Yes, This Album Was Once Sold In Christian Bookstores. No, It Won’t Ever Be Again.

Plenty of folks, including Burnside on occasion, rail against the machinery of Christian music. There’s good reason to do so, since the Christian music industry at large has hardly been a catalyst for innovation and creativity.

But many of Burnside’s writers have also been deeply impacted by Christian music acts, both mainstream and underground. We’re hoping this feature will shed and unironic light on the songs and bands who’ve provided everything from prophetic voices to great hooks.

King’s X
Faith Hope Love
(Megaforce/Atlantic)

Like the Stones, like AC/DC, King’s X have a Sound.  You hear King’s X and there’s no question who it is.  Specifically, it’s the sound of early ‘70s power trio metal–Sabbath, Mountain, all that hoary stuff–sung either by Sly Stone in a Baptist church, or by a couple crystal-voiced white guys.  Usually the different voices play off one another, or join into complex harmonies that flesh out the power trio’s riffs.  When things are going great–as they were for five straight albums back in the ‘80s and ‘90s–all the songs are insanely catchy, and this is WHILE they’re playing around with song structure like Rush, and sounding heavier than anyone this side of Pantera.  There’s no band remotely like King’s X.

AND THESE GUYS ARE A CHRISTIAN BAND.

Sure, they deny it in interviews.  Yeah, they started on a metal subsidiary of Atlantic Records.  And, you know, it’s sometimes hard to tell what their songs are about.  But when their third album was A CONCEPT ALBUM ABOUT 1 CORINTHIANS 13, there was no room for doubt.  They printed the whole chapter right there in the liner notes!  If they weren’t a Christian band, what the hell were they?  (We asked seriously, timidly.)

Can you imagine the CCM community’s excitement when Faith Hope Love came out in 1990?  Can you imagine OUR excitement–13-year-old Christian kids who’d been turned on to the band by no less than James Dobson, through Focus on the Family’s boy magazine Breakaway–can you picture the joy and trepidation that accompanied this blast from the Christian rock netherworld of major label metal?  We dug Petra and Stryper, but King’s X sounded nothing like them.  We hadn’t heard of Adam Again or Daniel Amos–if we had, we might’ve thought they were Christian comedians–but King’s X didn’t sound anything like them, either.  Saturday nights we’d fall asleep listening to the local college radio show Crossroads, and then we’d talk about the songs Sunday morning or Monday in school.  Crossroads played nothing less hip than Michael W. Smith (admittedly a low bar), and they were playing four songs off FHL:

1. the nearly ten-minute title track, an ominous psychedelic freakout that layers a militaristic guitar mantra under weird Screwtape voices, whispering, “Listen to me very closely: there is more heaven than hell”;

2. the big hit single, “It’s Love” (#6 Mainstream Rock!), which has THREE great riffs, including a bizarre one during the chorus that sounds like a paddleball bouncing around, under soaring vocals;

3. the opening “We Are Finding Who We Are,” in which bassist/Sly-Stoney vocalist Doug Pinnick embodies a strutting philosopher, the kind of guy you might avoid on the street, spouting perfect lines like, “Forever is a mountain/ We’ve yet to climb/ Tears are a part/ Of what is yet to leave behind”;

4. and the six-minute “Moanjam,” the “Freebird” of psalms, basically a piledriving four-minute guitar solo over roaring bass and drums, bookended by Doug’s screaming.  During his solo, Ty Tabor shouts to the Lord with a bevy of cool effects, including something that sounds like a siren and something else that sounds like scraping tectonic plates.  All is God’s creation.  I used to not like this song so much; now it chokes me up.

FHL is constantly called THE GREATEST ALBUM EVER MADE, if only by me, which may explain why people no longer speak to me.  10 years ago, trying to get to the bottom of it, I wrote, “This shit is the absolute fusion of black/white, art/funk, jamming/pop, ego/humility, Christian/secular, East/West, melody/harmony/rhythm, Father/Son/Holy Ghost, Faith/Hope/Love, any other di- or trichotomy that you can imagine.”  If you figure out what I meant, please let me know.  In the meantime, you should know it’s not just me.  Rock icons like Ritchie Blackmore (Rainbow) and Leslie West (Mountain) hail King’s X; reviewers like Rolling Stone and Martin Popoff love FHL.  CCM calls it “the 52nd Greatest Album in Christian Music,” and how many other albums have that distinction?  Even Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra still play, as a commercial bumper, the unpredictable stop-start riff from “We Were Born To Be Loved.”  And Ty’s drop-D tuning gave birth to grunge!  (Should’ve quit while I was ahead.)

So King’s X are exemplary.  Perhaps they most exemplify the old adage, “Unless your name is Prince in the ‘80s, you need a producer.”  King’s X fell off in the late ‘90s, after they signed to Metal Blade and could no longer afford such luxuries.  But their producer for FHL was unofficial fourth member Sam Taylor.  Taylor’s previous music industry job was “video coordinator” for ZZ Top’s Eliminator album, which automatically makes him one of the most noteworthy holders of that title EVER.  When he hooked up with King’s X as their manager-and-more, he named the band, got them their record deal, started Ty and drummer Jerry Gaskill singing their trademark harmonies, and, in his words, “gave King’s X a license to be true to themselves.”

Whatever Taylor did, it worked.  He and the band parted, under some tension,  after four albums–a four-album run equal to that of any other band, except maybe Led Zeppelin.  Throw in album #5, the Brendan O’Brien-produced Dogman, and the run is even more impressive.  So it’s ironic that once they started producing their own lackluster albums, King’s X somehow became less “true to themselves.”  (Thankfully the boys are now being produced by Michael Wagener (Extreme) on InsideOut, a prog label, and they sound far better for it.)

This just shows that making great music is only tangentially related to being “true to yourself.”  Like most aspects of music, the idea that musicians are being “true to themselves” is an illusion.  Closer to the truth is that great music presents the best parts of its musicians, and leaves all the clever crap on the cutting room floor.  That’s why bands need producers like actors need directors, like writers need editors and scriptures need redactors.  If artists don’t hear any outside input, they start putting out albums like 2000’s Please Come Home… Mr. Bulbous.  (Though I still won’t sell you my copy.)

More wisdom from 2000 me:  “[FHL] is utterly seamless–they do all this different stuff, and pull it all off, and it’s all like the multitextured landscape of your dreams, every inch sprouting some new surprise, but they never hit you over the head with what they’re doing–it’s never ‘Let’s morph into a bad country song here!’ (Sting) or ‘Looky here!  A waltz!’ (Peter Gabriel, Pere Ubu, everyone).  Even this sludgy ‘Talk To You’ Sabbath riff I greet like an old friend and hum in the shower.”  Even the weird tune about hexalingual parrots and librarian contract killers sounds like Pop Song of the Year.  Whatever managerial problems went down behind the scenes, recorded King’s X sounded like they could get away with anything.

Including an anti-abortion song!  FHL’s final song, “Legal Kill,” serves as a lovely coda to the epic bombast that’s preceded it.  It’s a gentle acoustic number sung by Ty (Doug and Jerry didn’t much care for the song), spruced up with cello and recorder, decrying abortion in unequivocal but humble terms.  In 1990 as today, the abortion debate raged.  Two years earlier during the presidential campaign, my 6th grade teacher had bravely warned us to take the heated political rhetoric with a grain of salt, emphasizing that “no candidate wants to kill babies.”  While I was squarely on the pro-life side, Ty’s admission, “There are two ways to be/ And truth does not depend on me,” came like a breath of fresh air.  Also moving was the line, “I have trouble with the persons with the signs/ But I feel the need to make my own.”  I felt the same way, even though I’d held a sign in the not-too-distant past.  Ty’s pro-life song insisted that abortion is a sadness, not a fight, even if “the fight for life is always real.”  I don’t know how well art can instruct–if anything, it can teach us about aspects of ourselves that would otherwise remain buried.  And what I learn from “Legal Kill” is that I will not belong to a movement that prioritizes anger and “being right” over sadness and humanity.  You can debate whether there are only “two ways to be,” but there are infinite ways to act, and us-vs.-them political action is only one way out of infinity.  We just need to creatively find the other ways.

There’s a wideness in this music, just as there is in St. Paul’s famous chapter 13.  Over 13 songs (hmmm, just noticed that…), King’s X cram in as much praise, thunder, weirdness, emotion, and hooks–as much of the world–as they possibly can.  Of course, nobody can get the whole world onto an album–most people are lucky to get a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.  But on Faith Hope Love, King’s X create that illusion like nobody else.