1. My Band Went to the Olympics and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

But who did bid thee join with us?
——Macbeth, III.iii

This is a tale that must be told.

It's old news by now, but still instructive, possibly even entertaining. I had hoped to tell this story to parties who might actually take measures to correct what happened, but I don't know how to contact those parties.

The story you are about to read is true. Some of the names have been changed, to protect my hide if anyone gets upset. Aspiring Christian musicians are free to use this information to help them decide how they should or shouldn't behave on tour, and what they will or won't tolerate from the people they choose to work with. They're also free to completely ignore this information and learn their lessons in the school of hard knocks.

It all began in the summer of 2003 with an e-mail from an individual I'll call B. He's a former worship pastor for one of those Gen-X, postmodern "emergent churches," and a few years ago he put out a highly respected worship CD. I played as a guest musician with his band exactly one time, in 1999 or so. It was a lot of fun, but that was all it took for me to realize that I don't relate to emergent churches. Nothing against them, but they're not my cup of tea. Chronologically I'm Gen-X, but in terms of culture, philosophy, and values I'm quite different from most people my age. But I digress.

B. remembered my one-time guest shot with his worship band. In the four years since then, he'd left that particular church to help plant another one, moved around a bit, and gotten involved with another music project that was taking him to fun locations like the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and several places in Honolulu (one of those, the X Factory, is a youth center in a former kim-chi plant where I once played a set with Ric Blair. But I digress.) This new band was called Loudmouth Worshippers. They'd be going to Athens to play at the 2004 Summer Olympics, and they needed a musician like me to give their sound a more ethnic flavor (I play fiddle, mandolin, and several variations thereof, if you hadn't gathered that already).

Was I interested?

Well, wouldn't you be?

Part 2