My Musical Career, Such as It Was

I grew up in a musical home, sort of. Neither of my parents played any instruments, but music was quite important to them. This came out primarily in their love of hymns and gospel songs. They also had what was in those days called a HiFI, and the playing of records was common—gospel, hymns, Gilbert & Sullivan, and folk songs. No, no, not Bob Dylan . . . more like Stephen Foster....I had a few short stints in some choirs—one at church, and the other one with my public school. I enjoyed it, but nothing earth-shaking

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What is Blog & Mablog?

The point of this podcast is pretty broad — “All of Christ for all of life.” In order to make that happen, we need “theology that bites back.” I want to advance what you might call a Chestertonian Calvinism, and to bring that attitude to bear on education, sex and culture, theology, politics, book reviews, postmodernism, expository studies, along with other random tidbits that come into my head. My perspective is usually not hard to discern. In theology I am an evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian, pretty much in that order. In politics, I am slightly to the right of Jeb Stuart. In my cultural sympathies, if we were comparing the blight of postmodernism to a vast but shallow goo pond, I would observe that I have spent many years on these stilts and have barely gotten any of it on me.

My musical career, such as it was, February 4th, 2026. I grew up in a musical home, sort of. Neither of my parents played any instruments, but music was quite important to them. This came out primarily in their love of hymns and gospel songs. They also had what was in those days called a hyfi, and the playing of records was common, gospel hymns, Gilbert and Sullivan, and folk songs. No, no, not Bob Dylan, more like Stephen Foster. I had a few short stints and some choirs, one at church, and the other one in my public school. I enjoyed it, but nothing earth-shaking. I also had about a year of piano lessons from a friend of my parents, kindly gent named Larry Morier. My problem was that I have a fairly good ear for a tune, and so I never really learned to read music all that well. I would tuck the tune away and play it while staring at the sheet of music in front of me, a sheet of paper to which I was determined to owe very little. My piano instructor figured out what I was doing after a period of time, and so he settled for teaching me how to play chords, and ability I retained to this very day. Okay, full disclosure here. Nancy doesn't like it when I describe myself as musically illiterate, and she does have kind of a pretty good point. We stand next to each other in church, where we sing a lot, and she knows that I go up when we are supposed to go up and down when we're supposed to go down. And I do have some understanding of quarter notes and half notes and stuff, so just take any self-deprecating comments I might make here, and then spot me ten points in a better direction. I'd grown up in anapolis, mostly, but in the summer of 1968, we moved to Ann Harbor, where I then spent my high school years. This was notable in the musical front, because my birthday is in June, and I turned 15 while we were on the road to Michigan. My parents pulled into a mall somewhere on the way, and bought me my birthday present, which was my first guitar. It was sort of a test run guitar, not full-size. It was, I think, an experimental guitar to see if I would take to it. My place in the station wagon was in the way back, and I remember sitting back there, figuring out these new chords, haltingly. OK, here's G. Ready? Strong, strong, strong. Hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Hang down your head, and long pause. Columbus Method. Discover in land. OK, here it is. Plant the flag. D7. Cry. The first time I ever performed solo in public was around Christmas time at our church in Ann Arbor, here on Hills Baptist Church. What I remember is that I sang, go tell it on the mountain, and I also remember that it was in the key of F. High, but doable for me. I don't think that I knew enough of the time to transpose anything. I'd bought a real guitar by this point, and apart from that performance, I would mostly just sit on our front porch and play for the busy traffic that went by our place. While in the Navy, I wrote a few songs here and there, but the big musical leap forward that happened is that I bought the guitar I still have. It's a guild, a real pal, and has been with me for 53 years now. Another thing almost happened, and I am frankly glad it didn't. I was stationed in Norfolk on a fast attack submarine from 1973 to 1975, and while there, I really don't recall how this came about. I auditioned, just me in the guitar, for a gent named Moose at Pat Robertson Studios there. They had a record label, I think. His response was something like, huh, I'd like to hear you again, but with a band this time. But as it happened, we were headed off to see again, and so that never came about. If only, if only. Like Lady Catherine Deberg, I am sure I would have been a great proficient. When I got out of the Navy in 1975, on the way back to Idaho, I met a man from our Christian community in Moscow named Dave Tongue, and we started discussing the idea of forming a band when back in Moscow. We met Dave while our family was on the road back to Idaho because he was working in one of our national parks as a ranger for the summer. We'd gotten that job because his last name was Tongue, and they thought from the application that he was a minority, but he actually had a Welsh background or something. So we started a band, and it was called Morningstar. I played rhythm guitar, Dave played lead guitar, Bart Branco played second lead, and Jack Riggs played bass. I don't remember what we did for percussion. Jack went on to become a medical doctor, and then after that, the lieutenant governor of Idaho. I think that this band went on until 1977 or so, and then people started graduating and stuff. In case it was time for another band, this one being called Mountain Angel Band. Dave Tongue and I were still in, and my brother Evan just out of the Navy jumped in, and Tom Garfield, a friend of ours from high school, also just out of the Navy, was our drummer. Three guitarists and a drummer, and the three guitarists took turns playing bass. We made our one and only record in the fall of 1978, and the band continued playing for local events until 1982 or thereabouts. It will appear for a moment that I'm drifting off the topic of music, but such is not the case. I completed my MA in philosophy in 1979, but I still had a little bit of money left available on my GI bill. I was pastoring our church by this point, and it had several hundred people in it, which meant I couldn't really get away for seminary. But our idea was to get away from the summer for just a smidge of seminary. So in the summer of 1979, we went up to Vancouver, BC, so I could take some courses at Regent Seminary. The courses were mostly fantastic, a class on the Book of Acts by John Stott, on the Cross by Leon Morris, and a class on economics by a jet named Brian Griffiths, who later served as the chief policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher. The one class that was kind of a dud was the one on her minutics, in which we were working through the Book of Galatians together. I don't remember the gentleman's name would taught us, thankfully, but when we got to Hagar and Sarah, the women who were two covenants, he said, yeah, well Paul shouldn't have said that. But here's the kicker, and the tie-in to music. While we were up there in Vancouver, Nancy and I went into a little Christian book shop, and I was going through their record bands. And what should I find there, but a copy of our album? I turned to Nancy and said, look honey, we are internationally unknown. Nobody's buying it up here either. After Mountain Angel Band was no more, I was still interested in making music, and so after a bit, I rented some studio time and recorded another album. This was the solo album, but with various friends roped in to sing back up or to do other musical stuff. The album was called Falling on Deaf Years. This one was released on cassette tape and had a homemade cover featuring a skull on a desk with a set of headphones on. The homemade aspect can be seen in the picture we staged and the meme font. Since those early days, my days have tended to fill up with other responsibilities. But ideas from musical projects still push forward and take center stage from time to time. I would say that they manifest themselves in five distinct ways. The first would be Random and Adhock Solo projects under the ages of something I call the Jenny Getis band. That would be me and whoever I round up. Jenny Getis was that stalwart woman who threw her milk stool at the minister's head at St. Giles Cathedral in 1637. The second would be doing video covers of earlier material, like the Hold Your Peace video, also with the aid of Jenny Getis. The third would be the editorial work I did in getting the contours Christy into print, both the 2002 version and the 2020 version, to which I contributed to the theatrical settings for some songs and some melodies as well. The fourth, surprise, would be playing around with AI for helping making demo tapes. I don't believe AI should be treated as legit when it comes to performances, but I believe it is superior to a sheet of music when a songwriter is pitching a song. Great for demo tapes in other words. The fifth, it would be pulling out the guitar to practice for participation in a periodic community concert hosted by what has come to be called the Dad's Band. And of course singing at church goes without saying, as I manfully try to learn the bass line for more songs than I currently know. A sampler. Having said so much, allow me to trespass upon your patience a little bit further. Here's a song from the Angel Food album, a song called Hear the Light. My girl Jesus is the bumper for their What Have You podcast. Here's another one from that same album called Amen Again. This one, also from Angel Food, represents my first toe in the water with regard to the song singing. The second verse veers off from the text, but hey, it was a start. And onto the next album, this was from Falling on Deaf Years and it's called Are You Looking For The City? And here was a song that represents my views on evolution, a little piece called Science Fiction. I may be overstaying my welcome here, but this is one more from Falling on Deaf Years. It is called Peace Peace Peace. As far as musical satisfaction goes, I'm probably the happiest with this one. This was done years later, a Jenny Gettis version of a song I had written many years before. Not for a couple that got into experimental waters. This first one is another Jenny Gettis round up of friends, and I don't quite know what genre bucket to put this one in. It is about the abortion carnage and it's called Got No Beds. We did this one shortly after the Delayed In videos came out. Earlier I mentioned messing around with AI. Here's a demo tape for a song I wrote called Watch the Sundown. The Jenny Gettis friend here was Darren Done, the instrumentalist who plays the prompts. Next up is a cover of Buffalo Springfield's Anthem for What It's Worth. And for What It's Worth. This was the song that was actually played at my high school graduation in the University of Michigan's Colosseum. It brings back the old times back when young people still knew everything and were consequently speaking their minds. Okay, I guess that's still going on. And those who used to be speaking their minds are now providing so much resistance from behind. Oh well. And last you can, if you like, but only if you want to, obtain for the low price of one dollar, the songs I wrote that are on the Angel Food Album. How's that for a sentence? If you do purchase it since it is only a dollar, I can't imagine how a year from now you would ever think about it long enough even to regret the purchase. If you are enjoying these videos and would like to support this channel and the work of Can Press, join up at Cammin Plus. Just click the link, create an account, and have a look around.