Ghosts of albums past

When Lin named a Steve Taylor song by name in the comment section of my "When Heroes Collide" post it sent my brain tumbling down memory lane back to the days of my un-jaded youth when I was a Christian music devotee.

My past affiliation with Christian music will come as a surprise to some, specifically Chris Thorne as he has taken great pleasure on more than one ocassion in pointing out that I have no Christian music on my iPod. I'm not sure what the absence of such tunes says about me. I'll leave that to someone else to figure out. For the time being, though, I thought I'd reminisce a little in front of you all - take a little stroll through my musical memories of days gone by. I do so with the same slight embarrassment that anyone would feel recounting their musical taste from decades past.

The first concert I ever went to was a Christian concert. It was a guy named Greg X Volz. He used to be the lead singer for Petra. I had his first album, "The River is Rising" on audio tape. I remember him rocking the long hair in spite of his receding hairline and thinking "There's a guy who loves the rock." He was like a Christian David Lee Roth. With less Spandex.



From Greg X Volz I graduated into a lot of the Christian rock staples of my day, your Petras, your Whitehearts, your Bryan Duncans. But I also listened to a lot of what were considered "edgier" Christian acts (I'm fully aware of the irony, thanks). One of my favorite of which was a band called The Altar Boys. They were a Christian punk band. Kinda. They wore leather, chains, and had really big hair. I guess they looked a little more like a hair band than a punk band, but hey, it was the 80's everybody used hairspray back then. I liked the Altar Boys so much that a couple of my friends and I dressed up as them for Halloween one year.

I can remember being at some small Christian rock concert in Louisville one night and the opening act was this rap group called DC Talk. At the time nobody had ever heard of them. A friend and I stood in the lobby of a high school gym and talked to them for about an hour one night. The next summer we hung out with them at Ichthus for an afternoon. They got kind of big after that (relatively speaking) and forgot our names thus ending my brief encounter with Christian fame. I wonder what ever became of those guys...

I was also into a lot of the alternative Christian bands like The Choir, Adam Again, and the 77's. Towards the end of my high school career a group of guys from a handful of these bands got together and formed a "supergroup" called The Lost Dogs. I think they still perform (minus the deceased leader of Adam Again, Gene Eugene). They had kind of an alt-country vibe that was virtually unheard of in Christian music at the time. They were actually pretty awesome.

There were more. Tons more. Rick Cua, Steve Taylor, P.O.D., Russ Taff, the late great Rich Mullins.... I could go on and on, but I'm sure you're all probably already bored with my fit of nostalgia.

How about you, though? Did you listen to any Christian music in the 80's and 90's? I know Lin was a Steve Taylor fan. What did you guys listen to? What am I missing out on now by not following Christian music in the year 2007?