ASFB and Mind Garage

Back when I was worked at the record department for the Harvard Coop in the 80s, the most popular contemporary Christian  musician was Amy Grant. So that's who people tended to mention when I told them that I was into Christian rock music.

Well, I liked Amy, and I had in fact been a buyer of her very first album when I lived in Sioux City, Iowa. But I always thought that it was unfortunate that people unfamiliar with Christian rock music thought only about relatively unadventurous musicians like Amy Grant when I would mention the phrase "Christian rock".

If one bought everything one could get one's hands on in terms of that genre (as I did), one would be made familiar with truly adventurous artists like Mind Garage (seen in this YouTube video and this one), the All Saved Freak Band, and others who were about as likely to show up in a standard secular record store as a professional kazoo act. Even Resurrection Band (a/k/a Rez) rocked with a ferocity unknown to fans of Amy Grant.

While typing this blog entry, I've been enjoying a recording by a band called the Sons of Thunder, from this web page. The band is from West Virginia, according to the band's web site. This is NOT the band of the same name which was based in Bethesda, Maryland. I think that they could have avoided confusion by calling themselves The NEW Sons of Thunder (the way Barry McGuire's group was named The New Christy Minstrels), since people interested in learning more about that older Christian rock band could get information without being diverted to sites for the Virginia band. But my main interest in the Maryland band comes from nostalgic memories, since they invited me down to their Maryland house after Randy Matthews had told me that they were looking for a keyboard player, after I had moved to Brocton, MA after graduating from high school in 1974. The Maryland band put on a cool concert featuring multimedia elements similar to those being used by a lot of psychedelic bands at the time. But I must admit, based on the audio and video recordings on the web site for the Virginia band, that they rock a lot harder than the Maryland band did. Check out the videos at this page.