I remember where I was when I
heard the news.
I was in my work truck, driving
to a small job with my best friend. I had the local Christian radio station on
and word had just come out of Illinois. Details were sketchy but the one thing
they knew for sure was that we had lost Rich Mullins.
My heart broke. It breaks even
now, twenty years later, to the very day. I was a huge fan, but even more, I
had a connection to Rich that made this personal. One of my dearest friends was
an original “Ragamuffin,” and was one of Rich’s closest comrades.
My thoughts immediately went to
Rick, and to the other Rags I had gotten to know through him. Mark, Jimmy,
Aaron… an All-Star band; assembled to create one of the greatest, most
lyrically and musically perfect albums Christian Music has ever seen. Suddenly
their friend was gone, and the world –at least the world that knew Rich’s music
and felt its’ touch- was never going to be the same.
I stopped at a pay phone (no cell
phones at the time) and called my friend Rick in Nashville. I had met Rick
Elias at a concert in 1992 and we became instant friends. That same year, Rich,
already a friend, asked him to join what he envisioned as a talent-laden group
of Christian musicians, for the purpose of creating a landmark album that he
had been working on, inspired in part, by his reading of Brennan Manning’s “The
Ragamuffin Gospel.” The band took their name from this book and the album
became “A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band.” You can argue about where
it falls in the pantheon of Christian music, but nobody would place it outside
the top five. To this day, twenty-four years after its release, it is still the
benchmark for what Christian Music can be when the songwriter is knowledgeable,
talented, and not trying to fire off yet another album full of brain-dead,
lyrically-vapid, “praise and worship” music. The album was beautiful. It was
complete. It was seamless. To quote William Gaines in “Pumping Iron” when
describing Arnold Schwarzenegger…it was “as finished as a G__ D____ apple!”
Lyrically it was a miracle.
Musically it was a triumph. It was perfect.
I thought immediately of Rick and
his friendship with Mullins. My only encounter with Rich came during a phone
call to Rick’s house. They were sitting at his kitchen table discussing some
charts with Jimmy Abegg when I called to discuss a concert Rick was playing at
my home church in Delaware. “Hey man…just calling to finalize your hotel accommodations
and flight info.” I said. Rick was his typical California cool self, “Hey
brother, I’m just sitting here in the kitchen with Mullins and Abegg, we’re
finishing up these charts for the tour…”
Just sitting here with Mullins
and Abegg. For those of you not familiar with Christian Music of the Golden
era, this was like saying “Hey man, I’m just sitting here with Bono and Mark
Knopfler…”
I kept the call brief and hung
up. I remember saying something stupid like; “Tell Rich I said hello!” Whether
Rick did this or not I have no idea, but I can’t imagine why he would. I was
nobody. But then again, that was the charm of Mullins. He was nobody too. He
was no diva. He was humble. He was entirely removed from the pomposity and
arrogance that permeates the current crop of Christian artists we have now.
People who just don’t get the truth that nobody has really ever heard of them.
Not really. Not in the way secular artists are known. They parade around as if
they are someone. As if having a record deal on a Christian label is anything
more than just a cut above having your record produced by “Uncle Bob” from “That
Thing You Do!” Rich Mullins was probably the most talented artist to ever write
Christian music, and he carried himself as if he were some shmo at an open mic
night in Smallville.
So, I dialed the number and as I
expected, nobody answered. I knew Rick was awake. I also knew he would be in no
mood to talk or take inane phone calls from well-meaning friends. So, I left
him a message on his voicemail. I told him I’d just heard the news. I told him
I was sorry for the loss of his dear friend. I told him I would be praying for
him –which all Christians say to each other and somehow, has lost its power
among us- and I told him I loved him. My voice broke when I got to that part.
It broke because it was, and is, true, and because I loved my friend, I instinctively
knew how his heart was broken. Rick Elias is a tough hombre, but if you make it
into his circle of friends, he loves you deeply. You’ll have your moments of disagreement
as all friends do. But Rick clutches his friends to his chest as treasures and
I knew he was in more pain than he would ever be able to express to me…so
a conversation would have proven empty anyway.
I hung up before the operator
asked me for some more quarters and I walked slowly to my truck. I’d expressed
my love to the mutual friend I’d had with Rich, now it was my turn to deal with
this. I got in my truck and broke down. I was thinking about all the moments
when his music poured out of my heart.
I was skiing in Vermont in
February 1994. The Ragamuffin album was only a few months old. I’d played the
thing so often that I had memorized literally every sound it rendered. My
family and I were skiing a nature trail; a long, ambling trail through miles of
forest. Not very challenging but full of incredible views. We rounded a curve
on the trail and I glanced to my left and saw enormous oaks, barren from the
snowfall, with their branches all reaching toward the sky…like giant sinewy
arms grasping at Heaven. Instantly a line from one of Rich’s songs came to
mind. It’s from “The Color Green” it says;
“And the wrens have returned, and they’re
nesting. In the hollow of that oak, where his heart once had been. And he lifts
up his arms in a blessing. For being born again.”
I saw those oaks living out the
words from Rich’s song and my eyes flooded with tears. I glided through the
Vermont mountainside, singing those words and raising my own arms in a blessing
for being born-again in that moment.
In years that followed, it was
Rich’s music more than any other Christian artist, who got me through the hard
times that befall a man of my heritage. When I was dating my wife, it was “The
River” from “The World as Best I Remember It Vol 1” that put my longing,
passionate heart to music. When we married, her processional was the opening
Hammered Dulcimer solo from “Calling Out Your Name” When we divorced…it was “We Are Not
As Strong As We Think We Are” and when those long nights of homelessness would
not yield to sleep…it was “Hold Me Jesus.”
Rich’s music was painfully
honest, in ways that endeared him to real human beings. And it was supremely
talent driven. I have not listened to Christian music since he died, save for
the albums my friend Rick put out occasionally in the years after. I can’t.
Current Christian artists are empty. Their songs are just one long, empty
continuation of every other song on Christian radio. They write formulaic
lyrics. They are driven by cash. They can deny this all they want, but not one
of them stands apart from the others. They hear a song on the radio and set out
to duplicate it as fast as they can to cash in before the trend changes again. They
spend their time trying to get a record deal and have themselves added to a
tour. Rich honed his craft by throwing his gear in the bed of a 1965 Chevy
pickup truck and hitting the road with no-one but his best friend Beaker.
These new breed hit clothing boutiques and
consult style coaches where Rich spent his last four years living six months
each year on a Hopi reservation, teaching music therapy to Native American
children. They’re pretenders, this current brood. They aren’t worthy of lifting
the cover of Rich’s keyboard, and the sad thing…most of them couldn’t name
three of his songs.
The last time I saw him was at a
concert he played in Nashville in 1994. The Ragamuffin Band had been on the
road for a lengthy tour in support of “Brother’s Keeper” an album Rich hated
but served the purpose of getting him out of his record deal. (Something he
wanted ever since Reunion was purchased by Provident Music)
The show was a masterwork. Those
were some of my friends on stage and I felt their triumph. Two years later, he
was gone.
Rick Elias has shared so many
wonderful stories with me about Mullins. Always at a time when I think he was
missing his friend and needed to share thoughts with those who truly got Rich,
and weren’t just the average, not-musically-astute Christian music fans. We
would talk about the story behind the lyrics Rich wrote. The humanity. The
truth. The reckless way Rich wrote about pain in an industry that refuses to
let its worker-bees discuss the topic. Rich’s friends sure loved him. In as much
as I could, I loved him too. I knew him only vicariously through my association
with some of his inner circle.
Five years after his passing, I
was living in Nashville. Brian Mason, a Christian Radio legend, put together a
memorial show featuring the Rags. They would play a song or two and then
someone would tell a Rich story. Somewhere toward the end, the great Phil
Keaggy –himself a legend in music- had this to say about Rich Mullins:
“Rich was the most ‘One-foot-in-the-grave-and-one-foot-in-Heaven’
person I’d ever met. He truly didn’t fit here. I think Rich knew this, and it
was what drove the greatness and the longing in all of his songs.”
I am 54 now and sometimes I think
of that quote and wonder if in my own way…it doesn’t apply to me as well. I
wonder where I fit. I wonder –even now in my fifth decade- where my home is.
Rich seemed to always feel that way.
In the twenty years since that awful,
fateful morning, my music collection –once burgeoning- has shrunk. The voice
that gave me songs I cannot stop singing has not sung them in years. At least
not in a venue where I can hear him.
He is home. Home where it seems
he always wanted to be anyway. And we who loved his gifts, and those who loved
him personally are still, twenty years down that road, trying our best to fill
the void.
The peace we have, if we have it
at all, is knowing that we will sing with him again one day. But for now, we
still weep.
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