Brainstorm Digest

When the Southern California group Daniel Amos are spoken about amongst fans of Christian Music, it’s often done so reverentially. There’s a reason for this. It’s not just the music that they made – a sprawling discography that hopscotches from alt-country to herky-jerk new wave to Elephant 6 psychedelia and back again  – it’s the way that they did it. Like many of the groups this site has covered – The 77’s, the Altar Boys, Undercover – Daniel Amos began within the sheltering arms of the hippie-populated Calvary Chapel movement. But unlike those bands, Daniel Amos’s early records were designed with adults in mind. Immaculately assembled California country albums, Daniel Amos and Shotgun Angel landed somewhere between the Eagles and Sky Blue Sky-era Wilco, easy-listening for the newly converted with punchlines and pedal steel galore (those records tend to get a bad rap amongst Daniel Amos fans – for a brief period in the ‘90s, the band all but disowned them – but taken for what they are, they’re both respectable AM radio efforts). The band was an immediate hit, packing out the Sunday evening Calvary Chapel service, the hippie-Christian equivalent of headlining Woodstock. At the peak of their powers, young Daniel Amos were playing for several thousand longhaired believers every week underneath the church’s outdoor tent. They performed a showcase for Curb Records executives who’d caught wind of the band’s buzz, and if they weren’t quite poised to edge their way out of Christian music entirely, they at least stood to be one of its most successful bands.

And then they gave it all up. A series of record label entanglements transpired in the late ‘70s (most notably, with Larry Norman’s Solid Rock Records) that I’m going to skip over here but, as always, refer you to John J. Thompson’s Raised by Wolves for the full story. For most record buyers, 1977’s smooth-and-breezy Shotgun Angel was followed by 1981’s Alarma! a nervous collection of weirdo new wave on which frontman Terry Scott Taylor swapped his California croon for a panicked yelp and the guitars pricked and wobbled. The net effect on their audience would be like if your father went to the record store to buy Hotel California, but the plant accidentally pressed David Bowie’s Lodger into the vinyl instead. And this was no mistake – Daniel Amos pulled a deliberate musical about-face, taking a long, hard look at their bank balances and their upward trajectory and the tentful of enthusiastic fans and deciding, “Nah, we’d rather do this instead.”