We go to Calvary Chapel.”īorn in downtown Los Angeles, Girard first earned major attention as a singer in the mid-1960s L.A.
Girard, who recently published a memoir, “Rock & Roll Preacher,” recalls cruising the California coast to “pick up hitchhikers along Pacific Coast Highway to get free drugs because they’d be carrying a bag of weed or whatever.” On one such adventure, they ferried some fellow travelers who asked, “Hey man, do you guys know Jesus? We found Jesus. Operating under the belief that LSD should be free, they developed ritualized trips and distributed it and pretty much every other drug at a boutique called the Mystic Arts World. Laguna Beach, where many Calvary Chapel hippies were living, was haven to a bunch of acid-heads known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. “As a Christian, I now consider it a counterfeit experience, but it’s very real when you’re going through it.”Ĭalifornia was drenched with LSD in the late 1960s, and Orange County was no exception. “It opened up a bridge between the natural world and the spiritual world,” the Love Song singer-songwriter says by phone from his Nashville home. Like Lonnie Frisbee, Girard was unanchored and experimenting with drugs in the late 1960s. “LSD was sort of a life-changer for me,” says Chuck Girard. Smith says in “The Jesus Music.” “This thing called ‘Jesus Music,’ which exploded in Southern California, somehow found its way my hometown, and it changed my life.” “When I first heard that Maranatha record, I couldn’t get enough of it,” Christian singer Michael W. Fifty years later, “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert” is considered the Big Bang of contemporary Christian music - a collection of folk-inspired soft rock that, as it eased its way onto youth-group turntables across the country, cast a spell over Jesus-loving, mostly white baby boomers amid a generational shift. Released on Chuck Smith’s new Maranatha! Music label and costing about $4,000 to produce, the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies. There, during the same period Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Frank Zappa and the Byrds were becoming famous, a half-dozen Calvary Chapel bands united in 1971 to create “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.” Though “The Jesus Music” moves far beyond Costa Mesa to tackle issues of race, morality, sin and redemption, its opening canto beams light on a long-gone music community 50 miles south of Laurel Canyon. Just a bunch of hippie kids that experienced something and gathered in masses to sing their songs.” “There wasn’t really an industry or an agenda behind it.
“There’s just something so pure about where it all started,” says co-director Jon Erwin.
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