Film ‘Jesus Music’ traces birth of a movement
Co-director left with profound respect for Calvary musicians
The birth of contemporary Christian rock and pop music in America can in part be traced to a vision received by Lonnie Frisbee, a 17-year-old runaway.
After stripping naked and taking LSD in 1967 near Tahquitz Falls outside of Palm Springs, California, the young man called to God. Frisbee saw himself standing beside the Pacific Ocean, Bible in hand, staring out at the horizon. But instead of water, the sea was filled with lost souls crying out for salvation.
This lesser-known chapter in music history provides the genesis of “The Jesus Music,” a new documentary that traces the contemporary Christian music movement birthed at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and similar pockets of divinity dotting the nation.
Within a year of that vision, Frisbee was converting hippies alongside a preacher named Chuck Smith and transforming Calvary Chapel into a haven for touchedby-the-spirit bands such as Love Song, Gentle Faith, Blessed Hope and Children of the Day.
“We were models for how you could use drums and guitars in church and still have it be godly,” says Love Song co-founder Chuck Girard.
Directed by the Nashville, Tennessee-based Erwin brothers, “The Jesus Music” examines how the
spirit of the times, a rush of faith-filled creativity and the emergent “Jesus People” movement begat a multimillion-dollar industry fueled by devotees eager to support their blessed messengers.
The documentary, now in theaters, includes interviews with Girard and his Love Song bandmate Tommy Coomes; contemporary Christian stars Amy Grant, Kirk Franklin, TobyMac of DC Talk, Lecrae and Michael W. Smith; and volumes of archival footage.
“There’s just something so pure about where it all started,” says co-director Jon Erwin. “There wasn’t really an industry or an agenda behind it. Just a bunch of hippie kids that experienced something and gathered in masses to sing their songs.”
Though “The Jesus
Music” moves far beyond Costa Mesa to tackle issues of race, morality, sin and redemption, its opening canto beams light on a long-gone music community 50 miles south of Laurel Canyon. There, during the same period Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Frank Zappa and the Byrds were becoming famous, a half-dozen Calvary Chapel bands united in 1971 to create “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.”
Released on Chuck Smith’s new Maranatha! Music label and costing about $4,000 to produce, the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies. Fifty years later, “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert” is considered the Big Bang of contemporary Christian music — a collection of folk-inspired soft rock that, as it eased its way onto youth-group turntables across the country, cast a spell over Jesus-loving, mostly white baby boomers amid a generational shift.
“When I first heard that Maranatha record, I couldn’t get enough of it,” Christian singer Michael W. Smith says in “The
Jesus Music.” “This thing called ‘Jesus Music,’ which exploded in Southern California, somehow found its way (to) my hometown, and it changed my life.”
Girard and a few musician friends formed Love Song in 1969 as a way to address life’s big questions. As the clique “started to land on the Bible more than anything,” Girard and his bandmates made the trip to bear witness with Frisbee.
Not long after, Girard started production with an engineer at a local studio on the songs that became “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.”
Within two years, Love Song would play as part of the Billy Graham-co-signed Explo ’72 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas before an estimated 75,000 people. At the time, the New York Times declared it “the largest religious camp meeting ever to take place in the United States.”
Those vivid scenes drew the Erwin brothers to the story of Calvary Chapel’s role in Christian music history, says co-director Andrew Erwin. He cites the famous Time magazine cover from 1971, emblazoned with the words
“The Jesus Revolution,” as an early window into the Jesus People movement and music. “It blew me away in this all-roads-leadto-Rome way. So much came out of that movement and out of Calvary Chapel, including Christian music.”
Six-time Grammy Award-winning singer Grant first heard “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert” as a preteen at some friends’ house in Nashville. “We would just sit in front of their turntable,” Grant said. Soon she was part of the youth group and dabbling in music. “I wrote my first song because I was like, ‘God has a real PR problem in the conservative world because people think it’s a cultural choice instead of this adventure.’ ”
It was a distinctly different music from the Black gospel sound born in Southern Baptist churches, which laid the foot-stomping foundation for early rock ’n’ roll. Christian rock and pop artists of the ’70s, including Girard, Grant, Larry Norman, Phil Keaggy, the All Saved Freak Band and Mustard Seed Faith, liked to say that, since rock ’n’ roll was born in the church, they were merely facilitating its return.
The charismatic, enigmatic rock singer and songwriter Norman, who spent the late 1960s canvassing Hollywood Boulevard for converts, signed with Capitol Records to release 1969’s “Upon This Rock,” regarded as the first Christian rock album. “Upon This Rock,” though, tanked, and Capitol dropped him.
Calvary bands Love
Song, Gentle Faith and Children of the Day had little concern for Capitolsized sales numbers and didn’t yet have the connections to make a play for the mainstream. But Larry Eskridge, author of “God’s Forever Family: The Jesus
People Movement in America,” says that grassroots structures were developing to support the emerging Jesus People movement.
“Maranatha put together their own little distribution networks, selling albums out of the back of vans and eventually going to mail order and linking up with rudimentary religious-music distributors and labels,” he said.
A second compilation, “Maranatha! 2,” was released a year later, in 1972, and soon the mainstream came calling. Rolling Stone flew photographer Annie Leibovitz to take photos for a feature. Life magazine gave the movement a cover story.
For Grant, holding the album “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert” during her interviews for “The Jesus Music” offered an electrifying blast back in time. “It was everything coming out of the Maranatha community. And in my mind, it was everything coming out of Southern California. It was Love Song. It was Chuck Girard. It was Second Chapter of Acts. It was that whole scene.”
Director Jon Erwin says that he wrapped the project with a profound respect for the Calvary musicians, whom he called “people who didn’t hear anything that sounded like them and fought really hard to have their voices represented. To me, that’s incredibly rebellious and incredibly romantic.”
He adds, “Any underrepresented audience that’s trying to find their voice in mainstream culture through art can relate to that struggle.”