We toured The Pledge for eighteen months solid. The album did incredibly well, both as the best-selling project of our career, and as some of the most effective ministry we ever saw. Between the solo projects, Dana wrote a book called Don’t Stop the Music, we were endorsed by the NIV Student Bible, and ForeFront continued to grow. Things were really coming together.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Let’s Get Upset
The way we ended up working with dcTalk was pretty interesting. Everyone knew Ron Griffin was looking for a commercially accessible rap group. One day a fellow named Jeoffrey Benward, who was one of the early ForeFront artists, gave Ron a demo tape a student gave him after one of his concerts at Liberty University. I’m not sure Jeffrey even listened to it, actually.
Ron was so excited about what he heard he rushed over to Dan Brock’s house to play it for him. He was so excited, in fact, he couldn’t even wait for Dan to finish getting ready. He played it for him while he was still in the shower. Dan called me and said they were so excited for us to hear it they were on their way to our show in Kentucky that night. It couldn’t wait.
That night, in the back lounge of our tour bus, Ron played the demo tape of dcTalk and the One Way Crew. We then voted on whether to sign them or not. Dana wasn’t a fan of rap music. He thought it might be a passing fad. In the end, though, he decided to go along with us. Ron, Dan, and I were all very excited!
We later found out the group had been pitched all over town and was passed on by every other record company. The same thing happened to me with D&K back in the day, so I was unfazed by that run-around. Through the years, I’ve been asked over and over again how a new, fledgling record company like ForeFront was possibly able to sign a band like dcTalk. My answer is always the same.
“Because no one else would.”
In the early days of ForeFront Records our jobs were all pretty simple and straightforward. Ron, the only actual employee, ran the company and produced most of the albums. Dan helped Ron when needed, but most of his time was spent on DeGarmo and Key business. Those were the peak years of our career and it took all hands on deck to manage our affairs. D&K’s job was to use our platform to help develop the bands and introduce them to the public. Dana and I thought it best not to share that we were co-owners in the label publicly. I actually didn’t share that secret until five years later. After all, we were successful artists, and didn’t want to confuse the audience or the industry by being seen as record company owners.
When we took dcTalk out on our eighteen-month tour for The Pledge, they were completely unknown. We were at the top of our game, and labels would gladly pay us to take their bands out as support acts on the tour. To justify taking dcTalk out as our opening act we offered them jobs as members of the crew. Toby “TobyMac” McKeehan sold our merchandise. Michael Tait set up our drums and backline amps. Kevin “K-Max” Smith was my keyboard tech. It might sound degrading, but it was a way for them to get a platform they otherwise would not have had.
In retrospect, hiring them as roadies was a bad idea in at least one way; they were not good roadies. In fact, they were terrible. We can all laugh about that now. Off-stage they were just about useless. When they performed, though, they were excellent—right on target. That made the whole thing worthwhile.
In 1990 I talked Tim Landis and Harry Thomas, the promoters of Creation Festival, into letting dcTalk take fifteen minutes of our headline slot at the festival. They were not booked to appear, so we gave them part of our time. Creation was the mother of all Christian music festivals, drawing between seventy and eighty thousand attendees to rural Pennsylvania each summer. Tim didn’t want to do it at first. He said the fans came to see D&K. I assured him neither he, nor the fans, would be disappointed by dcTalk. They weren’t.
I pulled the same maneuver at several other festivals that summer. Chuck Tilly, the organizer of Atlantafest, still tells that story. The rest is history. Before long the fans at our concerts wanted to see dcTalk as much as they wanted to see us—if they were pre-teens, maybe more. Clearly dcTalk was on fire.
As ForeFront began to heat up we signed more artists, including Audio Adrenaline, Geoff Moore, and The Distance. The label took more and more of our time and attention. Dan Brock spent more time helping Ron Griffin, too. The business was exploding and we were loving life. It may have been too much of a good thing, though. We ended up hitting a real tough patch we didn’t see coming. Soon there would be plenty of pain to mix with the joy.
In 1990 D&K went out on a roughly twenty-date West Coast tour. One company was promoting all the shows. As the tour started, however, it became apparent the promoter had not done his job well. Business details were a mess, lots of tasks were being left undone, and the crowds were much smaller than we expected. Some shows drew a hundred people or less. No one knew we were even coming to town. Something was definitely wrong. We had never experienced this before in concert after concert. We were at the top of our game during this nightmare.
On that tour we were paid a straight percentage of the gate most of the time. We were comfortable with that arrangement because of our past success. Plus, we knew the promoter well and expected him to do a good job. Because the guaranteed fees were either low, or non-existent, we were losing thousands of dollars every night. We had around sixteen people on the tour in custom buses and were using a semi-truck for all of the equipment. It was very expensive.
Dana and I were extremely concerned—in fact, Dana was livid. He was thoroughly convinced Dan Brock was just too busy with the business of ForeFront to watch out for us anymore. It seemed apparent to him that Dan was not managing us properly and staying on top of our business. Although I have come to believe that Dan’s role was a part of the issue, it wasn’t the whole picture. There was something more complex going on. Our concert promoter was not doing his job at all, and we didn’t know about it until it was way too late to fix anything. That’s the plain and simple truth of what happened.
Our team was always proactive in staying in the loop of our concert activity and addressing issues long before we arrived in town if possible. These ill-fated concerts totally blindsided us.
After that tour, a deep fracture began to form between Dana and Dan. Looking back, I think it began long before that tour, though. It may have been Dana perceived Dan as siding with me over him in “The Vocal Wars” and surrounding drama that started us down the solo album path. Dan and I often seemed to see things from a similar perspective. At times that may have left Dana as the odd man out. I’m not sure, but I knew by that point it was getting serious. So serious, in fact, Dana decided he wanted to sell his ForeFront stock and was lobbying me to oust Dan as our manager. I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was tragic. I felt stuck in the middle. This was no-win for me.
Dana and I met with Ron, Dan, and Richard Green, our attorney. Dana told us all he had made the decision to sell his stock in our record company. We had to come up with a way to do a valuation of what the stock was worth and Richard suggested a couple of ways forward.
In the meantime, Dana pressured me to end our management relationship with Brock and Associates. In fact, he told me he was seeking legal counsel about whether Dan mishandled our career so badly it might be considered legally negligent. I didn’t believe that for a second, and did not want to go down that road at all.
Dan Brock was a loyal soldier for D&K and I felt it was wrong to tarnish his image after so many years of strong support. D&K was the center of my career at that point, so I did what I felt was the only thing possible. I called Dan and emotionally explained to him we were seeking to end our management relationship, and I had come to the conclusion it was only right for me also to sell my stock in ForeFront to create some distance between us. That was very difficult for me, as Dan and I were close friends. I’m convinced that telephone call began the process of eroding the trust we always held between us. I had multiple contractual recording and tour commitments with Dana I couldn’t forgo for years to come, thou
gh. I was stuck!
When we received an independent valuation on ForeFront it turned out, even though we were only two years old, that our company was worth much more than any of us expected. Dan and Ron called me to explain they didn’t believe they could raise enough money to buy both of us out. We would have to choose which one of us was going to sell.
A few evenings later Susan and I were at the D&K office in Germantown, packing up merchandise fans ordered through our newsletters. Dana dropped by right as it was getting dark outside. Susan brought up the ForeFront stock issue and what Dan and Ron told us. “Dana, either you or Eddie can sell,” she said frankly. “Which one will it be?”
Everyone who knows Susan knows how direct she can be. She just lays it all out there. I love that about her. It can get tense sometimes, but you always know where you stand. Sometimes I wonder how she would negotiate with the Russians.
The air was so thick in the room you could cut it with a knife. I asked Dana to join me outside for a few minutes. I told him I was leaving the choice completely up to him. If he wanted to stay, I’d sell my stock. If he wanted to sell his, I’d keep mine. It was totally his choice.
Dana looked me right in the eye and immediately said, “I prefer to sell mine.”
So, that’s what happened. Dana sold his stock in ForeFront Records in 1990, and D&K quietly severed management with Brock and Associates. I called Dan and explained I saw no other way forward and I promised to make the best of the situation. Dan extended a peace offering that helped us greatly. He felt awful about the massive tour losses we suffered. So, he decided to waive a commission payment due to be paid to him on a large royalty payment from The Benson Company. The royalties were several hundred thousand dollars, and every cent of it was used to help D&K pay off our massive tour debts. I’ve always appreciated that gesture. I tried my best to reconcile the relational breach he suffered in the loss of D&K, but I could tell it hurt him deeply. We just had to make the best of it.
THIRTY-NINE
Against the Night
After a mostly strong 1990, the best way I can describe 1991, and the recording of D&K’s twelfth album Go to the Top, is it was like a giraffe on roller skates—awkward and clumsy. We ended our long time management relationship with Brock and Associates, Dana was out of the ForeFront ownership group, and ForeFront was moving its distribution from The Benson Company, which was to be the home of D&K’s future albums, to Star Song Distribution, a leading competitor. Everything was unsettled, and I was knee-deep in the drama, every day stuck right in middle of the crossfire.
Dana and I decided to invite Ron Griffin to produce Go to the Top. He did a fine job on The Pledge and was a good mediator of our creative dynamic. But things were awkward for us on a lot of fronts when we came together to record. The air was heavy when we were together. The album has some good moments, such as “I Believe,” “Against the Night,” “Family Reunion,” and “Ultimate Ruler,” but overall Go to the Top is my least favorite D&K album. The music stills feels unsettled to me. It sounds like it is lacking the passion and emotional electricity of our earlier work, or of our later albums Heat It Up and To Extremes, for that matter.
When D&K left Brock and Associates it fell on Dana and me to manage the large enterprise around the world. To tackle this properly we opened and staffed a Memphis office managed by Scott Winchell. We also had a Nashville operation with our production staff and equipment. The Nashville operation was first managed by Stan Letarte and later by Doug Jones. We had a better handle on managing the production office than the business office at first. The business office in Memphis managed all our interaction with the record companies and booking agents, along with publicists, interviews, travel arrangements, banking, royalties, and everything else that went on in the large business of DeGarmo and Key.
Not to disparage Dana in any way, but most people who knew and loved him would readily tell you business was not his first priority or gift. He had ample gifts in ministry, preaching, and teaching to make up for any business shortfall. The downside of this for me was most of the responsibility for the business of the band fell directly on my shoulders, and I was rusty to say the least. Dan Brock and his staff handled all of those matters for years while I was being an artist. Suddenly I needed to fill both roles. Dana did too. It was an immense amount of work for both of us.
It didn’t help that the beginning of the Go to the Top tour was in Australia. From there we headed to Europe, which takes even more coordination. Chuck Reynolds, our drummer for The Pledge tour, had left the band. His replacement was an eighteen-year-old drummer from Memphis named Kevin Rodell. Kevin was an excellent drummer who played in the style of Greg Morrow and was a great fit for our band. He was perfect. I could close my eyes and almost hear Greg playing behind us and holding us together. Thank you, Kevin.
The Go to the Top tour continued with a long string of North American dates. We were able to bring ForeFront acts Audio Adrenaline and the rappers ETW as our openers on various legs of the tour. It only seemed right to help those artists reach an audience. Of course it benefited me as a ForeFront owner to get their names out there, but musically, the ForeFront artists were a good fit for D&K anyway. They were all misfits like us to a degree.
The first time Audio Adrenaline came on the road to open for us I hitched a ride with them to the auditorium from the motel. I remember being able to see the road passing by us through holes in the floorboards of their old rusted out van. It reminded me of D&K’s Happy Truck days. Fortunately, they grew past that early stage of their career much faster than we did.
We filmed a long form video of several songs from Go to the Top when we returned from Australia. Stephen Yake directed the video and Ken Pennell, then the head of A&R at The Benson Company, assembled it. Ken worked with us from the late eighties as our creative sounding board with the record company. He was a great asset to us with his strong musical credibility, and we valued his input. I have always appreciated his contributions to D&K. The video turned out remarkably well. In some ways it feels better than the album to me. There are some hilarious Memphis locals who make cameo appearances in the video as well as excellent scenes from our homeland.
Filming that video was the first time I recall meeting Ken’s teenage son, Marcelo Pennell. He was helping as a sound engineer for the video crew. Little did I know, as I witnessed that long-haired, goateed (longer than any I had seen before) kid wearing hi-top combat boots and short pants in the Memphis summer heat, that I was looking at my future son-in-law. He was just the right kind of “freaky looking” to fit in with the DeGarmo family. But that would be years later. He was still in high school.
FORTY
If God Is For Us
Over the next year and a half, it became apparent I needed to move my family to Nashville so I could help out more with ForeFront. The label was exploding and growing by leaps and bounds. We released the dcTalk Nu Thang album and it was selling like hotcakes. We also saw early success with the first Audio Adrenaline album, and Ron produced a hit album called A Friend Like You for Geoff Moore and The Distance. Things were working at ForeFront. But things had become very tense between Ron Griffin and Dan Brock for some reason. I don’t think I will ever totally understand what happened there. I worked at trying to get them together, but it just didn’t seem to go anywhere. I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Neither seemed to care to work it out. It was sad. Ron and Dan were close friends since their college days. Something got personal and it was poisoning their relationship. Eventually Ron decided he wanted to sell his ForeFront stock and get out. It was very weird and uncomfortable for all three of us, but we set it up. It was then I allowed something to happen that came to visit me in waves of difficulty for years to come. Looking back, though, I still feel like I made the right decision.
At a breakfast restaurant off I-40, close to the Natchez Trace Parkway, between Nashville and Memphis, Dan Brock and I met to decide the best way to buy Ron’s stock and move the company forward. We
had a normal buy/sell provision in the company bylaws that gave the remaining stockholders the right to buy sellers’ shares equally. I could sense through the conversation, though, Dan was still reeling from D&K terminating the management relationship with him.
I knew it was of paramount importance that he now pour himself into ForeFront. The company was doing well, but needed a steady hand. He never leveled with me about what went down between him and Ron, or perhaps between their wives Charlotte and Darlene, but it seemed like it was personal as well as business.
As we talked, I made a decision in my heart to allow Dan to buy a few more shares of Ron’s stock than I would. That would give him majority control of ForeFront. I had D&K and ForeFront. He only had ForeFront and a soon to be expired contract to manage dcTalk. He needed to be affirmed and I knew this was the right thing for me to do. I also knew Dan was the right man for the job to run ForeFront.
He was always a great businessman and marketer. We needed him to be that for our company. Also, I felt it was important as an olive branch between us. I was going to move my family to Nashville and I wanted Dan and I to trust each other completely. We were only talking twenty-five out of five hundred total shares. In fact, I asked Dan to write down on a napkin a promise that he agreed to sell me ten of those twenty-five shares back when I decided it was right. That only gave him a five share majority. There was an appropriate time, many years later, when I gave that napkin back to Dan. He had forgotten about it. He was honorable and sold me the ten shares as he promised at breakfast.
On June 2, 1992, Susan and I moved to Nashville with our girls. Our oldest had just graduated high school and our youngest was entering tenth grade. The timing was the best it could be. It was still a hard move for us. We loved our home, our friends, church, and community in Memphis. Plus, D&K was a big deal in Memphis. In Nashville we were one in a million. I was still pursuing D&K diligently then, even though I knew inside I needed to prepare myself for the future. Those striped pants couldn’t take me where I had to go.
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