(Photo courtesy of Bill Roberts)
Back to the summer of 1971. For reasons I was never clear on, I was on my first just-me-and-Dad trip that wasn’t to a church camp – it was to the town of Lincoln, Illinois, home of Lincoln Christian College, my Uncle Billy’s alma mater.
I don’t know what the event was, but it was sponsored by the college while being held in a local park, a beautiful park with a huge gazebo surrounded by endless shade trees. Hundreds of college students and local teenagers populated the park, crowded around the gazebo, where – wait for it! - rock bands were playing.
I’ve already made clear that rock music was verboten in our home. I was thrilled to see and hear a live rock band, but had the presence of mind not to appear as if I was, you know, enjoying it or anything. My discomfort was soon set aside, however, when I realized that I was hearing, for the first time, Christian rock.
Now, it’s 1971, and Contemporary Christian Music – a despicably inept, uninspired genre that I would one day both embrace and revile in print – was still a decade away. Most of the young people in that park were hearing it for the first time. But they were hearing it right: whatever this event was that my father had toted me a hundred miles to see was in festival format, with lots of bands.
I only remember two of them, though I believe there were many more: The Red Letter Edition (a name I felt was undeniably clever) and The Power & Light Company. It was the latter that really grabbed me.
More properly, it was Dixie Stuller and the Power & Light Company.
I couldn’t have had a more unusual introduction to Christian rock. Dixie and the PLC were an utterly unusual mix, a middle-aged woman with a Motown wail and four high school students. They were from Greenwood, Indiana, a town not that much larger than Lincoln, and they played like they’d been together for a decade.
While the Red Letter Edition had delivered some serviceable but unremarkable rock of generic bouquet, Dixie and her kids were all over the place. First and foremost, their set list showed off Dixie’s astounding voice, which sat just to the right of Aretha Franklin in sheer power, blowing through a high-octane whitening of the old gospel chant “Amen”, to which they added some improvisations of their own; they raided secular pop-rock shamelessly, with a Christianized version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday”, sung by keyboardist Bill Roberts and a similarly-modified revamp of John Lennon’s solo sing-along “Power to the People”, which came out “Power to Our Jesus”. They even super-charged the Sunday School chorus “This Little Light of Mine”, if you can imagine such a thing, turning it into a ferocious, unapologetic rocker. Their showstopper was a revised “United We Stand”, the then-popular anthem from Brotherhood of Man.
Besides Roberts, there was Lee Robison on guitar, Chuck Billingsly on guitar and bass, and Rhonda Fleming on drums – all of them under 18.
I was just blown away. This was the lifeline I needed! I could learn to play music that wasn’t 200 years old! I could play instruments other than the piano and organ, and I could do it without being excommunicated!
Dad noted my enthusiasm and promptly booked Dixie and her kids at our church in the fall. They did a Sunday evening concert, serving up the same songs, plus a couple of originals, one of which the guys in the band had written to each other called “Friends”. The highlight of the evening was when I got Lee and Chuck to sit down with me briefly, so I could show them that I’d worked out the chords to “United We Stand” from memory.
That night they were selling their debut album, which Dad bought me, and I proceeded to learn all the songs on guitar. The album included a song that Bill sang called “Jesus is a Soul Man”, an original (I think), and a cover duet of Glen Campbell’s “Less of Me” by Rhonda and Chuck (I think). There was also an original, the name of which I don’t remember, that was of stellar quality. The album closed out with Dixie at her most soulful, singing the classic hymn “I Need Thee Every Hour”.
The album vanished. I left it at church by mistake one weekend and never saw it again.
But I remembered every note. Twenty years to the week after that Lincoln concert-in-the-park, my own original Christian band, Frontier, appended “United We Stand” to an original song of mine, “Together”, which I wrote in tribute to that long-ago festival:
Hands raised up to heaven, as far as I could see,
The promise of tomorrow on our minds
Reaching toward forever, resolved to change the world
Ready for whatever we might find
Ten thousand voices, lifting high one holy name
We were Together, united in Jesus
We got older, but our striving didn’t end
When the fire that stirred our hearts had come and gone
The world grew colder, so many fell away
We huddled close, and carried on
The truth we held so long ago, the truth we hold today
And still we’re Together, united in Jesus
We never found what we were looking for,
We lost so much along the way
And there you found us, you turned our heads around
And we finally put our childish things away
And when our day is done, we’ll know we have not loved in vain
We’ll be Together, united in Jesus
We’ll be Together, united in Jesus
We’ll be Together...
And then we roared into “United We Stand”, the chords of which I rewrote as Boston-esque power rock. This track was the standout on Frontier’s album The Lion and the Lamb, 1992. The track won a Best Of original music award in Louisville in late 1991. Jeremy Marcum, the lead guitarist who plays the solos in both songs, hadn’t even been born in 1971.
It should be said that my memory of the event is somewhat exaggerated, as the lyric above makes clear. For one thing, 10,000 people would have been very nearly the entire population of Lincoln – but it made for a much more romantic line. I’ll stand by the rest of it, though, particularly that final line before the final verse.
I was in intermittent contact with Bill and Lee over the years. Dixie died of cancer, they told me, and I am friended to all the PLC surviving members on Facebook.
I am, of course, in a very different place today. And I still think most Christian music is goofy and derivative, and most Christian musicians even more so.
But I will never forget Dixie and the Power & Light Company. They opened a door for me that changed my world.
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