In the summer of 1975, during our first cross-country tour, we heard from our contacts in Canton, Ohio, that the week of meetings had been cancelled. I told them we had no choice but to pass through Ohio since our itinerary took us further east the following weeks. If nothing else we would have to sit out the days. When we got to Ohio I managed to book a couple of small last-minute meetings, but otherwise we just sat around in these people’s nice home watching the clock tick. A framed sign next to the clock said simply, “Do the next thing.” That motto has stayed with me to this day, a very useful bit of obvious advice. Not able to sit still, I went down to the basement piano and wrote a musical for children based on an idea that my wife had when she directed a Sunday School Christmas program with puppets the year before. I figured maybe we could use the musical if we ever went back into local church work.
That fall, back in southern California, I did some transcription for a friend who wrote children’s songs and I played part of my new musical for her. She liked it and told me that she had heard that Manna Music, the respected gospel publisher, was looking for a new children’s musical for Christmas, and she gave them a call. Carl Farrer invited me in to play it, so I drove to Burbank with my penciled manuscript and a prayer.
I was a little nervous when I sat down at the piano at Manna Music. As I was halfway through the introduction to the first song, Carl grabbed my arm and said, “Stop. Don’t play any more.” He took a deep breath and said, “I can tell you right now that we will publish this musical.”
“But you haven’t heard anything,” I said.
“I’ve heard enough to promise that even though [owner of the company] Hal Spencer hasn’t heard this yet, he will love it, and this will be a hit for us.” I was stunned. “Now go ahead. Let’s hear the whole thing.” Carl was the first person to hear it all the way through, and ever since that quiet morning with just the two of us at the piano, he and I have been close friends. We have drifted apart, of course, since my deconversion to atheism in the 1980s—different circles—but we have never lost that connection, and talk on the phone from time to time. In November 2007 I visited the 80-something Carl at his home in Austin, Texas, and it was as if no time had passed. Some friendships are truly transcendent.
I came back to Manna Music a couple days later and played the musical for Hal Spencer and other staff. They all loved it! “We have been searching for a new Christmas musical for children,” Hal said, “and you walk in the door and hand it to us. This is an answer to our prayers.” They made few suggestions, no real edits, and in 1976
Mary Had a Little Lamb
was published and recorded. (Get it? Mary was the mother of Jesus and Jesus was the Lamb of God.) It was Manna’s bestseller for a couple of years, and it remained near the top of the list for many years. I’m still getting royalties from that musical to this day.
Suddenly, I was a published composer. This gave my ministry a broader scope. I wrote a sequel, an Easter musical called
His Fleece Was White as Snow
, as well as some additional songs, and started getting invitations to appear in churches as a national Christian songwriter. The musicals were performed by churches and Christian schools, and are still being presented to a lesser degree decades later.
Mary Had a Little Lamb
was translated into Spanish and German, and has been performed around the world at Christmas. At a Christian Booksellers Association convention, Hal introduced me to Dale Evans (wife of Roy Rogers) who told me that her grandchildren loved
Mary Had a Little Lamb
.
The second musical,
His Fleece Was White as Snow
, is based on the fact that Jewish law required an offering of an unblemished animal, and that Jesus was supposedly the final, sinless Passover sacrifice. Although I have always been happy with the artistic quality of this work (which includes a flamenco I still play), the lyrics and the story now embarrass me. I actually kill off the star of the show, a cute, unspotted lamb named Snowy!
A couple of years later I started working on a third musical for Manna Music,
Everywhere That Mary Went
, that was based on the handful of New Testament references to the mother of Jesus, noticing that her appearances in the story always point to her son’s ministry—a not-so-subtle rebuke to Catholics. I did not finish that work before my views started to change, so the world was spared those great insights.
I was once invited to a church in East Los Angeles to be guest conductor of
Mary Had a Little Lamb
. Instead of using children, this congregation used the adult choir. Its members dressed up like camels, sheep, pigs and donkeys, and it was quite amusing. But what I remember most was the huge painted sign hanging above the pulpit saying “Jesus Is Coming Soon!” The sign needed to be repainted and cleaned, and I saw cobwebs around the back. I now wish I had had a camera! Of course, at the time I thought the message of the sign was right-on, and the irony of the cobwebs was tucked in the back of my mind.
One of my adult octavos published by Manna Music, “There is One,” was sung by Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power choir on national television, though as a street evangelist renouncing wealth, I didn’t think much of Schuller’s glitzy Christianity. I was still involved with Manuel Bonilla, who preached and sang to the common people, and with many of the California Hispanic churches, which were not wealthy.
With my new contacts in the recording industry I was able to produce, arrange and play piano on at least a dozen more of Manuel’s albums, including some innovative children’s records in Spanish that became immensely popular. (If you happen to spot one of Manuel Bonilla’s animated children’s videos on the Internet, you will know that those are my arrangements and that I played piano and directed the kids’ choir.) We were able to hire top-rate Hollywood studio musicians, including my regular drummer and percussionist Fred Petry (a busy studio player who had toured with Stan Kenton) and guitarist Grant Geissman. Since I spoke Spanish and identified with Manuel’s life and ministry, I became a good interface with the Los Angeles recording industry for those projects. On subsequent trips to Mexico we would hear the people singing the arrangements exactly as we had recorded them, which they had learned from the radio. One of the songs Manuel and I co-wrote is a beguine called “No Vengo Del Mono” (translated, that means “I don’t come from a monkey”), mocking evolution. Another song I produced for Manuel, with a college-age choir in the background, was “Pronto, Sí Muy Pronto, Veremos Al Señor” (“Soon and Very Soon, We Will See the Lord”), which truly expressed our end-time expectations.
Besides working in evangelism, as a preacher or as an invited Christian songwriter, I made a supplemental income with record production in the Los Angeles area for various clients, mostly Christian, in addition to Manuel Bonilla. I never produced any big-time albums, but I did work on a lot of “B” projects: a pastor and wife singing duets, a junior high school choir going on tour, songwriters needing demos or records for their touring ministry, various Christian vocalists in English and Spanish who needed music to sell at their rallies and services, and literally hundreds of children’s songs for Christian publishing companies and curriculum houses. I once did a marathon recording session of more than 100 songs in one week for Gospel Light Publications, a leading publisher of Sunday School and Vacation Bible School (VBS) curriculums. (At the end of that fun but grueling week, Fred Petry quipped, “I hate to play 128 songs and run, but I have to go now.”)
I wrote much of the music and produced many of the early recordings for Joy Berry’s company, Living Skills Press, which then was connected with the educational division of Word Books, the largest Christian publisher. Some of the character singing on Joy’s albums was done by Hal Smith, the voice actor who played Otis on
The Andy Griffith Show
and who did Goofy for Disney and the Owl in
Winnie the Pooh
. (He was a genuine pleasure to work with, though I have no idea what his religious views were.) Word published a collection of my religious children’s songs written for Joy’s
Ready, Set, Grow!
series of books, with accompanying music that I produced for them. I played piano with Paul Mickelson, Billy Graham’s organist, on a piano/organ album of Christian hymns. I produced a Christian aerobic exercise album called
Body and Soul
, with some of
The Lawrence Welk Show
singers performing disco arrangements of well-known hymns such as “Leaning On The Everlasting Arms.” (That was hilarious!) I got to hire Thurl Ravenscroft (the voice of Tony the Tiger), who sang a very deep bass line for the
High On Christmas
album I arranged and produced in a pop style for Parade Records in the early 80s.
I worked in more than a dozen studios in Hollywood and southern California. I didn’t pretend to be the best producer in town, but I was dependable, sincere, on schedule, never over budget and I communicated well with the religious clients. I was also cheap. I sometimes proudly worked for nothing, happy to be a part of the cause. I actually lost money on the
High on Christmas
project, due to a sloppy contractual agreement, and had to borrow money to pay off the debts. I figured that recording Christian music was part of my evangelistic calling, since it was spreading the word through music. In retrospect, I now realize that if I hadn’t been such a blinkered believer, if I hadn’t been convinced that Jesus was coming back “any day now,” I might have had a decent career as a music producer, doing something I was good at and loved. I now know it was negligent, as a parent of young children, to sell myself so cheaply, allowing the clients to reap the profits while my family very often struggled to eat. But like the idealistic starving holder of a lottery ticket who is waiting for news from the sweepstakes office, I knew Jesus was coming soon to take us all to heaven.
I played the piano for Pat Boone in 1972 to a crowd of more than 10,000 in Phoenix. We met briefly backstage—yes, he was wearing white patent-leather shoes—where we talked over some tunes, keys and tempos, and then I sat at a grand piano beside him on stage as he talked about Jesus and sang Christian songs.
Jimmy Roberts (of
The Lawrence Welk Show
) used me as his accompanist on a two-week cross-country tour in the early 1970s. I played in a Christian rock band called Mobetta for many years, performing mainly at public high-school assemblies in gymnasiums with horrible acoustics. For about 10 years, starting in college, I directed a singing group called The King’s Children, ministering in southern California churches, and also served a very brief term as musical host for Dr. Gene Scott’s TV show on Channel 30 in Glendale. It was for The King’s Children that I wrote my first song: “I’m Tellin’ the Whole Wide World About Jesus.”
I sometimes took a team of ministry to the Union Rescue Mission in the skid row section of Los Angeles, preaching to the winos and other down-and-outers who wanted something to eat and a place to sleep but had to sit through a religious service first. We would sing our gospel songs and one of us would preach, looking out at the rows of unshaven, bored, hungover and sleeping men who were forced to endure our wisdom before the doors to the dining room were opened. We truly thought we were helping these men, offering them hope in place of despair. Once in a while one of them would shout “Amen!” but that might have meant “enough” instead of “bravo.”
For several years I wrote and produced Gospel Light’s VBS Mini-Musicales, short, easy-to-perform cantatas with three or four songs. Gospel Light Publications is one of the leading Sunday School and children’s curriculum publishers in the world. I enjoyed working with Christian outreach groups, children’s ministries, singers, publishers, missionaries, evangelists—anyone who was doing the work of the Lord. This was not a career for me. It was a ministry.
I used to think that everything that happened to me had a spiritual significance. If I was looking for a parking space and a car pulled out of a space right near where I wanted to be, then I would say, “Thank you, Jesus, for giving me a place to park.” If I had to park six blocks away, I would say, “Thank you, Jesus, for teaching me patience.” The bible says “All things work together for good to them that love God.” I viewed all income as an undeserved gift from heaven. I tried to interpret every news event as fitting into God’s plan for the world. If something bad happened then I would say, “There is the price for evil.” If something good happened then I would say, “There is a sign of God’s blessing.” Any news from the Middle East was a sign that God was focusing attention on the site of the arena for the last days, which was just around the corner. Nothing in my life was accidental. Every occurrence was a lesson to be learned, or a part of divine purpose, or a temptation from the Devil. Behind the visible world was a very real spiritual world inhabited by angels, demons, spirits and saints, all fighting to win my soul and demolish the other side. As you might imagine, this made my life very interesting.
One day I was driving home through the foothills east of Modesto, California. I was thinking about my ministry and praying that God would teach me how to follow his direction. I really wanted to obey God, to be a faithful servant, and to recognize His “true voice” in my spiritual ear. As I was traveling down the highway I “heard” my mind say, “Turn right.” I figured this had to be the voice of God, and if I was ever to learn how to obey I had better do what I was told. I turned right. The little road led off into farmland and I just kept driving, waiting for another signal. After a while I heard the voice again: “Turn left.” So I turned left. This kept up, turning here and there, and I was beginning to feel excited about what God might have in store for me when I got to wherever he was leading me. Maybe, I thought, there would be some lost, godless person who was desperate to hear the gospel. Or, maybe I would find a generous donor to my ministry.