after Steve and the others had gone.
During the next few weeks, Steve and the others came over for more Bible studies, and I went to Pomona to jam a couple of times. I slowly began to take in some of what they referred to as the “message,” but it was the music that kept me coming. The more I played and talked to David, always about music, the more I liked him. And I respected Steve; he was an educated, intelligent man, a little like my father in his gravity and his reverence for learning. David, I sensed, was watching me covertly, wondering, perhaps, if my passions as a drummer echoed something deeper in my heart.
In September I was finally invited to Waco to celebrate the Hebrew Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles that followed. The group followed some of the Jewish rituals, I was told, and kept Saturday as the Sabbath. “I want you to be the drummer in this band, but you have to understand where I’m coming from and what my message is,” David said, laying it out for me clearly for the first time. “Two hundred people, from all over the world, will be in Mount Carmel next month. We’ll study, but we’ll also have some fun, play music. After that, you’ll have to make a decision.” Implicit in this statement was the fact that the music and the message went together, and I would have to be in both or neither.
This was the first moment I had to face the prospect of becoming David’s disciple. During those early days of our acquaintance, my grasp of his teachings was extremely vague, my understanding of its implications even vaguer.
Looking back, I ask myself a tough question that never quite occurred to me with any clarity during the early days of my connection with David, perhaps because I was so young and so unconscious: How could someone like me, who’d shown little previous interest in belief or Scripture, who had almost no religious background, later become so entranced by the Bible?
The key was David himself. He first touched me as a fellow musician and a warm friend, and I was taken by his deep sincerity and natural authority. I soon realized that he was an extraordinary personality, but his unique interpretation of the Old and New Testaments only gradually came to fascinate me, when the music and the man had already opened my mind and heart.
In David, the music, the man, and the message were all of a piece; without his Bible, he had no purpose and his music had no focus. Following his example, I came to appreciate Scripture as a way to make sense of myself and the world.
If, back then, he’d said right out that I had to embrace Scripture totally or cut loose from Messiah Productions, I might well have taken a walk. At the time, though, my gut instinct said: Go with it, what’ve you got to lose? A couple of weeks, maybe? A trip to Texas? My habit of going with the flow, if it feels right, softened the edge of my reservations.
Anyway, I didn’t have a lot of options. I could see David’s band really taking off, and it could be a great opportunity to crack the tough nut of the rock world. My only real reluctance boiled down to a concern about losing my job and my apartment if I was away for two weeks or more, but David countered that with a promise to cover my expenses.
“You’re going to come back as Father Dave,” my friend Ryan and the other guys in my band protested. “You of all people—a holy roller!”
“I’m sick of the old Hollywood routine, jammin’ for no money, no respect, not going anyplace,” I replied. “I’m off to Mount Carmel. Wish me luck.”
3
COMING TO THE MOUNTAIN
On a bright September morning, the Messiah Productions tour bus, the Silver Eagle, rolled eastward through the Mojave Desert, bound for Texas. After cresting steep, spectacular Cajon Pass, we were already in a stark, spare landscape that would continue for the next 1,500 miles, to a semimythical place named Mount Carmel—the Anthill, as Jaime called it. “Fire ants, chiggers, and rednecks,” he grimaced.
Jaime and Paul Fatta were on the bus with me. It turned out that I was the only one who’d never been to Waco, and Paul spent a lot of time talking to me as he drove.
Paul, who came from a wealthy family in Hawaii, was one of Steve Schneider’s converts. Accepting David’s teachings, he’d sold his share of the family business to his father and moved to Mount Carmel with his son, Kalani, then about twelve years old. I gathered that he ran some of the group’s business ventures, like souping up classic American cars, to generate income to keep the community going. He was a bright guy with a quick wit, and we took to each other immediately. Paul was the one who gave me the nickname “Baby Gorilla,” mocking my restless, rambunctious way of swinging from the overhead grab bars to pass the tedious hours of travel.
From time to time, Paul pulled the bus over and stopped on the side of the road. We squatted down in the Silver Eagle’s shadow, and Paul took out his Bible and gave us a study. One of them was about King Cyrus, the ancient Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 B.C. Cyrus freed the Jews, allowed them to return to Israel, and helped them rebuild the temple the Babylonians had destroyed. “According to Isaiah,” Paul said, “Cyrus was a ‘messiah,’ a word which means ‘anointed one’ in Hebrew. And in Hebrew, ‘Cyrus’ is ‘Koresh,’ the name David took last year.”
“You mean, ‘Koresh’ isn’t David’s real name?” I asked.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Paul said cryptically, and I saw from his expression that he didn’t invite further questions on this point. However, he did add that David was the reincarnation of King Cyrus, the man who would confront “Babylon” in its modern form, which I gathered included the political and military powers that ruled the world.
“So what are you saying?” I queried. He shrugged, and I let it go at that. To be honest, none of it struck me as totally outlandish. Maybe I’d lived in Hollywood too long, had heard too many strange tales, some of which had actually turned out to be true.
During the long ride I grew close to Jaime. He was my age, dark, soft-spoken, with soft brown eyes. He told me he was born in Texas but grew up in various suburbs east of L.A. His father, a ranchera musician, moved out, and the family had to survive on welfare. His mother was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, but his childhood was very difficult. “Where I grew up, dope was everywhere,” he said. “I was expelled from school for having poor grades, then wo
rked as a courier, playing drums and guitar at night, fucking groupies,” Jaime said.
In 1988, feeling he’d lost his way, Jaime put an ad in a newspaper about wanting to play in a Christian band. David answered his ad, and later that year Jaime moved to Mount Carmel, shuttling between Waco and Pomona to play in the band. He loved and respected David, but as a musician he had a certain beef with him.
“He likes to set us drummers against each other, maybe to keep us on our toes. David made me feel I was part of the band, then he auditioned other drummers for my spot, like Mike Schroeder and you. He told me he was ‘just trying the guys out,’ but I got the impression he was going to leave me hanging, that maybe I wasn’t quite good enough. He told me he was going to use Mike for ‘a while,’ and I threatened to go and find myself another situation. I wanted to pack up and hit the road; I didn’t need to take that kind of shit from anyone.”
He shrugged. “Maybe David’s testing each of us musicians to see if our main commitment is to the message or to the music.” After I’d joined the band, Jaime began playing the bass. He felt it was a lesser role, and there was an edge of resentment toward me that his better nature tried to set aside as we rolled on toward Waco.
He made one particular remark that stuck in my mind.
“Mount Carmel is the one true, stable family I’ve ever really had,” he said. “And that is David’s doing. He’s been more of a loving father to me than any man I’ve ever known.”
Waco is the navel of the Texan plains, the Brazos Valley sinkhole in the belly of that vast aridity. Its main claim to fame is that it’s the birthplace of Dr. Pepper cola, an achievement the town celebrates with the Dr. Pepper Museum, along with the Texas Ranger Museum and Hall of Fame. My first glimpse of Waco, as we skirted downtown’s squat cotton warehouses and turned southeast along the mud banks of the Brazos, reminded me of The Last Picture Show, a desolate movie about a desolate place. Arizona and New Mexico had been hot and bright, but the sunlight in East Texas was like an iron fist.
Waco Page 4
