Facing the Music (11 page)

On the weekends, when I wasn't working in a church somewhere, I drove up from Pittsburg to Kansas City so I could hang out at my favorite venue, New Earth Coffeehouse. Hearing the kind of music that was being played there and chatting with different kinds of people, altered everything I thought I knew about what Christians were supposed to look and sound like. Preppies,
virgins, druggies, Baptists, Pentecostals, skeptics, rich, poor—it didn't matter. We came. Hundreds were packed in like sardines and got lost in the sounds of artists like Dakoda Motor Company, Over The Rhine, Waterdeep, Dime Store Prophets, and Sixpence None the Richer. There were many nights when I stood, pressed in among the crowd, and wondered if I would ever be cool enough, potent, or talented enough to play there.

The sounds and the lyrics that came from those musicians blew my mind. Their music and personalities seemed subversive compared to the light of the sanctuary. Heavily tattooed young men took the stage, cranked up their amps, and let it rip. Solo acoustic guitarists sat center stage and bared their souls so freely that we were compelled into reverent silence.

The artists that left us speechless were those that dared listeners and performers alike to be brave and honest about their true selves. Ska bands, rock bands, songwriters, and poets—all of them young and set free on the stage to tell the story of their journeys. It was different because they shared about their experience as Christians, the good and the bad, the believers and the cynics alike without fear of judgment against their imperfections. A wide path was given to all to explore and stumble, if need be, toward a spiritual experience that called and united us. We just were, and the art we shared was what came out of it.

I will never forget the first time I got a chance to play at New Earth. It might as well have been Carnegie Hall, such was the level of admiration for all I had seen and heard there. Before I had been one of the many silhouetted heads floating behind the spotlights, clapping and hungry for inspiration. Now, I was the one, exposed and center-stage, being called upon for greatness.

I had a half-hour set to fill and perhaps only four songs in
which I had any confidence. My knees shook like jelly. My hands cramped and sweated. Just me and my guitar, left alone in a room full of people who had never heard of me. Madness.

I don't remember playing the songs as much as I remember the rapid-fire thoughts that shot through my mind while I played.

Don't screw it up
.

What am I
doing
here? How did I get myself into this mess
?

Wow, this is so awesome!
I'm killing it  . . .! Oops
.

This song is so cheesy; they hate it. I
gotta
write something better
.

Is that an espresso? Man, I'd love an espresso right now.

Do they really like my songs that much or are they glad I'm finally finished. Is that good applause or bad? Oh, my God, what have I done? Thank God this is over.

My first gig there was a crucible of sorts. Resident pastor and founder of the little urban church/coffeehouse, Sheldon Kallevig, said I could give it a go but, in the end, it was the room that decided.

“There are no promises here. If they like you, you come back. If they don't, well . . .” He was candid, yet openhearted about it. He had the spirit of a man who wanted every contributor to succeed, but success wasn't necessarily about popularity at New Earth. The folks who came back tended to be those who tapped into the journeyman spirit of the community that was there. You could play any style you wanted to, talk as much or as little about Jesus as you needed, be holy or even a little unholy, but you had to come with an eye to love and making a way for others. Those coming to simply make a name for themselves or who just played for the sake of praise didn't seem to last long. At New Earth, you had to find a way to connect on an emotional level.

Through the blur of my first night, I must have done something right, because I ended up cutting my teeth in that coffeehouse. I think I played my first set there in 1994, and watched countless other artists perform, grow, fail, and succeed along the way. By 1996, I was in among them—an artist in my own right, headlining a few nights a year at New Earth and making fans that were urging me to continue.

eleven

L
ong before the Internet became the workhorse of the modern musician I was amassing a humble following. There was no digital social network. I didn't have a Web site. It was all about doing gigs, word of mouth, and miles of open road. And it was more than helpful if you had a CD.

The little
Circle Back
cassette tape Byron and I made did well for a while, but I was writing more music, outgrowing my older work, and gaining more regional fans familiar enough with me that they wanted to hear my latest work in the modern CD format. In between college classes and touring, Byron sat me down in the studio and helped me arrange and record my songs into a full-length project, titled
Wishing Well.

Recording your music means that your songs can go to places you've never been. Besides selling CDs at shows, you can pop them in the mail and send them to a deejay, to a college events planner, or even to a record label in hopes that someone will actually listen to it, like it, then offer you a deal that will change your life. I didn't know it, but
Wishing Well
would be a project that would change my life.

Over the course of a year I had sold over three thousand copies of that CD. During my fourth year of college, Byron sent CDs to every Christian label in the market. He'd even managed
to get a couple of well-known trade magazines to write reviews of my indie work.

From the early days of Captured, Byron had always had an unshakeable belief that I had what it takes to be a legitimate artist. I had been traveling along with the idea, enjoying getting to play, and loving that I was paying my bills doing something that I loved to do, but I figured the odds of making a lifelong career of it were long. However, by the spring of 1996, Byron started to get calls from Nashville.

For a while, it seemed as though Byron was fielding a steady stream of phone calls from CCM (contemporary Christian music) producers and A&R representatives. I didn't even know what an A&R guy was until Byron explained to me that it was short for artists and repertoire. (Those are the record company personnel in charge of discovering and signing new talent, along with managing the current roster of artists on the label.)

But, for all the phone calls, it didn't seem that I was what the big labels were looking for. There were only a few guitar-wielding chicks that I had ever heard of in CCM anyway, and I didn't look or sound anything like them. I was used to playing in grungy little Christian coffeehouses for college students. When I heard artists like Amy Grant, Twila Paris, and Sandi Patty, I thought there was no way that CCM would consider me. They seemed so clean cut. Me? I was a woman who grew up in the world. I had a dark past littered with sex and booze. I had a hard time imagining, despite my story of redemption, that I had been a Christian long enough to be considered trustworthy enough to be on a Christian label. I held out a little hope when I got hold of artists like Margaret Becker, Ashley Cleveland, or even Christine Dente of
Out of the Gray
. They wrote and sang like they'd actually lived out a few
hard, unholy years in their lives, but had they really? Anyway, who was I compared to them? They all seemed so shiny, spiritually certain and  . . . wearing
dresses!

At times, I could be crass and unpolished with my onstage delivery, enough that some people wondered if I was polite enough to have a career that relied on a predominantly conservative church audience.

I remember one day, when I was sound checking at a church before a concert, one of the fellows running the PA system came over to give me a hand in setting up.

He'd heard me described as a rock-and-roll chick, but was confused when I showed up with just my guitar.

“You got a band? Where's your band?” he asked, looking me and my guitar up and down as if we were somehow unprepared.

“Nope. It's just me.”

“Tracks? What about tracks then? Don't you have any cassette background tracks you're going to use? I gotta tape player wired to the system,” he offered, still baffled.

“Nope. It's just me.” I tried to keep my growing agitation to a minimum.

“Well, then, wha . . .who . . .?” Exasperated, he kept looking at me as if mystified at how I was to perform with no band and no backing tracks and only a guitar. I felt like I clearly wasn't the sweet little singing Christian girl he needed me to be. “Who do you play with then?”

I replied, “I play with myself.” I giggled aloud at what I had insinuated, but he didn't seem to notice. Again, for my own pleasure and to see if he would cotton on. “Yep. I
play
with my
self.
”

The young sound guy turned beet red and walked away, and that was the end of our preproduction conversation.

I could get away with that kind of thing in the underground scene, or at some out-of-the-way church somewhere, but on a CCM label?

Byron got quite a few calls, but I never seemed to make it past the initial phone call. Well-respected labels like Sparrow, Ardent, and Forefront came and went in a flash, and I started to figure that was pretty much the lay of the land. I'd have my fun traveling around for a few years while I finished school, but that would pretty much be the end of it. I couldn't have been more wrong.

At around that time, a group called DC Talk was revolutionizing the face of CCM rock music with their double-platinum, Grammy-winning album “Jesus
Freak
.
” To say this album was a game-changer in the world of Christian music is an understatement. They eclipsed the CCM marketplace and spilled out into the mainstream world. Christian kids were flipping out. Almost overnight, DC Talk made being a young Christian a cool thing. Teenagers and young adults finally had a soundtrack that helped legitimize their Christian cultural experience. Every track on that album channeled the rumbling teenage angst of the late nineties, familiar to fans of Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Pearl Jam. The dark, warm, electric throbbing manifested itself at live concerts, where, at last, a hormonally raging Christian kid could cut loose and mosh his brains out. For nearly a decade, the wave of DC Talk's “Jesus Freak” took the social stigma out of being Christian.

The driving force behind DC Talk's vision was Toby Mc­Keehan. Toby was one of the trio of front men for the group. Toby not only had a vision for what he hoped DC Talk could accomplish, but expanded his vision by starting his own label,
Gotee Records
.
Their early roster included a wide variety of acts. Among their early notable groups were R&B trio Out of Eden
,
grunge-rockers Johnny Q. Public
,
and the hip-hop duo GRITS.

They were a small company, with little staff and less money, but they were determined to offer music from Christian artists that reflected more of the faith culture than just middle-class, conservative, white folks who had grown up in the church. Toby and his crew had a heart for real people who had been through real life and wanted to offer more than clichéd music.

It was an electric ego boost when TobyMac called and said he'd listened to my old
Wishing Well
record and liked it. In April 1996, Gotee invited me to hang out with them at the Nashville Christian music event of the year, GMA (Gospel Music Association) Week. To go meant skipping a week of my college classes, but my grades were okay, so I decided that I could take the risk. It seemed ridiculous to pass up the opportunity to meet with a label that actually seemed interested in signing me.

When I got there, I met label president Joey Elwood and the small staff that worked in keeping Gotee up and running. The company attitude reminded me a little of the New Earth scene, with a bit more polish. Not too much, though. It seemed like a few of the people that worked there had lived a little, and I liked that.

The Gotee peeps took turns showing me Nashville and the behind-the-scenes world of the CCM industry. That week, I spent most of my time around the primary meeting place of the GMA crowd, the lobby of downtown Renaissance Hotel, and walking along Broadway, Nashville's Main Street.

Hanging out in the musically historic Nashville for the first
time thrilled me. Walking past the storied Ryman Auditorium, the birthplace of the Grand Ole Opry, where legends like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline reached out to the world over live radio broadcasts filled me with awe. It was exciting to walk past the Broadway honky-tonks at midday and hear the live music spilling into the streets! I wondered if the players in the bars played all day in the hopes that the Music Row record executives would stroll through the scene looking for the next untapped talent. Even the buskers on the street turned the sidewalks into stages. I wondered if every hopeful country singer and songwriter in the world had landed here, vowing to sing nonstop until their dreams came true. That I had been flown in by a record label added to my sense of how rare this occasion was.

During GMA week the Christian music industry filled the streets of downtown Nashville. The artists that were the face of CCM could be seen passing through the lobby of the Renaissance nearly every second. I tried not to freak out at how intimidating it felt being around all the signed artists. It was hard not to be when cameras were going off everywhere. Everyone who was anyone in CCM, at some point, had to pass through the revolving doors into the lobby, braving the bustling crowd filled with fans, media, and Christian retailers. Even if I wasn't a fan of all the artists that were walking around, the truth was, these were people who I could only dream of equaling in terms of success. Heads turned and bulbs flashed when artists like Stephen Curtis Chapman came through. The crowds parted and stilled like the waters of the Red Sea when gospel sensation Kirk Franklin and his entourage of glitter and gold thundered through the mob. In my
wildest dreams, I couldn't imagine how on earth I found myself in such a place.

One of the nights, Gotee was putting on a showcase concert with all their acts. Toby was interested in signing me, but few people in Nashville had ever heard me play. It was up to me, that night, to take the stage and prove that I could handle myself. I was terrified. It didn't matter that I had a hundred shows under my belt—compared to this crowd, I was a rookie to be sure.

Gotee had rented a vacant bar to serve as their venue for the week. On the night I was to play, it was packed with very serious fans buzzing about how excited they were that Johnny Q. was going to be rocking their faces off. The band had amps and drums and fans ready to mosh. I, on the other hand, was armed only with an acoustic guitar.

The crowd looked so cool that I felt out of place even in the audience. Backstage, the all-male Johnny Q
.
filled the room with their rock-star musk. I remember TobyMac calmly welcoming me into the green room while he casually picked at a box of sushi with a pair of chopsticks.

Sushi? Raw fish?
Who on earth—
I said to myself, completely grossed out. “Who would
ever
eat raw fish?

My subconscious answered me back in a jazz-cool voice, “Rock stars, babe. Rock stars eat sushi.”

What was I doing here? I was definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Before I knew it, Joey Elwood had taken the stage to introduce me. The buzzy room stopped for a moment, a few lazy hands smacked together when he announced my name, and then it was my stage.

All I could do was take a deep breath, close my eyes, and play my heart out. I couldn't be anybody other than who I was, so I had nothing to lose.

Thirty minutes later, I looked up and it was all over. I don't remember much about the applause in the room, just that I automatically did what I always do when I leave the stage. I reached to pull the cable from the end of my guitar, gave a little thank-you wave, and turned to get off stage without further embarrassment.

As I walked off, one of the girls who squished up into the barrier in front of the stage asked, “What's your name?”

“Jennifer,” I said off mic. “Hi!” I didn't know what else to do except smile and try to leave.

“No,” the girl returned, “What's your
name
on your
record?
”

“Oh, uh—” it felt strange introducing myself to someone with my full name, but she wanted it all, “Jennifer . . . Knapp.” Weird.

“Cool,” she said, “I'll be looking out for you!” I heard her say, as I walked off.

AFTER GMA WEEK
had ended, I returned back to Pittsburg for the last few weeks of the spring semester. I fought the remaining adrenaline and flattering buzz that still lingered, and tried to focus on the coming final exams when I got the call from Joey. Amazingly, Gotee wanted me on board and were offering me a five-record contract.

I was twenty-two, a new Christian with barely a dozen songs to my name, and I said yes.

I was still a semester or two away from completing my psychology degree, but it was going to have to wait. I finished my classes that spring in what would be my last term at Pittsburg State. I committed myself to being a full-time, signed, Christian recording artist.