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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday April 23, 2001 Volume III Number 17 |
FOCUS - La Cuesta Encantada
Bill Batstone is an unassuming guy. Unpretentious.
He writes music. One of his songs has become a signature theme song for our young congregation out there in the country - up the road and over the hill from the Interstate. On Sunday mornings, especially Easter Sunday morning, you’ll hear our whole crowd waking up the neighborhood with one of Batstone’s creations.
One day I asked Bill (some of his album covers identify him as “Billy”) about how he writes a song, particularly this one. He had to stop and think, and remember penciling out a lyric, then fingering a melody line at the keyboard, and then grouping some chords together to fill in the harmonies. Generally, Bill’s lyrical source will be a Bible passage as it was in this case. He talks about how he puts his mind into the framework of the passage, and the context, and tries to capture some of the meaning for a contemporary audience. And then he tries to capture the feeling, the tempo, the cadence with his tunes. And a song emerges.
Bill has written scores, perhaps hundreds of songs. And every once in awhile, one will catch on with the multitudes. Like this one.
I’ve seen him perform. Usually, Bill’s not the lead singer. Or lead guitarist. Or the focal point on stage. He’s more comfortable in the background. I’ve watched him through my binoculars from the upper deck in stadium events where his band plays for tens of thousands. He travels all over the world now with his friends and his songs.
Recently, I got my hands on his latest album. It’s a collaboration with a couple other musicians, and on one of my favorite cuts, Bill takes the lead on the solo. I’ve known Bill for a long time now, but it’s the first time I’ve heard him sing… all by himself. His voice is steady, true. Honest. Believable.
So I called him and his wife Kathy a couple weeks ago just to let him know that one of his songs has pulled together a fledgling congregation and given them music that takes flight every time we sing it. He seemed to like hearing that someone new discovered his work… and that it energized a new crowd to a new level of biblical awareness. And it has.
Bill’s tune was the big finish for a blowout Easter Sunday morning celebration last week. I can still hear the refrain echoing in my mind a week later.
* * * * * * *
Nick and Colleen make their home just over a mile high in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California. When we first met our two boys, Mike and Kevin were toddlers. Full truth be told, they were both in diapers.
I had a weekly assignment in their little town up in the high country for nearly a year back then. And we’d get our families together and go for hikes and in the wintertime sit by the fire and while the kids would play, we’d talk into the night about movies and plays and books and parenting and travel and business and church. It was the kind of friendship that comes along once in awhile. The two moms hit it off. And the two dads. And the kids were inseparable.
Through the years, we’d exchange Christmas cards and occasionally we find some excuse to renew that friendship forged out up there in the tall pine trees and clean crisp mountain air. But it was never often enough.
Time, scheduling demands and geography caused those good times to fade into the memory books.
Imagine our surprise nearly two years ago, when we brought our son to his first college orientation week, and on Parent’s Day, Nick and Colleen walked in with their nineteen year-old. Our two lanky aw-shucks boys, more than a little self-conscious on that milestone day for us all, were re-united once more. They were too young to remember those days when they entertained us by the fire as toddlers on the living room floor. But they greeted one another like the two young men they’ve become, and smiled, and endured the story telling of gushing parents who all four wondered where in the world the years went.
Since that day, Kevin and Mike have become best friends. And these past few months, they are earning their sophomore college credits in a little village outside Zurich.
Switzerland.
* * * * * *
The Central Coast of California, romantic and picturesque, is best visited in springtime. The winter and spring rains drench the hillsides and meadows, and when the sun warms the soil, green happens. And after the green, blooms of every color. It’s a rugged coastline, rocky. Tide pools team with pre-historic life. Crabs and sea urchins and starfish and sea anemones. Monterey pines are shaped by the perpetual sea breeze with branches like an artists brush strokes sweeping up the slopes.
Exotic names like Morro Bay and Morro Rock and Cayucos and Cambria and San Simeon and Big Sur dot the maps along the coast.
William Randolph Hearst was a miserable politician, but a brilliant newspaperman. The son of privilege, Hearst disappointed his high profile parents (his father a wealthy industrialist and his mother a philanthropist) when he got himself expelled from Harvard. In 1887, he took over his father’s newspaper in San Francisco – The Examiner. He discovered the power of the written word. Critics called his innovation “yellow journalism.” He utilized sensational headlines to sell papers. Killings. Gun battles in the streets. Domestic violence. Scandal. He was the turn-of-the-century Jerry Springer. And it made him millions.
From his home in New York in 1903, he won two consecutive terms as a US Congressman. It made him eager for more. In 1904, he made a bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination and lost. He ran for Mayor of New York City in 1905, and then Governor of New York State in 1906 and then another run at Mayor in 1909. And in every race, he was soundly defeated.
Discouraged, but unyielding, he poured his time and energies and family fortune into his media empire. He expanded his holdings, and his influence. He found that he could sway public opinion through his chain of newspapers and magazines far more efficiently than any politician.
And when the 1920s Roared, William Randloph Hearst was a player. He believed he controlled politicians, economies, courtrooms, moviemakers… all with the power of daily newspapers bringing headlines and grainy black and white images onto street corners and into living rooms all across America. Hearst, the shunned politician, could be a kingmaker or a spoiler. He could make a career or ruin a career. He could assure the passage of legislation or kill legislation. Some historians credit him with starting a war. He could influence the outcome of a high profile trial. All with a sweeping confidential memo to his loyal editorial staff.
When William Randolph Hearst dreamed a dream, to build some kind of Monument that would stand the test of time and become an American icon, he sat down with a map of the United States of America and selected the Central Coast of California. Just outside San Simeon, on a plateau about three thousand feet above the blue Pacific, in 1925 he began a project which would cost fifty million dollars.
He called his ranch, La Cuesta Encantada.
On two hundred forty thousand acres
he build a zoo, and airport, and a grand castle surrounded by cottages
resembling a French villa. He
collected rare works of art – paintings, sculpture, statuary – from all
over the world. Pools and gardens
and fountains and sweeping stairways surrounded the grand hall where he hosted
weekend parties for the rich and famous that became legendary in their own
time.
In 1941, a young upstart movie producer in his mid-twenties, Orson Wells, gave the controversial newspaper mogul a new name – Citizen Kane.
It’s no wonder Hearst chose San Simeon for his palatial retreat. When the sun shines, and the waves roll in glistening white spray against the deep blue sea and then crash against the rocks and the seagulls ride the breeze and the mountains stand tall in the distance and the spring flowers paint the hillsides in yellows and orange and blues and whites, there’s a magic in the air that cannot be matched anywhere.
So when Nick and Colleen and Carolyn and I took time to renew our friendship and compare notes on twenty years of parenting and the news from a small college campus in Switzerland – we picked the same neighborhood that William Randolph Hearst selected. The Central California Coast.
A little town just south of San Simeon called Cambria.
* * * * * * *
In my world, the mere mention of the date on the calendar – April 15 – carries a whole truckload of baggage. It’s the American deadline for filing income tax returns – an annual ritual spurned by most of us. The most common feelings then elicited by the thought of this dreadful day would be disdain. Scorn. Drudgery. Revulsion. Loathing.
So imagine my surprise when I checked the calendar for the year 2001 and discovered that April the fifteenth was Easter Sunday. Who is responsible for these things?
Because also in my world, Easter Sunday is a most glorious day. And this year was no exception.
Music plays a big role in the glory of Easter. Always has.
On that scale that measures the spectrum between the contemporary and the traditional that everyone knows about, my experience would lean toward the traditional.
Not that I’ve been chauvinistic about it. I pride myself in being inclusive. Tolerant. Fair-minded when it comes to musical styles. I like to think that I am capable of enjoying a broad range of musical tastes.
But my background would be traditional.
We were trained in the classics. And in our world of church, the grand old hymns of the faith. I remember the console of the pipe organ located on side toward the front of the Sanctuary, the long black grand piano on the other. The organist and the pianist occupied benches that faced the pulpit. Robed choirs sat in rows behind the platform and the director took his place behind the pulpit as the congregation sang four-part harmony (soprano-alto-tenor-bass) from an open Hymnal and we were instructed to sing the first, third and fourth stanza. Sometimes all four verses if time might permit.
We did consider ourselves cutting edge on one point, however. Unlike those mainline churches down the road, we did not end the hymn with a final, sustained “Amen.” That would be just too “high church” for us.
Far back as I can remember, in spite of our traditional moorings, some have made every attempt to package our message in a way that will be palatable to contemporary culture and society. We want people to be attracted to the message, so we dress it up in ways that make people feel more at home. And that applies to our music.
Through the decades I’ve seen new generations put the old traditional ideas and truths contained in those old hymnals into lyrics and tunes that have a more contemporary sound. Younger crowds take to the new like fish to water. The Old-Timers are horrified. I’ve listened to the debate rage all my life.
On one side of the Great Divide, the case is made for preserving the timeless sounds and traditions handed down from our faithful forefathers and foremothers (many of whom sacrificed and suffered that we might enjoy the privileges of the present.) Should we stray from the hymns passed from generation to generation there will be consequences. And it won’t be pleasant.
On the other side of that Great Divide it is argued that the traditionalists, well, they are dying off. There’s a new generation coming along that finds the whole thing irrelevant. We’ve got to spice it up. Adopt some of those marketing techniques that are working so well in the rest of the world. Put the new wine in new wineskins. Pump up the old message into a new tempo. Especially in our music. Where will tomorrow’s leadership come from if we don’t start attracting a new generation?
My memory goes back to the nineteen fifties, and I can’t remember a time when this debate didn’t put the church into two distinct, adversarial groups.
But for the last couple of years, out there in the country, we’ve been tilting toward the other end of the spectrum. I haven’t seen a hymnal for two years now. The lyrics are projected on a screen up front. It keeps our heads up, and out of a stale, musty book. The organ’s gone, replaced by a keyboard on a metal stand with the word YAMAHA across the front. There is an acoustical guitar, plugged into an amplifier so that it can keep pace with the lead guitar and the bass, which are also plugged in. We not only have a full set of drums, there are three or four microphones a couple of inches from each drum, and a tall clear plastic shield serving as a buffer between the drummer and the other musicians. At the front, across the platform, a line up of more mikes and stands for the vocalists. At the back of the room, there’s a huge soundboard with more dials and levers than in the cockpit of a 747.
And I’m one of those vocalists at one of those mikes. The old guy on the left, lookin’ like he’s havin’ a lot of fun. That’s me.
This Easter Sunday morning, we blew the windows out in celebration of the Resurrection. Drums drummin’. The lead guitar fillin’ in the licks. The rhythm and the bass goin’ strong. And the vocals in synch. And all the people on their feet.
Alleluia! Glory to the Lamb, Alleluia!
To the reigning King of Heaven, Glory to Your Name!
Alleluia!
And God smiled as we sang Bill Batstone’s song.
* * * * * *
It’s a springtime Monday morning. The second to last Monday of April, Year 2001.
And you are a leader.
And as you contemplate the spring flowers in your neighborhood and the joyful sounds of a congregation celebrating Resurrection echo in your mind and renewed friendships with the far away sounds of the surf and the squeals of seagulls soaring across the horizon against a setting sun, let the energizing power of hope chase away the grim and gloomy shadows of despair.
While after his death in 1951 William Randolph Hearst left a castle high above the shoreline (one cynic called it the most impressive collection of tombstones for any person who ever lived), one might wonder out loud about the price tag of happiness and the hard cost of peace of mind and if it is indeed the accumulation of wealth that brings either one. Or if, rather, those things come from somewhere else.
I think they do.
If Hearst found them at all at anytime during his tumultuous life, I’m going to guess out loud that he found them in his faith; resurrection faith symbolized by a flower in bloom. Or a friendship in season. Or on a sunny breezy afternoon in the open air. Or in the ready abandon of singing a song in praise to the Living One.
There are no admission tickets available for this kind of happiness. This kind of peace of mind.
You just open your heart.
And you’ll find it.
And when you do, you’ll have something real to give away.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2001
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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