Speaking as a Jesus pioneer RANDY STONEHILL has survived to become one of the most impassioned singer/songwriters in American CCM. Mike Rimmer grilled Randy about his past, present and future.

Randy Stonehill

The humour his fans have come to expect is featured on Baby Hates Clowns. My wife Pip and I both listened intently trying to suss out the deeper meaning of the song, surely this can't just be about Stonehill's wife Sandy not liking clowns can it? Erm...yes it can! Stonehill leaves me in no doubt when he calls me by my Sunday name! "All I can say to you Michael if you're looking for a message" he confesses "is you're working too hard bud! She just doesn't like clowns". There are other humorous moments at the end of the album when Stonehill sings to a piano accompaniment, Keeper Of The Bear, a Gilbert & Sullivan style number written for the entertainment of the son of Rick Elias. It brings the album to a lighthearted conclusion and reminds one that Stonehill is still capable of creating those clever little rhymes.

When it comes to songwriting, Stonehill says, "I'm not comfortable with just rehashing familiar ideas from the past." 'Angel's Wings' and 'Every Heartbeat Is A Prayer' address the issue of the struggles that we as believers face on a daily basis. Stonehill says, "When I sing 'I have stumbled down a dark and crooked mile' (from 'Every Heartbeat Is A Prayer') I think of this culture with all of its counterfeits and sharp edges that come at you from every angle. You can find yourself in some very destructive places. I've come out with lots of scars and bruises. But the final line in 'Angel's Wings' gives a healthy overview: "It all will be worth it when I kneel before Jesus and His face has been carved in the stone of my soul."

Stonehill On Keith Green
One of the early popularisers of CCM, Keith Green was 23 when Sparrow released his debut album 'For Him Who Has Ears To Hear' in 1977. He was only 28 when he and 11 others were killed in a plane crash on the property of Keith's Last Days Ministries. Stonehill reminisces about the late great.

"It was a relationship with a lot of ups and downs. With Keith there was no room in a conversation for a second opinion and nobody was quite spiritual enough for Keith, including Keith! I think at times he wrestled with a tot of stuff himself and, you know, on the one hand we had great musical chemistry together and I could see this kind of little boy behind his eyes saying, 'Look, I really want to be your friend. I really want to work with you.' On the other hand, there were times when you'd just want to say, 'Look Keith, put some duck tape on your mouth, go read the Bible, go to your prayer closet for a few more years then come out because half the time you're a visionary and you're great and the other half you're like a bull in a china shop.' Sometimes you felt like you had to take aspirin just to hang out with him.

"I met Keith at a little night club in north Hollywood and we had a mutual friend who was a music publisher and he suggested that I go and see Keith perform because he felt that our musical styles were similar enough that perhaps we could write some songs together. I walked into this little club and there was this little guy just ripping the keys off his piano. I'd never seen anything quite that intense and he came off stage dripping with sweat. I shook his hand and told him who I was and I noticed he had this little crucifix around his neck. I went up to his house and we started working on song ideas and I would talk to him about the Lord and he was interesting because on the one hand he was very bright and on the other hand, you'd come out kind of bruised within that context. He'd say, 'If Jesus is real and can change lives why are you such a jerk?' and I'd say, 'Thank you Keith for your sensitivity.'

"I figured if he can't accept the Gospel from me because we're actually too close, maybe he can hear it from another person in another context so I invited him and Melody, whom he was courting, to a Bible study which later became the Vineyard Church. I said, 'Go and check this out Keith. There are a lot of musicians who go there. They're intelligent, intriguing people and if you don't like it, you can walk out. I just dare you to go to this Bible study and see how you feel.' I ended up being on the road for about a week and when I came back, Keith told me he'd become a Christian.

"I was in Melbourne, Australia when I found out he'd died. I was on concert tour that summer and I got a call at my hotel from the main organiser in Sydney. He told me I should sit down and he said, 'Look, I've just heard over the wire that Keith and two of his children have been killed in Texas in a small plane.' I had the painful task of trying to get through the performance that night knowing that the last song that I was going to share was a song that Keith and I had written together called 'Until Your Love Broke Thru'. I had to break the news to the audience and then I sang the song like I have never sung it before or since."

Stonehill On Larry Norman
Credited by just about everyone as the inventor of Christian rock, Larry Norman began his recording career with People before recording seminal albums like 'Upon This Rock' (1969), 'Only Visiting This Planet' (1972) and 'In Another Land' (1976). Stonehill recalls his years with the Jesus Music pioneer.

"I now look back to those early days where I see that God's hand was definitely at work. I helped shape a lot of Larry's performance ideas and his utilisation of humour. He helped shape a lot of my songwriting ideas but the fact of the matter is that people are just people and they're fragile and they're damaged. We grew at different speeds and the working relationship just became so intense that it really started to put a strain on our friendship. It was like Larry had good creative vision and sensibilities but he was not a good businessman.

"He tended to shoot himself in the foot and burn a lot of bridges with a lot of people that in turn made our working relationship very difficult because he was a guy who had too much going on and he really couldn't attend to the careers of the artists at Solid Rock (Larry's record label) the way he should. Also we were in a situation where it was financially very convoluted and nobody knew where the money went and we were creating records too sporadically and I felt like he started to view the artists as kind of a millstone around his neck. It was less a friendship and more of an executive/artist relationship and I just thought I don't want to be like this. I also knew in the interests of good stewardship, I really needed to try new creative relationships. I needed to get out of that kind of comfortable, familiar pond and go and stretch and challenge myself in a whole new recording situation.

'I remember when my contract expired with Solid Rock Records in 1979 Larry was nice enough to come to me and say, 'Sign on with me again. We can do this bigger and better. I really want to do this right.' I just thought I knew that his heart was ahead of his thinking or his ability and I said, 'You know what, Larry? Let's not. Let's write some songs together, let's hang out together, let's go to the movies, eat a hotdog, whatever, but let's not do this anymore. It's just too hard on our friendship, it's not good on a business level.'

"It is one of those things where with Larry the guy is such a complex combination of elements. On the one hand he's very articulate, he's very talented and bright. On the other hand when you've known him for a while you realise that there's an insecurity about him. He really wants friends; he really wants to surround himself with a team of people. So I think that in his own frailty, he just felt like he had to walk away from the other artists. In other words, if Larry was not your manager, publisher, producer and your best friend, if he was not all of those things, he would be none of those things. That was very painful for me too because here was a guy that I trusted and admired and I saw him shut down on our relationship and so I just had to leave it in God's hand and say, 'Well, I'll always love him. We had a great season of time. I wish him well but, you know, God is in control, I have to rest in that so I got to let this go.'"

(Larry's marriage to Sarah, Randy's ex-wife)
Strangely enough I had a sense of closure about the marriage and when I heard that Larry and Sarah had subsequently got together it struck me as a little odd but I thought, 'Hey, life does go on and we're all in the same circle together. I wish them well.' I think that in terms of some of the stuff that's been said in the press it's people's smaller moments because there was a lot of confusion, a lot of pain that was also inflamed by the confusion over the business. I never received any monies from any of the work I did with Larry and so I thought, 'Well now, this doesn't smell right to me.' I did try to resolve some of this and untangle some of this. I think about five years ago Larry and I spent 11 hours with a pastor, a sort of an arbitrator, and Ray Ware who was privy to all of the goings on and has now been my manager for several years.

We all sat together in this hotel room and I just tried to come in with an open mind and an open heart and I guess we didn't really accomplish too much. Some of it got angered, some of his wounds, some of my wounds and at the end of the time, I came away thinking, 'Well, it was just good to be face to face and to be able to say some of these things to one another in a controlled environment.' Sadly after that when I tried to follow up on some of the things we'd agreed on in that conversation he became like Greta Garbo and disappeared into the mists again. So the business side of things have never been resolved. I see him maybe once a year, usually around the GMA time in Nashville and I just try to be friendly and it seems like he tries to do the same with me. It's one of those situations where you have to .say, 'God has been so faithful and life is so rich and full, let's leave some of the convoluted history in the past and let's leave it to God's timing and approach the situation with a servant's heart and try to speak the truth but speak it in love and trust that it's not over till it's over.'

"So perhaps in God's time there will be more clarity and more healing, more reconciliation. In the meantime you have to go with the situation like a Christian and just try to make sure that your heart and your motives are clean and if you can't speak in love then just smile and shut up, just let it go. I really do think that's the wisest thing. There's been letters and there's shouting and arbitration and almost 20 years of water under the bridge and it's really accomplished precious little, so you have to let it go, trust God with the timing and just act in love because that really is what it all boils down to in this life. Because Jesus loves us, we need to try to love other people even when they act like your enemy at times or it's a painful thing to do. That's the big picture of this life and naturally the big picture that I've adopted with this still somewhat kind of rocky, unresolved relationship with Larry."