The "Eve Of Destruction" man BARRY MCGUIRE has been singing for close to 50 years. He spoke at length to Mike Rimmer.

In these days when the Christian music scene openly embraces and celebrates any artist who has a modicum of mainstream success when they become a Christian and longs to see them record Christian music, Barry McGuire wasn't convinced he should still be doing music after he'd embraced Christ. "When I first surrendered to Christ I stopped everything. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, I just knew what I was doing wasn't it so I just hung it up and didn't do anything. I just read the Scriptures. I read the story of Jesus; how he treated people, what he had to say. And then gradually about, I don't know, five or six months later, a song would come up out of my relationship with Christ. Some of the first songs I wrote were 'Anyone But Jesus' - 'Not gonna think about, talk about, anyone but Jesus. . .' - and "Love Is" - 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, all thy mind always and love thy neighbour as thyself.' And that is the fullness of the Law and the prophets. That's all we have to do; love God with all our heart and love thy neighbour as yourself. That's it! Bottom line! End of story!"

In 1973, McGuire recorded a seminal album for Word's fledgling Myrrh label, 'Seeds'. McGuire is self-effacing about the album saying, "It was just a bunch of songs that talked about my new discovered relationship with Christ and reality. I had a bunch of songs. I met this fella named Buck Herring. Buck was an old rock and roll DJ who had surrendered to Christ, and his wife, Annie Herring, was a great songwriter and singer and she had a younger brother and sister and the three of them would sing together in the living room and she would play the piano. So they'd sing me their songs and I'd sing mine. Buck said, 'We ought to record these.' So we went in and recorded the songs and they sang background vocals."

In 1975 Myrrh released McGuire's 'Lighten Up' album. On it Barry re-recorded "Eve Of Destruction" for part of a trilogy that he had previewed in front of 250,000 people at the Explo '72 festival. The suite of songs merged Sloan's protest lyric with two of McGuire's own songs which insist that a) America's problems are not God's fault but the consequence of her own sing ("Don't Blame God") and b) God will in fact heal the country if people repent and pray ("II Chronicles 7:14").

Jesus music historian and film maker David DeSabatino suggested that, along with Larry Norman's "Reader's Digest", McGuire's "Don't Blame God" is one of the "few songs to turn the anti-institutional frustration of the counterculture against the established Church." The lyric he probably has in mind runs, "We've got million dollar churches/But no one's on their knees/So many selfish people/Just doing what they please."

Another standout track on the album was the rollicking good-time song "Happy Road", which would become his best known piece from this period. The album closes with a joyous romp in which McGuire proclaims why he's not going to sing, shout or talk about "anyone but Jee-ee-ee-ee-sus!" Perhaps the best of the best on 'Lighten Up', however, would be "Callin' Me Home", a gorgeous folk ballad that acquires a stunning sort of rough beauty when sung against type in McGuire's gravelly voice.

Both of McGuire's first two albums were produced by Buck Herring - as was the classic 'To The Bride' McGuire recorded in concert with 2nd Chapter Of Acts. The Encyclopedia Of Contemporary Christian Music declared 'To The Bride' to be "probably the best live album ever made by a Christian artist - its only competitor for that title being Andrae Crouch And The Disciples' 'Live In Carnegie Hall'." 'To The Bride' featured McGuire and 2nd Chapter Of Acts performing together and separately backed by a group named A Band Called David (Rick Azim, guitar; Jack Kelly, drums; Herb Melton, bass; Paul Offenbacher, guitar; Richard Souther, keyboard). The McGuire songs are almost exclusively ones from 'Seeds' and 'Lighten Up', but the real treat becomes the dialogue between the songs, in which he introduces them with alternately amusing and moving stories. His rapport with the audience is palpable and his songs become more personable and affecting.

More albums followed for Barry, 'C'mon Along' (Sparrow, 1976), 'Anyone But Jesus' (Masterpiece, 1976), 'Have You Heard' (Sparrow, 1977) and the arresting 'Cosmic Cowboy', the title track becoming the biggest song on US Christian radio in 1978. Barry remembers, "'Cosmic Cowboy' was a big album. I was with Mike Nesmith from The Monkees. We spent a whole night talking about Christ and he said, 'You know it seems like the name of Jesus has become the enemy to the person of Jesus, because as soon as you say his name, this preconceived idea of who people think you're talking about jumps into their mind and they don't hear another word you have to say.' He said, 'Too bad you can't make a song about Christ that would allow people to catch a glimpse of him the way you see him before they actually know who it is they're looking at.' And that's why I wrote 'Cosmic Cowboy'."

1978 was also the year that, in one of those twists of recording history, Barry was to enjoy his most successful recording ever, bigger even than "Eve Of Destruction". Ironically it was as a guest vocalist on a children's song, "Bullfrogs And Butterflies". Agape Force was an evangelistic ministry based first in California and eventually in Lindale, Texas. Candle was the "arts and music department" of Agape Force who also oversaw the music ministry of CCM hitmakers Silverwind. Rather confusingly the aggregations assembled by the organisation called themselves Agape Force when their praise and worship and children's albums were released on the Candle label and Candle when released on Sparrow (or their subsidiary Birdwing). Candle/Agape Force became the Veggie Tales of the '70s and '80s with hugely successful children's albums like 'The Music Machine', 'The Music Machine 2' and 'Agapeland'. The 'Bullfrogs And Butterflies' album was actually a reproduction by producer Mike Deasy of 1974's 'Agapeland' album and with Barry McGuire's gravelly tones performing the infectiously cute Sesame Street-style song about transformation ("Bullfrogs and butterflies/They've both been born again") the album became the biggest Christian music album of the era, eventually selling an astonishing three million copies.

For a time McGuire put together a programme called Kids For Kids that involved children's choirs doing programmes to benefit children in need. In 1979 he and a bevy of kids performed at the White House. More McGuire albums were released, the live 'Inside Out' (1979) recorded on behalf of aid organisation World Vision International; the compilation 'Best Of Barry McGuire' (1980) and 'Finer Than Gold' (1981), an album that strangely contained almost no original songs, offering instead the troubadour's interpretations of songs by Becky Hermandez, Georgian Banov and Mark Pendergrass. After his Greenbelt performance Barry seemed to slip from the CCM radar and despite a comeback album 'Pilgrim' for Live Oak in 1989 filled with highly personal songs that McGuire wrote while touring with World Vision he seemed largely forgotten by Nashville's Christian music industry.

From 1984 to 1990 McGuire lived in New Zealand, working full time as an emissary for World Vision. Barry sang with more than 20,000 kids from over 400 primary schools in 57 different New Zealand towns. This tireless activity generated nearly 2,000 sponsors for Third World children. He wrote a novel called In The Midst Of Wolves (Crossway, 1990) about the leader of a motorcycle gang who becomes an evangelistic Christian. He became critical of the Christian music subculture, viewing it as a phenomenon that serves to insulate devotees from the world at large. For a time, McGuire quite recording because, he said, "I am tired of making generic records. . .they all have the same words. . .it's all 'Hallelujah, praise the Lord,' which is wonderful in context, but there has got to be more. We have got to get out of just the Christian ear."

Back in the USA in 1991 Live Oak Records released Barry's 'Promise' album. Despite a good duet with Jamie Owens-Collins it was described by the Cross Rhythms reviewer as "wimpish country and western that sounds about as sweet as Dylan doing Sesame Street." The following year Maranatha! Music released a children's project, 'Let's Tend God's Earth', by Barry McGuire & The Kids' Praise Co homing in on the ecology. In 1994 Barry reunited with some of the New Christy Minstrels and they completed a season (a gruelling 250 shows) at the Sierra Land Theater in Oakhurst, California, calling themselves A Gathering Of Minstrels. In February of 1995 McGuire began to do concerts with another veteran performer of the '70s, Terry Talbot. It was rekindling a long musical association. In 1976 Barry had sung the role of Peter in 'Firewind', a musical co-written by Terry Talbot, his brother John Michael and Jamie Owens-Collins and released on a Sparrow album. Singing '60s material the duo proved to be a popular in-concert attraction and were able to release five independent albums, 'When Dinosaurs Walked The Earth' (1995, billed Talbot McGuire), 'Ancient Garden' (1997, Talbot McGuire), 'Frost And Fire' (1999, Terry Talbot, Barry McGuire) and 'Talbot McGuire Live' (2000) and 'Trippin' The '60s' (2007, Barry McGuire with Terry Talbot).

Also in 2007 a New Jersey independent, Frogtown Records, released a surreal Barry McGuire single, "Mr Hakk N' Koff", a vocal satire with a strong anti-smoking statement and "I Pledge Allegiance", expressing the importance of God and country with a new twist.

A few years back when searching the internet for information about McGuire I discovered that for a season he had retired from making music! "Yeah," he says, "I did. I retired. But I've discovered in Christ that you never really retire! You just pull into the Holy Ghost tyre 'n' brick company, as Bob Dylan called it, and you take on a load of Holy Ghost bricks and put on four Holy Ghost tyres and you're all RE-TYRED and ready for another hundred thousand miles, you know! So that's kind of what I've done. I've just re-tyred. I've got asphalt in my veins. What can I tell you? I was born on the road; I've been travelling my whole life. I have slowed down a little bit and I do love singing. I love performing. My new show is called Trippin' The '60s. It's just phenomenal."

This is where McGuire goes out and sings songs from the '60s. He has a wealth of stories from back then as he explains, "Yes, all the people I knew and partied with, hung out with, performed with, recorded with. Many of them are dead now and it's the songs that set a whole generation up to actually receive the reality of 'Love God with all your heart' and 'Love your neighbour as yourself'." He sings, "'All you need is love, love, love, love. . .' Well, that was it. That's the truth, you know! Just all those songs that were sung were songs of truth; it's just that there was one little piece missing and that was the person of love himself."