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Photos by Susan Ann Luce<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure all our reader\u2019s need no introduction to Ojo Taylor. His mark on the early and formative days of Christian music is unmistakable. Not only did he play in Undercover \u2013 which was one of the earliest alternative bands in Christian music circles \u2013 but he also founded and ran the Broken\/Brainstorm music label with Gene Eugene. Back in the day Broken\/Brainstorm was the place to find great bands! There was Adam Again, Crumbacher, Youth Choir (pre- The Choir), Undercover, Common Bond, Altar Boys and many more depending on which incarnation the label was in. The roster was young, edgy and unique in every sense, from the style and dress, to the music and the message. Ojo branched out again when he released his solo album Relative<\/em> in 1988. It was eclectic and a unique collaboration of various artists handling guest vocal duties for each track. The music on Relative<\/em> was earthy and more in the vein of the world music genre, and it was different from pretty much anything else that was out at the time.<\/p>\n This is a pretty in depth interview with Ojo who took time out of an extremely busy schedule to answer these questions. There is a little history here, a little talk of new music coming and talk about the journey that he is on in his life as it relates to spiritual and practical issues. I am always interested in the journey that others are on in their life regardless of how much (or how little) they have changed. I find it interesting that it seems many of the musicians I have listened to for years and grew up with, many of them seem to have changed their views in regards to their faith. Ojo is one of those who has re-defined his walk and his belief system, and I was glad that he was willing to be open and talk about it. So enjoy this frank discussion with a man that has seen the industry from all sides.<\/p>\n How did Undercover come together?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jim Nicholson and I had been playing together in bands since we were in high school. When we went through the born-again thing within weeks of each other, we continued our musical partnership and started writing more and more original music. A bit of trivia most people don\u2019t know is that our first drummer in that early incarnation was Clark Edmond who was my brother-in-law at the time and who went on to become Idle Cure\u2019s drummer. Neither Jim nor I had any prior experience with evangelicalism, Christian music, anything like that. Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Chuck Smith\u2019s church, was doing their weekly concerts and that whole thing just tripped me out. I was brought up Catholic so it was a very different religious experience for me to see young people and bands so engaged in the practice of their faith.<\/p>\n Jim and I ultimately moved to what was then an emerging Calvary Chapel in Yorba Linda, although then it was really nothing more than a bible study in a living room led by John Wimber. There were some really great musicians in that group, mostly friends of John\u2019s from his own music career, including Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers and Ron Tutt who was Elvis\u2019 drummer, and some others too. It was just dumb luck to have ended up there, really. We just chose it because we lived in Orange County and this was the closest Calvary to us.<\/p>\n John\u2019s son Chris Wimber was there, and he started his band Boaz along with Ric Alba and Danny Pavlis. Our band was called JC Rose. They were more rock, we were more progressive. Ric Alba\u2019s friend Frank was our drummer, Uncle Dave Hackbarth played keyboards (we had two keyboard players), and Jerry Davis who has been instrumental since in reconnecting us with Ric Alba was on bass. Jim and I shared lead vocals. Most of these connections were just friends of friends and people we met in church, and there really are so many great little side-stories. Boaz and JC Rose played a number of small outreach type things together in parks and stuff like that.<\/p>\n Boaz ultimately decided to venture into punk and new wave and we followed shortly after and in the wake of that evolution, both bands kind of shuffled members. Ric, Danny, Jim and I formed Undercover, Chris went on to form Lifesavers. This was about 1979 or 1980. Jim and I decided we needed a real lead singer so we put an ad in the church bulletin (the church by this time had grown considerably) and after auditioning a number of singers, Bill Walden answered the ad and he completed the lineup. At that time there was only us and Lifesavers, and then shortly after, The Lifters. DA was doing their thing too but we didn\u2019t know them and they had already done records so although we worked together later, we were not part of the same sociologies in the very beginning of this movement. There was also a group called Chosen Ones with Danny Pavlis\u2019 little brother Chris and Brian Doidge who later went on to play in LSU. They were young and not bad for their age but they only recorded a demo.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never really said this before, but Chris Wimber was a big influence on me and I always thought he had more cool. Lifesavers in the very beginning was a better band than we were just in terms of their songwriting, cultural awareness and sensibilities, and ability to carry their audience. They could have been huge, but they had their problems. It took us a little time to come into our own and I always thought Chris deserved the credit for being the real visionary in this genre even though we were contemporaries and our albums came out at exactly the same time. We all had the same idea, to just play the music we loved and write about what was important to us. Chris Brigandi, the leader of The Lifters and later Wild Blue Yonder was also instrumental in things getting off the ground. He really believed in everything Undercover and Lifesavers were doing, put so much energy into it, set up gigs, helped move equipment, whatever had to be done. He was awesome and also an influence. Ric Alba joining Undercover was also big for us because he\u2019s also a great songwriter and musician and he brought so much talent with him.<\/p>\n What were some of the difficulties in being the one of the first alternative bands in the Christian scene?<\/strong><\/p>\n We weren\u2019t thinking that way. Nobody was saying, \u201cHey, we\u2019re one of the first alternative bands in Christian music!\u201d Really, the whole idea of who was the first Christian this or that strikes me as silly. We stood on the shoulders of giants and there are people who stand on ours. At that time the behemoth that was the Christian music industry seemed unattainable to us and none of us thought we really wanted to go down that road anyway. We started playing other venues, lots of night clubs, parties, youth group events, colleges, all kinds of stuff. MRC, a grass-roots division of Maranatha Music, had asked both us and Lifesavers if we would be interested in recording for them, and we both agreed to do so. It was a completely different kind of record deal though, one that was focused on giving bands a product to help generate support. Issues of ownership of masters and copyrights, publishing and creative control were different than other record deals, and this was a great way for both bands to get started. We were not exactly being courted by other labels anyway, at least not yet. I think we took a lot of people and the industry completely by surprise.<\/p>\n I may be wrong about this because I was not brought up in the protestant or evangelical sociology, but the Christian music thing in Southern CA up until then had a set of expectations about how artists were to look, act and communicate on stage. In fact, the very term \u201cartist\u201d was discouraged, and those who were \u201cjust artists\u201d were seriously looked-down-on. Well, we weren\u2019t interested in doing things that way. We wanted to sound good, be musically interesting, look good, put on a good live show and be genuine, true to who we were and to our audience. I think I\u2019ve always said that my goal was for the music to stand or fall on its own artistic merit, not just because it conformed to a certain agenda, creed or ideology. Young people responded in ways we could not have imagined.<\/p>\n The practical difficulties for us didn\u2019t really seem that difficult. We were reinventing the wheel in some ways, although we weren\u2019t thinking that way either. The old wheel was not on our radar screen. We took heat for that, for how we looked and sounded, but none of that mattered to us at all because we were focused and had support from MRC and from Yorba Linda. We had each other. There were lots and lots of people swirling around this movement as it began and grew. There was really lots of love and energy and excitement. We\u2019re lucky to have been part of it. We knew we were on to something and while we made a lot of mistakes, we were focused.<\/p>\n The one truly difficult part for me, probably not what you had intended by your question, was the matter of being part of a movement, a cultural youth revolution, and keeping my personal life put together. We were young and I was already married with two kids when our first album came out. There were just a lot of plates to keep in the air because we still had to work to pay the bills, we had this tiger by the tail, and we were on unfamiliar turf in so many ways. We were being asked questions, good questions that forced me to begin forming points of view. We were traveling and meeting people. The life that Undercover thrust me into was a much larger life than I had structured for my personal self and that transition, important and necessary as it was, took its toll. I tried to shelter my kids as much as I could from any fallout, and there was fallout. Like all good creative stories, it\u2019s always a bit of a mess.<\/p>\n When you think back to those days, what are some of the things that come to mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n When you talk about \u201cthose days\u201d I assume you mean the very early days. Kind of picking up with the very early story here, when our first album was just pressed (MRC had very limited distribution, just to a very few, mostly local stores so when the record sold, it was mostly out of the back of our cars) we used to have these parties we called burrito bashes at Ray Hersom\u2019s house. Chris Wimber and Clark Edmond also lived there, maybe some other guys from time to time. Usually after church at Calvary Yorba Linda (which was to become The Vineyard) dozens and dozens of us, kids of all ages, would go to Ray\u2019s and we\u2019d play the first Undercover and Lifesaver\u2019s albums over and over and dance like crazy. That house was just stuffed to the rafters with people. This is where I remember meeting Brian Healy of DAS and Chris Brigandi.<\/p>\n Those were important and beautiful times for me. I learned so much, about how to make records, how the business worked, how people thought and lived in other parts of the world. It grew me up very fast although in some important ways, I still had yet to grow up even years later. I couldn\u2019t possibly begin to synthesize all of the great moments and memories. I remember when I heard the test pressing of the God Rules<\/em> album for the first time and I was so happy with it. I remember that so clearly, listening to it at the MRC offices alone in a side room. I knew we were on to something.<\/p>\n Yes, I had yet to grow up. A number of people, writers and interviewers have said that listening to Undercover was in many ways like growing up with us. That\u2019s probably true. Things became unraveled for me around the time of the Boys & Girls<\/em> album in 1984 and that was chronicled on Branded <\/em>in 1986. My marriage was a shambles and I was basically living my own life. All things Undercover were consuming my complete energy. I remember thinking I could not go on living the way I had been living. It was sloppy personally. I called Randy Stonehill who was the only other CCM artist I knew who had been divorced and he was very gracious to me, but told me everything would come undone. He gave me good advice and from there I entered counseling and he was very gracious to me, but told me everything would come undone. He gave me good advice and from there I entered counseling. It was important to me then that the counselor was a Christian, and I was lucky that the one I chose, recommended to me by Stonehill\u2019s pastor, also had the education, state credentials and license. He began chipping away at my rigid fundamentalist thinking, my own emotional immaturity and my distance from my own feelings. I went for a couple years, got through a divorce, and had to figure out where to go from there.<\/p>\n I was determined to go through all of this as responsibly as I possibly could, to stay connected to people at MRC and Calvary, the band and friends. Things did change quite a bit, and I\u2019ve often thought back on that conversation with Stonehill although I don\u2019t know if everything unraveled. In a way, Branded<\/em> was just the beginning, our most successful statement. We were lucky enough to have been part of that youth revolution in the beginning, in the early years, and then with Branded<\/em> we kind of broke new ground again. Again, people responded in ways we could not have imagined. The album was just an open chronicle of what I was thinking and feeling at the time, reconciling what I had always believed and what I had been taught with my experience of the world.<\/p>\n So, I don\u2019t know. On a macro level, there\u2019s the track things took in my life and how that played out in our music. On other levels, there were so many great moments, concerts, people and adventures all over the place. I still see ripples extending out from those years ago. I don\u2019t know that I can be completely objective. I\u2019m still trying to make sense of it. I\u2019ve always felt as much an observer as a participant in the whole thing. Lots of things come to mind.<\/p>\n Where do you see Undercover’s place in music history?<\/strong><\/p>\n At one level, I think we have no place at all in music history. I teach in the Music department at a university and I can guarantee you that nobody involved in Christian music circles that I know of is being studied in music history classes now, and will not be in the future either. That may sound like a pedantic answer, but I have always strived to be musically genuine and authentic and that probably drove me back to study music years later and that\u2019s my reference point when you mention music history. Maybe we have more of a place in religious cultural history. That\u2019s a different thing.<\/p>\n I have always refused and rejected the Christian music label, and philosophically still resist it but I cannot deny that this was the sociology we were part of and the infrastructure we worked in, so I will reluctantly use that taxonomy for Undercover in this question. Christian music is such a small piece of the whole music industry and we are just a small piece of that small piece. My own projection at another level is that we were probably influential to a number of artists, maybe to a movement, maybe to some degree to CCM as an industry. I got an email from Tom Willett who worked at Word Records and was responsible for the What? Records imprint. He told me he got the idea from Undercover, which was very gracious of him to say. This was just within the last few months and I never knew that. In Jerry Wilson\u2019s book God\u2019s not Dead<\/em><\/a><\/strong> I told the story of Darrel Harris, then president of Star Song records who called me one day to tell me he had heard Branded<\/em> and thought it was a powerful album. That was also very gracious. I have so many such stories and yet I can\u2019t be objective about our place or influence. How can I be objective about it? Maybe I flatter myself. Maybe I just need to believe that what we did was worth something. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n My friend Jon Trott, a writer and fellow Velvet Underground fan correctly pointed out that they probably sold about 1,000 records but that they were all sold to people who then went out and started bands. Maybe we were like that, but to our small piece of that small piece. On the other hand, I know some of the non-religious LA and Orange County bands from that era used to come to our shows and we played with a lot of those bands too so maybe it does go a little beyond our small piece, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n My sense is that we were inconvenient to the status quo and just tolerated, maybe only barely by that infrastructure, not tolerated at all by other segments, certainly not embraced, and we were ignored for the most part in the CCM machinery. I don\u2019t think it was any kind of conspiracy, just that we were not what they were about. I\u2019m talking about the CCM status quo, not our fans and the people we worked with. Undercover was grass roots mostly, scrapping from beginning to end, and we had support from just enough gatekeepers at the right places to do what we did. I do not mean to minimize those people\u2019s efforts and faith in what was possible. I realize we were also limited somewhat by our own thinking, our outspokenness and rather extreme style and sometimes our lyrics on our early records. Undercover was always kind of a double-edged sword that way. It was hard at times to know that we may have been blazing some trails and that other bands, friends of ours who may have been more palatable, maybe more orthodox in their lyrics and lifestyles were able to capitalize on that and go on to bigger and better things than we were in both secular and religious sociologies. I am very happy for them and for their success too.<\/p>\n I have been reading through Jerry Wilson\u2019s book because it has many other individual perspectives on that time from members of bands that were active in the early years and the various perspectives help me understand things myself and my own role in everything too. Terry Taylor has a great narrative on the idea of art and Christian music and how it\u2019s used by the church for evangelism. It really should be read by anyone interested in this era. He rightly points out that Undercover was the next generation of that, and that DA had tried to escape it with varying degrees of success. That was in the early years though. When Calvary stopped doing their concerts and Maranatha folded up Broken Records, we were just getting ready to record Branded<\/em>. It was hard for us to make a transition from what Terry described and what we had built, to being genuine artists writing from a certain poetic center rather than used simply as a tool by the church for evangelism. I think or hope we were successful in that with Branded. It was a different album with a different lyrical approach, introspective more than evangelical, and it marked the end of one era of Undercover, that militant, utilitarian, simplistic era and the beginning of another followed by Balance of Power<\/em> and Devotion<\/em>. As I said earlier, in many ways, and I think the rest of the band might agree with me, things were just getting going with Branded<\/em>.<\/p>\n I also was moved by reading the chapters by Steve Hindalong, Derri Daugherty, and my band mates\u2019 chapters, Jim Nicholson, Bill Walden, Sim Wilson and Gary Olson. They all had such beautiful and important perspectives on this time. It dawned on me that things were so crazy, so busy, so full, that I really never had time to explore what others\u2019 experiences were like to them. Steve and Derri had such a different purpose than we did and I loved reading about it. The things they went through, their own sets of challenges, feeling like they didn\u2019t fit in because they didn\u2019t fit the evangelical mold like we did, all impacted me when I read it. I admire their fortitude, commitment and persistence. The members of Undercover also had different points of view on the exact same set of events we all shared together. I felt a little small reading it all. Why did I think I had it all figured out? I am so grateful for the people I know and have shared experiences with, their beautiful hearts and their own inner fires, their own paths and journeys, inquiries, interpretations and the meaning attached to it all. Mine is only one perspective; a valid one, but only one.<\/p>\n So as I said, when we started, there really was no framework for a solely artistic, or rather non-evangelical representation of the Christian life. If you were Christians you were expected to do things a certain way. Churches were just starting to get over guitars and long hair when we came along swatting the hornet\u2019s nest all over again. So in some ways, DA had a hard time transitioning to a band not governed by religious affiliation and so did we. I know The Choir did too and felt awful pressure to be more overt and direct with their lyrics and stage delivery. Others that came along a little later like Adam Again also had challenges, but it was perhaps easier for them because a lot of the work of getting this kind of music accepted by the religious infrastructure had been underway for some time and they could afford to explore nuance a little more. This is only my view, and I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s completely accurate, just my sense.<\/p>\n Overall, and in the end, I am happy for my part in all this, bumpy and messy as it may have been along the way, with reading the emails and posts I get from people, to hear that we have made a difference in some peoples\u2019 lives in different ways. I am also happy to be making a difference in my students\u2019 lives here at the university. I have no doubt many of them will be rock stars in their own fields and go on to way bigger things than I\u2019ve been part of. I am in touch with many of them already who are doing great work at places like the Warped Tour, The Grammies, all kinds of things.<\/p>\n How do you define Undercover’s sound and influence?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s easier for me to talk about our influences than our sound. We have a unique instrumentation because of the keyboard bass thing. There are other bands who do that, but I don\u2019t know that they do it in as energetic or intense, bombastic a context as we do. Jim\u2019s guitar is also unique and my approach to the keyboards provides a foundation for him to do what only he can do. All this, the songs themselves and our own ways of hearing what we want to do, and our own unique chemistry with one-another give us our own sound. We\u2019ve grown and evolved too, like most bands do. There are some songs I don\u2019t think we could pull off live at all anymore, not because we couldn\u2019t play them but because that\u2019s just not the musical space we\u2019re in anymore. Of course the keyboard bass thing came about when Ric left Undercover. We had changed drummers and lost Ray after our first album and then Ric too. This left us with four people and we decided to stay trimmed down and try the keyboard bass using B-52s as a model. We had been doing Undercover with 6 people and 4 just seemed to make sense at the time.<\/p>\n I get asked the question about influences and style often, and I realize that there are so many. I can point to some of our songs and tell people, \u201cOh, this thing right here is a total tip of the hat to Zeppelin,\u201d or Black Sabbath or Yes, or X, or The Pixies, Fear, GBH, or Deep Purple, or The Ramones, or Steve Stevens, or The Beatles, or Ultravox, or Rush, or TSOL, or The Cure, or any number of others. Somehow that all gets mashed up along with our own ideas, into the impossibility of who we are. We didn\u2019t have any Christian music influences except for Lifesavers in the early days. Later, I think those of us in this immediate Southern CA thing, the artists on Brainstorm, influenced each other. I alluded to that in the small piece on Remembering Gene Eugene in this magazine. There were also times I would explicitly ask myself, \u201cWhat would Ric Alba do if he were still playing with us,\u201d because we like lots of the same music and bass players, stuff like that.<\/p>\n What are your thoughts about Brainstorm and its influence?<\/strong><\/p>\n Necessity is the mother of invention, and such was the case with Brainstorm. Adam Again, 441 and Undercover were on Blue Collar Records which had gone belly up because of their distributor\u2019s default in paying them so we were all without a label. It was Gene\u2019s idea to start our own and we talked about it and agreed to approach Maranatha Music and ask about distribution. Maranatha was willing and even agreed to sell Broken Records to us. Our corporate name was Brainstorm Artists International (Gene and our third partner, Barry Hill were both Canadian, and one of our artists was Level Heads, also Canadian) and we initially used Broken Records as the label name.<\/p>\n Undercover\u2019s live album from Magic Mountain, 3-28-87<\/em> was the initial release. We began to sign other artists. It was almost inconceivable to us that groups like The 77s and DA were without labels and so we eagerly worked with them and I think some of their best releases came out on Brainstorm (we ended up reverting to the name Brainstorm after the sale of Broken fell through). We also signed some groundbreaking rap and hip hop artists, SFC, Dynamic Twins, Freedom of Soul and of course continued to produce Adam Again and Undercover. Those were great years for me, mostly because of the relationships with people like Marie McGilvray who played keyboards for 441 and was our marketing director, all the artists, and Gene and I were pretty tight during those years. I think for the most part, people are much less aware of record labels though, than they are of artists, and so while I think we did good work over those years, it\u2019s rightfully the artists and their releases that endure. I was really glad to be part of that too though. As far as Brainstorm\u2019s influence, again, I cannot be objective and I\u2019d have to defer to others\u2019 opinions. For whatever good may have come out of our work there, I am incredibly grateful.<\/p>\n How did Relative<\/em> come together for you? What led to wanting to do a solo album?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think the first seed of a solo release was the influence of technology. The first time I remember ever being exposed to MIDI was around 1984 when we were on the road in Northern CA. We stopped at a music store to get guitar strings or something like that and they had a bunch of MIDI keyboards in the showroom. For those who don\u2019t know what that means, basically it allows multiple keyboards to be controlled from one source, either another keyboard, a computer, or a sequencer a hardware device that \u201cremembers\u201d what you play into it and then plays it back on a MIDI instrument. What that meant to me in plain English was that I could play one keyboard but have it control a host of others all connected together by way of MIDI cables. For a keyboard player whose one hand was tied up 100% of the time on bass and only had one hand left, that was huge. The first album we did using MIDI was Branded<\/em>. Up until then, each layer had to be added manually, one at a time. One free hand meant only one layer. Creatively that kind of opened a door for me and I started playing around with different musical ideas that had not yet been available to me. I remember thinking that Undercover was an extreme band with a unique instrumentation. I was writing songs that were not really meant for Undercover but were still good songs. Some of those ended up on Relative<\/em>.<\/p>\n At another level, in 1987 we were suffering from having been through a really crazy and great seven years since the band had started, with very few breaks. The issues with me getting a divorce, Calvary shutting down its concerts, Maranatha releasing artists from their contracts, constant touring, writing and recording, all had taken their tolls on us. We agreed to stop playing for a while or maybe permanently (in my mind it was never a permanent break). Jim and Sim went off to start Boys Club, and Gene Eugene, Barry Hill and I started Brainstorm in September of 1987. I began work on Relative<\/em> right after I finished mixing 3-28-87<\/em>. I was eager to get these ideas recorded. I was also eager to work with people whose work I admire like Greg Lawless from Adam Again.<\/p>\n I had bought an Apple IIe computer in 1983 and MIDI sequencing software that I used to \u201crecord\u201d the album into the computer. I did it without the benefit of hard drives, which were really expensive and not widely used in the early 1980s. So here I am swapping floppy disks and all, and the software was very rudimentary, but it did allow me to program all the keyboard layers and the bass, and drum parts. I used two digital sampling keyboards plus a rack of analog keyboards for the sounds. It was all driven by the little Apple IIe with no hard drive. All I had to do then was to record guitars and vocals in the studio and then whatever other parts I wanted to add to specific songs like percussion and sax.<\/p>\n I had a battery of great vocalists to work with. Terry Taylor, John MacNamara from 441, Gene and Riki Michele from Adam Again, Dino Elefante, Mike Knott, Crystal Lewis (credited as Skyler), Marie McGilvray, so many talented people. I don\u2019t know where the idea to put multiple singers on the album came from. In some ways it would have been fun to do the vocals myself, but I don\u2019t think my voice lends itself to those songs\u2019 styles and the singers that ended up on those songs are the right ones for the job I think.<\/p>\n Where do you stand now in regards to your faith\/belief?<\/strong><\/p>\n I am sincere and open in my search for truth no matter where it leads. I know there are many who think that doubt and inquiry are wrong if they do not somehow lead back to the truth of the Bible as they see it. I can\u2019t outline my whole process and arguments for what I believe here. But is it really all about correct beliefs? Many think so and I\u2019m certain that to them I am no longer a Christian. To my theologically liberal friends all my questions probably seem like the blinding flash of the obvious. I have had to go through it and I am, of course on a lifelong path but one that has now taken me beyond the idea of the value and potency of correct beliefs and the constructs of Christianity.<\/p>\n On my Facebook page<\/strong><\/a> where it asks for religious views, I listed Music, Freethought, and Lovism. To me that means that I value rationalism, I believe in reason unrestrained by deference to religious authority, and I am firmly committed to the cultivation and practice of love. I express this most deeply in music. That\u2019s the framework for what I believe.<\/p>\n Again I refer to a discussion I had with Jon Trott who suggested that there are two kinds of knowledge, rational and experiential. The beliefs I held have not stood up well to reason and rational inquiry. I acknowledge and accept the validity of religious experience, although those experiences are unique by definition and cannot be used as a logical defense of any one god or belief system over another. All faiths lay claim to those kinds of experiences. Ultimately, you are going to have to bring that experience into the realm of reason if you want to communicate meaningfully with others.<\/p>\n In the end, the important question is, \u201cWhat is the basis of what I choose to believe?\u201d I have heard and expect all the arguments because people like to believe that their beliefs stand up to scrutiny. I have been told that mankind is corrupted, fallen, and that we should not rely on our rational minds in spiritual matters, although that is itself an appeal to reason. I have been told that love and a healthy moral code are not possible outside of God, and in fact just the opposite is suggested by research. Many hold that genuine love is not possible outside of Christ, and that somehow only Christians have the truth. I have been told that the secrets and the mysteries belong to God, that we cannot know, and yet I am expected to assent without reason under threat of eternal suffering. I suppose then I am agnostic. I don\u2019t know, and outside peoples\u2019 individual experiences, nobody else does either. It\u2019s necessarily a matter of faith. If one\u2019s faith could be proved by reason and logic, it would no longer be faith. I align most closely in the end with Einstein who said, \u201cIf something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”<\/p>\n When I talk to people about the early days of my journey with evangelical Christianity, they often ask if I really believed all that stuff literally. It\u2019s a good question. I went forward at an altar call at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in 1976. I began asking questions right away, not borne of skepticism, but thirst. I remember driving to Calvary the first week after that altar call and asking anyone who might have been even standing around in the parking lot what it was supposed to be like to be a born again Christian. I had been brought up Catholic.<\/p>\n Now Calvary in the early days for example, taught that the rapture was going to take place no later than 1988. I heard that taught explicitly, that Hal Lindsey line of thinking that the generation that witnesses the second coming would be the generation (40 years in the bible) that saw Israel become a nation again in 1948. Chuck Smith had written books and tractates on the end times and biblical prophecy. There was a nagging question I had about the way one verse in Matthew 24 was used repeatedly with regard to the end times: \u201cSo likewise ye, \u2026 know that it is near, even at the doors<\/em>.\u201d Well, the \u201c\u2026\u201d made me curious so I looked up the verse and the missing words, \u201cwhen ye shall see all these things<\/em>\u201d seemed important to me. Why omit them? It seemed to argue against the idea of an imminent second coming because the \u201cthings\u201d we were supposed to \u201csee\u201d were not at all yet evident. So I asked Chuck personally at a baptism at the ocean. I did not get a good answer and the sense that I had was that I should not be asking the question. To be fair, Chuck was busy with a baptism that day and I was just some kid asking a question, one that he could have possibly interpreted as confrontational, or at least tedious. But that was not my motivation. I wanted to know.<\/p>\n Not having received a good answer led me to explore other explanations and interpretations of the apocalypse and the end times and I stumbled on George Eldon Ladd who had a completely different view than the Lindsey camp, that the end of days and a rapture of the church were not imminent, a view that made much more sense all things considered. I adopted that view quite early which left me at odds with the people at Calvary for whom this was such an important and central issue and I avoided many such discussions. Did I really believe all that, my friends ask?<\/p>\n There were many other such unanswered or poorly-answered questions on crucial matters that I had over those years and coupled together with the decline of my personal life up through our first few albums, my faith necessarily unraveled and changed in many ways. I did feel in the first half of the 1980s like I was \u201changing by a thread, out of control<\/em>,\u201d that I had tried so hard and in the end after years of study, worship, church attendance, travel and evangelism, this belief system granted me no more personal power or sense of transcendence than if I had no belief at all. It was to be then, a matter of complete faith. The rain falls on the believer and the unbeliever alike. I wrote as much on the liner notes to an anthology of our albums in the late 1980s, that I had had to re-evaluate my faith and had chosen to toss out quite a bit of bathwater without losing the baby, those core beliefs of my Christianity. In my disillusionment with evangelicalism, between 1986 and 1990 my entire religious efforts were gradually refocused on Catholicism. I did not accept many of the tenets but had promised to stay open when I made my return to Rome official. Those doctrines seemed no more outlandish to me than many of those I was exposed to in evangelical fundamentalism anyway, and the Catholic Church at least had historical accountability going for it, so I thought. There I remained for the next 15 years.<\/p>\n I moved to the East coast in 2007 to teach at James Madison University. I knew nobody and went there alone. I made the acquaintance of a bright and interesting woman and I asked her out. She was a secular humanist and had learned of Undercover and my role in Christian music. She told me that if I believed she was going to hell and if I was going to try to save her from hell, she would not go out with me. That simple exchange gave me pause and I told her I would consider the question and would get back to her on it. It ended up being a transitional event for me. I had not believed in a fire and brimstone hell in some time, although I did believe in a kind of hell, an eternal separation made of our own choice to turn away from God here on earth. Did I really believe all that?<\/p>\n This had lurked in the background, all of these many mental exercises, contrivances and convolutions one must necessarily go through to reconcile the Bible with itself, with history, with orthodoxy, with what we know from science and archeology, with our own experience. I had to admit to myself that my own mental exercises, convenient as they might have been, as orthodox as some of them could be considered, were not at all what the historical church, the early church fathers, or the bible taught even though I had long since abandoned the doctrine of sola scriptura<\/em>. I told her I did not believe in a future reconciliation of the cosmic sin ledgers or a fiery hell and that I would not try to save her from one, although if objective discovery of such a place ever happened, I would make her aware of it and would in fact try to save her from it. I said so half-joking, but she was serious about this, and I told her that the bottom line was that my idea of hell was only my own, that I didn\u2019t know for certain, but that I didn\u2019t believe in a lake of fire. So we talked this kind of thing over, faith and belief, for hours.<\/p>\n The floodgates of inquiry were now open, and in the three years since, I have done an intense amount of reading and have opened myself up to any reasonable question and have demanded adequate answers in exchange. It seems the only responsible thing to do. I have the time to devote to it because I am on the East coast to teach and have very few other obligations there. Once one accepts the validity of scripture as a sacred document it may make sense to have discussions about theological matters, the finer points of doctrine and practice. I watched the documentary \u201cFrisbee\u201d recently and a friend of Lonnie\u2019s in the film said that he had never read the bible before and once he had, it opened a whole new world to him. If the Bible is approached like that, it makes sense to have those kinds of discussions.<\/p>\n For the last three years though, I have been in the crawlspaces of inquiry, examining the foundations, backfill, the joists and girders. I read the new atheists, skeptics, scholars of many disciplines, artists, mystics, pastors and theologians, conservative, liberal, and mainstream. Bart T. Ehrman, New Testament scholar and Chair of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina was particularly powerful. At that level the questions take on an entirely different nature. I never knew, for example that there is no archeological evidence at all for the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Millions of people wandering a small patch of desert for 40 years, and there is not a trace of evidence. Why, if there was a worldwide flood with all remaining life on an ark, are there no kangaroo remains between Ararat and Australia, or penguin fossils between Turkey and Antarctica? I never knew that many of the New Testament epistles are pseudonymous, in some cases outright forgeries (not necessarily motivated by malice, but pseudonymous nonetheless), and that we know a good deal about the fascinating origin and evolution of the scriptures, the thousands of manuscripts available, no two of which agree completely, their selection and compilation into the canon in the fourth century, and the early church apocryphal writings that also show what early Christians believed and practiced. This is all well-known by biblical scholars, and anyone who is serious about their practice should know this stuff. These are just some examples of problems for literalists who rarely think through such things because they are like the guy in the documentary who have gone in with the assumption that it should all be taken at face value. Did I really believe all that?<\/p>\n To the believer, it will sound as if I am cut off, down a bunny trail of error and blindness, a heretic, apostate. I feel no such thing. Things make much more sense to me, I am more alive, I feel more connected, I am not worried nor do I fear. I am incredibly grateful to the forces responsible for my existence. No god I am interested in knowing would begrudge an honest and sincere inquiry, honoring the only faculties I was born with. I assume responsibility for it. I know love more than I ever have. I have grown. I am more complete in every way. I have ongoing discussion about all this and my ongoing process on Facebook, and I invite anyone to sit in and continue to grow with me, just as it was with listening to Undercover.<\/p>\n What are your views on Christianity these days?<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s such a broad question. First, there is no unified or singular \u201cChristianity\u201d that I can really offer a view on. Even within mainstream orthodox Christianity there is so much division and disagreement over so many critically important issues of eternal consequence. That alone is telling. Perhaps we should not have such strong views on things we don\u2019t understand. Also very sad is the politicization of faith. That is not unique to Christianity but it\u2019s rampant within it.<\/p>\n I have two cousins who are retired missionary nuns in the Maryknoll order. They have been instrumental in my growth over the years. I remember talking to one of them around 1990 about the afterlife and she told me she didn\u2019t believe anyone was going to hell. I was surprised and asked if she meant \u201canyone\u201d like even Hitler? She reaffirmed her answer. Her view of course is way outside the mainstream of Catholic teaching but it was obvious she had thought the issue through and I just hid the conversation away in my mind. Sometime later I was in the rectory at a nearby Catholic Church (also Tommy LaSorda\u2019s church) that was pastored by Augustinian priests, a conservative order. They still wear self-flagellating belts around their waists although I hope they don\u2019t still use them. I had mentioned my cousins to the pastor whose face went a bit white and told me \u201cWell, you know there are many who consider the Maryknolls somewhat on the fringe of Catholicism, maybe not really Catholic at all.\u201d There is this fixation with correct beliefs, and allowing for certain tolerances, anyone outside those correct beliefs is deemed \u201con the fringes\u201d or outside the camp altogether, and that has very real daily consequences for how people are treated. That can\u2019t be right.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve experienced a real contrast of practices lately. I\u2019ve been playing guitar for the Dances of Universal Peace. It is an interfaith practice of simple circle-dances with musicians in the center. They were begun by Samuel Lewis, \u201cguru to the hippies,\u201d in San Francisco in the 1960s. A little research will show a number of connections between Lewis and Eastern teachers but again, the point is not dogma or correct beliefs. There is no belief system and no religious affiliation with the Dances, so there is really nothing to belong to. The point is practice, to come together as a people from many spiritual traditions or no tradition at all. It is a practice of renewal and meditation to promote peace, understanding and connection within ourselves and each other through song and movement. I have learned quite a bit about other peoples\u2019 practices this way. This might scare some of the \u201ccorrect belief\u201d folks away, but even the secular medical and behavioral sciences advocate meditation, breathing practices, relaxation, movement, chant (even the early church), all good for us in a number of ways. Christianity can be overly cerebral. Some sects integrate more activity in the way of practice, but more often in evangelicalism the service is focused on a person and the sermon, usually after the singing of hymns, perhaps prayer, which too often looks and sounds like begging God for favor. I\u2019m not sure about the practice in that kind of model. I don\u2019t mean this as a criticism at all. The difference in practices and the results are just things I find interesting and noteworthy.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think that religion or faith are necessary for us to become complete human beings, to love, to have a strong and pure sense of morals and ethics. Religion and faith can do a lot of harm. I am told they can do a lot of good too, although I think it\u2019s also possible that the good could just as easily be done outside religion. But good is good, love is love, and wherever it comes from is fine with me. It\u2019s just that love and good so often have to take this long detour through doctrine, dogma, speculation, mental exercises, contrivances and convolutions before it gets to love. I am inclined toward complete acceptance and respect of others\u2019 beliefs. On the other hand over 40% of Americans believe the world was created in 6 days just a few thousand years ago and many of them want to run for public office, rewrite science and history textbooks (as was recently the case in Texas), establish a state religion and enforce a moral code that has no basis in reason but is solely justified because it exists in ancient manuscripts, and in such cases I have a hard time standing by silently or passively.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe I will ever be reunited with my mother in heaven. My heart is broken by that loss of hope. We need to love now. We need to live now, fully. We are not going to be rescued someday from the pain and suffering of life here and now. We need to be that rescue, love, to those in pain. Some see this as meaningless. I see it as urgent. There is no reason why the loss of hope, or the absence of meaning or purpose should require the existence of a transcendent belief system. I accept the practices of those singularly committed to love.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been asked how I reconcile my years in Undercover with my own beliefs and practices now. Was it all a waste? Am I just throwing all that away? What of all the people who listened to us and whose lives were changed in such powerful ways? How can I stand on a stage and play those songs still? These are all good questions. I feel very fortunate to have been in Undercover, to have owned Brainstorm, to have been invited to be part of so many people\u2019s lives, to have been changed by them as they were by us, to have been a catalyst in any way for good. The message in the early days was one of \u201csalvation\u201d through Jesus only. I\u2019ve many times expressed how we were young and the message necessarily simple and simplistic for a church not quite ready to go to the cultural or metaphysical edges. They were also representative of our own growth. I own that and assume responsibility for it. From Branded<\/em> on, our message was one of self-forgiveness, acceptance and forgiveness of others, tolerance, kindness, wonder, love, all it means to be a complete human being. I was not then at the point where I believed any of that was comprehensively possible outside of Christianity. I know it is now, and that it\u2019s not important what container love comes in.<\/p>\n I know that D.A.S. and Undercover are in the studio – can you tell me what the plans are with Undercover and what you guys are working on? Will it be a full length with a regular release, just as a download, etc.? <\/strong><\/p>\n The only studio work Undercover has been doing has been recording single songs and we\u2019ve had no plans to release anything. The one song that we\u2019ve been working on lately is a song Gym wrote in the 1980s called \u201cI Love You\u201d and recorded for his band Boys Club around 1988 or so. I always liked parts of the song so one afternoon a couple of years ago I took the parts I liked and rewrote the other parts, changed the character of the song a bit, then Gym and I re-recorded it in a couple weekends with Rob Gallas singing. Since then we\u2019ve had Ric Alba play bass on it, and I hope to get Sim\u2019s vocal on it before this summer is out. A rough version of it is posted on my MySpace page. Other than that we have no plans for Undercover recording although we do have some pretty solid plans for some concerts over the next year, which is always great and lots of fun. I am working on another batch of material for myself and I don\u2019t know how that will be released yet. I\u2019m going to be doing most of the performing and the vocals myself on those songs although I can\u2019t really call it a follow-up to Relative<\/em> either. It\u2019s substantially edgier.<\/p>\n What is your involvement with D.A.S.? <\/strong><\/p>\n Brian\u2019s been a great friend for many years. I helped him on his very first record by co-writing some of the songs and programming a good number of them too. On his later records he worked with other people and I think he is probably the best person to talk about all that. We reconnected lately and he told me about his idea for a cover song (I think I\u2019m sworn to secrecy on the details). His idea was to get me and Gym involved and Riki Michele from Adam Again. I told him I was also in touch with Ric Alba again and Brian was thrilled to include Ric on it too. We recorded that in December. He also had a demo with a full album\u2019s worth of material that he gave us and we all agreed it would be a great project to work on so we\u2019re kind of right in the middle of arranging and recording all those songs too with the same lineup except that now Steve Hindalong has agreed to play drums which I think is brilliant. Derri Daugherty is slated to mix it all down when we’re done tinkering.<\/p>\n What are you playing on the new D.A.S,. and how would you define the sound? <\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m playing keyboards for the most part, but I\u2019m also kind of the keeper of the studio sessions and files, and engineering most of the recording right now. We\u2019re all involved in fine-tuning the arrangements, but it\u2019s Brian\u2019s project and he did a fabulous job of writing the material and largely arranging it himself. He\u2019s been open to everyone\u2019s ideas and it\u2019s a very free and collaborative environment.<\/p>\n Brian Healy again always says he is the weakest link in the band: 1) Is that true? and 2) What does Brian do? Artistically what does Brian bring to the DAS party? <\/strong><\/p>\n He says that a lot around us too. I think he means he is the weakest link musically, meaning he probably has the least amount of formal music theory knowledge and experience and he\u2019s probably right in that way. But he is the visionary behind DAS and there\u2019s no doubt about that. In that sense, he\u2019s not only not the weakest link, he\u2019s the only link! He has a vision for DAS, the only vision really, which is as it should be. He writes the songs using a combination of found materials, loops, writes his own lyrics and melodies, and he has ideas about how the recorded parts should sound. So he doesn\u2019t have the book-smarts musically? I think that always helps, but DAS is the manifestation of an artistic vision and that\u2019s what he brings to the party. The rest of us are only accomplices.<\/p>\n Can you also tell me a bit about what your teaching job is and what that entails? <\/strong><\/p>\n I had been educating myself along the way of my life for a number of reasons. Personal growth was a furious driver at first, my own intellectual curiosity, and then there was the fact that I had kids and didn\u2019t feel very employable if the bottom ever dropped out musically. After my first graduate degree in business from UCLA I got out of Christian music and just focused on raising my kids but I soon began studying music formally again and ended up with another master\u2019s degree, this one from CSU Fullerton in music theory and composition. That was a great journey because I had no undergraduate music degree so I had to make up a bunch of classes and prerequisites before I could even consider getting into the graduate program in music. That wasn\u2019t my objective though. I only studied for the love of music and wanted to take every class I could anyway and just ended up with the units. Also, I was older than most students and I already had a full-blown music career in my rearview mirror so that made it a very rich experience for me and I became very good friends with a number of my teachers including Lloyd Rodgers<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0with whom I studied composition, and John Koegel, a brilliant musicologist.<\/p>\n Towards the end of the program I started wondering what the combination of my degrees might be useful for in the real world. With about a year left to go, Dr. Koegel asked me if I\u2019d be interested in teaching a class called The Business of Music and I agreed to do it. CSU Fullerton had the class in its catalog but had not offered it for some years and here I was with the right combination of education and experience to teach it. I never thought of myself in that role before but I loved it. Just before my graduation Dr. Koegel came to me with a job opening for assistant professor of Music Industry Studies in the Music department at James Madison University in Virginia. I prepared a CV, sent it off, and it turned out to be a very good fit for both parties. I finished the MM in June 2007 and was in Virginia teaching 2 months later. I\u2019ve made some very good friends in the music department there including the coordinator of the Music Industry program, Dr. David Cottrell, an Emmy-winning composer.<\/p>\n I teach Artist Management, Marketing of Recorded Music, Entrepreneurship in the Music Industry, Legal Aspects of the Music Industry, Music Publishing, a yearlong track in Songwriting, and History of Rock. I love the job mostly because I love the students, have something unique to offer them, and I have the opportunity to make a big difference in their lives as they go out to conquer their own worlds, which they will. I love the university too because there is the expectation that the faculty will stay active creatively, professionally, intellectually, and in ongoing service to the community and the students. I have to pinch myself sometimes when I realize that I also get paid for it.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/downthelinezine.com\/archives\/files\/2022\/01\/OjoTaylor3.jpg\")
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The irony is that all these bands started within a Christian sociology. Any of us could have bypassed that altogether from the beginning but chose not to for whatever reasons. Who knows what could have happened or not? Maybe none of us would have ever recorded; maybe some would have broken through. I happen to think the world\u2019s a better place having records by these artists where we might not had things gone differently. But starting within the religious sociology and then trying to transition didn\u2019t work for any of us. For the secular market we were too religious and for the Christian market we appeared too secular and dealt with controversial topics. That was not a problem later, and bands have succeeded where we could not have then.<\/p>\n
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