Randy Stonehill

We interviewed Randy Stonehill at a show at Church on the Move in Tulsa Oklahoma, which is a mega-church in every sense of the word. Randy is by anyone’s definition a true pioneer of the genre of Christian Rock. Releasing his first album in 1971 Randy, went on to be one fo the most influential voices of his (Christian) generation. With that said all that I knew about Randy was that he was important and we should for sure include him in the doc. A quick trip to his Wikipedia entry confirmed this, not only did he release a Christian Rock album in 1971 it was financed by none other than Pat Boone?!?! But more on that later. Randy’s second album was engineered by Andy Johns, who had also worked with the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Who. Wow. Ottley was also really excited about Randy too, which meant something. Tim’s background is different from mine in that his tastes range more toward guitar driven pop, so I usually listen when he’s into something.

So we get there and set up and Randy just comes strolling in. Very friendly and outgoing and if I understand correctly something of an amateur comedian in the vein of Robin Williams or Jim Carey. The kind of guy who is on 10 all the time goes into impressions and “bits” at the drop of a hat. To use an “Almost Famous” term, it freaked me out. Since there was really no Christian Rock prior to Randy and Larry Norman my standard first question of “what was your first exposure to Christian rock” didn’t really apply so I asked him what were his thoughts going into his music career. He totally took it and ran. No kidding he talked for about 25 minutes straight and basically answered almost every on-deck question I had prepared to ask. He also mentioned that in the early days he had seen shows and hung out with The Doors, The Grateful Dead and the Mommas and the Poppas. Cool.

While all this is going on however, I started smelling something burning and realized that it was one of Ash’s lights. Now on the surface this is not out of the ordinary, Ash’s lights are like a zillion watts and often smell like they are getting a little bit hot. This time however to my horror it didn’t just get hot it actually started smoking. So there was smoke pouring in a steady stream just to Randy’s right, and it smelled like a volcano. So what to do? Ignore it of course and hope that it wouldn’t escalate into full on flames. I was totally sweating that at any second Randy would jump up walk out disgusted with the amaturish nature of our interview. Thankfully Randy was a total pro. Either this had happened to him many times before or he just didn’t care because he was really cool about it. Even when Ash went to attend to it, he kept focused on the camera and didn’t let it affect the interview.

Randy talked to us for around and hour and it was all good. I brought up the fact that he was actually an actor in the cult classic “Son of the Blob” and he said that I would have to be killed for knowing such information. When I asked about the Pat Boone story he said that he and Larry Norman had gotten a sit down with Pat at his home in the early 70s. When they arrived Pat was out by the pool and the two were seated in the living room to wait for him. For some reason Pat’s wife felt that the Boone children, including a very young Debbie, needed to be present for the meeting and they were called in. Randy said that they all walked in single file in order of age. Kind of surreal. He said that a short time later Pat walked in tanned to the hilt, wearing white shorts, deck shoes and a windbreaker, full-on Bing Crosby style.
I will never in my life ever be as cool as Pat Boone, I mean that.

He added that the kids seemed to be kind of weirded out by the whole thing. He said that their attitude was kind of like “Daddy who are these pirates in our living room?” speculating as to why there were two hippies in their house.

I guess the pitch must have worked out because Pat fronted them the money and the rest is history. Another interesting note, it’s kind of funny to hear these older guys relate the things that people had a problem with in the early days. We all know that the long hair was a major problem as was the high volume but Randy brought up a new one: patched jeans. He said that people absolutely flipped out that he wore patches on his jeans. This actually came up several times. Interesting.