Whiteheart's 1986 LP Don't Wait For the Movie is a true classic for a number of reasons.
To begin with, it was their first album after deciding to continue as a band at a time when their future was uncertain due to the crimes and arrest of their lead singer, Scott Douglas.
The album's closer, 'How Many Times (Seventy Times Seven)', was written as a direct address to that situation and is rightly one of the band's most meaningful—as well as most popular—radio ballads.
It is also the album that introduced Rick Florian, who established himself as the face and voice of the band so firmly that it can be almost forgotten that Whiteheart had two singers before him.
Tunes like 'Beat of a Different Drum', 'Fly Eagle Fly', 'Convertibles', and 'Maybe Today' were live favorites as well as frequently played on Christian radio.
But this album is special to me for a totally different reason.
I grew up listening to a lot of records that my parents owned. Many afternoons, no matter the time of year, were spent lying on my stomach with my face near the stereo speakers and a pile of records nearby. Most of these featured gospel music like the Blackwood Brothers, Andrae Crouch, or the Bill Gaither Trio, or some of the previous decades' Christian pop artists like the Archers, Sandi Patty, Dallas Holm, and others.
When I was eight or nine years old, my cousins came to visit over the Christmas holiday. One of them had a blue cassette tape, and said he thought I'd like it. I had never heard a rock'n'roll song in my life, but picked up something of the conservative Christian prejudice against rock music that was definitely in the air at this time. I was skeptical, and both cousins insisted if I heard it then I'd enjoy it, and that it was Christian rock'n'roll.
Whatever, I thought. I didn't know what was so bad about rock music, but I knew an oxymoron when I heard one—even if I didn't yet have the vocabulary for it.
I did surrender control of the stereo, however, and let my cousin slip the blue cassette into the tape player. Within thirty seconds, I was irrevocably hooked. I was a die-hard Whiteheart fan by the time that first song, 'Read the Book (Don't Wait for the Movie)', ended. I could have happily just played that one song over and over forever.
The guitars in those first thirty seconds were just so explosive, and the rhythmic pounding of the drum kit drove their way deep into my DNA. I loved this music! I loved this sound! My body and soul moved with it, and there was just no going back or standing still. I can't exaggerate the terms in which I express the ground-shaking transformative power of what I heard or the effects it had on me ever afterward: it truly was a religious experience on the level of a conversion, though I would not actually find myself responding positively to a felt sense of the Holy Spirit's call until the end of high school.
Largely due to my cousin's playing that tape, though, I'd started on that spiritual journey. My parents were sufficiently open to the alleged paradox of 'Christian rock' that I was allowed to listen to Whiteheart—they even bought a copy of Don't Wait for the Movie, intending that I should win it in a contest they had for our fourth grade Sunday School class which they taught. As it turns out, I won another tape and ended up trading it with someone else who'd gotten the Whiteheart tape.
Over time ever since, there was something of the rock'n'roll spirit that found its way into my own: something loud, angry, exuberant, anarchic, and profoundly contrarian. This music was cool to me, and that was all that mattered—I didn't care who was or wasn't listening to the same music I loved, and tended to sneer at how cultural preferences and musical styles could change so quickly and without any reason sufficient in my view to justify something new at the expense of something a few years older.
There were a couple attempts to look and dress a bit like my favorite rock stars, usually involving most of a can of hairspray. For the most part, though, part of the rock'n'roll spirit to me was individuality. I wasn't any good at being anyone else, and so I just had to be me. And rock music was definitely me, even if the look and the ability to play it was not me at all.
I'm nearly 50 years old, and a lot of my rock'n'roll heroes are in their 60s and 70s. A few are no longer living. Rock is no longer the cultural powerhouse that it was, though it would certainly be quite premature to say that 'rock is dead'. But I still listen to it, still love it, and find that I am more than ever animated by its spirit.
I am still angry, though I want to be angry only in the best way at only the right things. Injustice, hypocrisy, lies, and double-standards make me angry. I love truth to the point that I want to shout it out loud with the power of a Michael Sweet scream, or whisper it with the subtle power of a verbal bullet in a Bob Dylan lyric. I don't care about relevance, 'cool-ness', or being in tune with the times, but I care deeply about what is excellent, true, and praiseworthy and I'm vastly more interested in what lasts rather than what constantly changes. If that makes me a curmudgeon, a contrarian, or an 'anarchist' as my uncle has jokingly referred to my sternly independent nature, then so be it.
Reading the Scriptures, I find that same rock'n'roll spirit burning in the hearts of the prophets, apostles, some of the kings even, and numbers of the otherwise faceless faithful populating those pages spanning from Genesis to Revelation. Far from the devil having all the best tunes, I think the Holy Spirit is the one shakes, rattles, rolls, and hums behind the shattering sound of guitars, drums, vocals, and amplifiers.
Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his, good, pleasing, and perfect will.—Romans 12:2
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