And we’ve been writing these songs, I wonder if the pastor would let us play.’” “We thought, ‘Wow, cool, this guy looks like Jesus. “Almost every night, we were going to Calvary, and now we were seeing the hippie preacher on the platform,” Girard says. There was a hippie guy there named Lonnie Frisbee, who became very popular as a speaker at Calvary, but I got Chuck Smith instead, a 42-year-old balding straight guy.”Įven with an establishment-looking preacher in the pulpit, Girard says the night affected him powerfully, and soon he joined the other so-called Jesus Freaks at Calvary Chapel almost every night.Īfter he and his housemates in South Laguna Beach started writing songs that sounded like the music on the radio but with lyrics that reflected their religious awakening, Girard says they asked Smith if they could perform them in the church. I actually went to see the hippie preacher. “It was quite different from what I’d ever experienced before. “So this was the first time to revisit Christianity in a number of years,” he says. “I went up one night just to see what it was because I’d had a negative religious experience when I was younger, and I rejected things when I was about 15 and went off into the music world,” Girard says by phone from his home in Tennessee. And hitchhikers he met on Pacific Coast Highway told him that at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa he could find it in the teachings of Jesus. “The Jesus Music” begins in Southern California, which the film and history view as an epicenter for a religious youth movement bubbling up in places all over the country.Ĭhuck Girard, who is featured in the documentary as one of the originators of contemporary Christian music, had already had a successful vocal group, the Castells, as a teenager, and later a pop hit with the Hondells and “Little Honda.”īut by the end of the ’60s, after exploring life as an LSD-taking, truth-seeking hippie, Girard was ready for something else, he says. “And it’s inspiring and entertaining beyond my love of the music.” Long hair and the Lord “That’s really inspiring to me,” he says. “They didn’t even know that they were really pioneering anything, they were just sharing their songs with the world. “It’s an inspiring story to see how a group of people sort of willed their voice into the world and created an industry, and did it unwittingly,” Jon Erwin says. The documentary then follows the growth of Christian contemporary music from its difficult adolescence - many older worshipers fought to keep church music traditional - to the huge success across many musical genres of Christian artists and albums today.
It’s a story that starts with the rise of the Jesus Freaks, the long-haired hippies of the ’60s who brought modern music to Christian songwriting as the ’70s began. “The Jesus Music,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, is the documentary that resulted. “Next thing we know, we’ve got 300 hours of interviews with over 100 artists, and we’ve got to figure out, OK, what is this story we want to tell?”
“The doors kind of got blown off at that point where everybody else said, ‘We want to be a part of it.’
“And they said not only is it interesting but we want to produce that with you guys,” Erwin continues. Smith, two of the biggest stars in Christian contemporary music, and artists who’d launched the brothers’ careers when they hired the then-unknown duo to make their music videos. They reached out first to Amy Grant and Michael W. ‘The Jesus Music’ explores Christian contemporary music’s California origins and beyond
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