Please Re-Release Me
Joe Martin
January 1, 1998
The eighties were the decade that gave us leg warmers, Tammy Faye Bakker, and Miami Vice. They also gave us some of the best material ever to come out of Contemporary Christian Music. Doubters of this proposition need look no further than a couple of recent cd reissues.
For starters, check out the catalog of one Steven Krekorian—a.k.a. Tonio K. His Olé, the victim of label wars and corporate reorganizations, can't technically be termed a reissue at all, since it languished in a&m's vaults after its completion in '89. Give credit to Connecticut's dinky Gadfly Records for setting it free. K is both genius and eightball, one part Don Henley and three Randy Newman, a largely unknown talent who never quite managed to shake commercial obscurity. If you can listen unmoved to the lean, guitar-driven arrangement or protest lyrics of "Hey Lady" or "That Could Have Been Me," you're definitely consciousness-impaired. The rest of K's compendium, all out again, has also weathered well. Romeo Unchained ('86) is truth mixed with bitters, the sort of stuff you still won't find on Christian airwaves even in these enlightened nineties. The synth-laden production may induce flashbacks, but the melodies, the lyrics and his lean, angst-ridden singing sound as passionate as ever. Sample these lines from the opening "True Confessions": "Heard about a housewife sleepin' in the wrong bed/ Heard a rumor that Elvis had risen from the dead/Seen a lot of lovers been programmed to lose/Seen a civilization confessin' the blues." Ouch. Even a pagan will feel the punch in barbs like that.
Leslie Phillips was Word Records' darling until a well-publicized rift in '87. Fed up with seeing her music converted to gospel rants, she packed her bags and ran away from ...
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