From the Clarkives 5: About a Band, Part 1

This is part 5 in an ongoing history of us... Links to the first 4 parts are over on the left sidebar over there.

The History of Radiant Worship by Jessica Clark... Part 1 of a 2 or 3 part series.

(click to enlarge)

The history of the band begins with Net Work Praise Band... but not too long before that, and before he met Jesus, Richy had been one of the frontmen of a band known as the Toxic Crayolas, famous for causing a minor riot and mosh pit at Conroe High School around 1992...

Later, he got saved, and eventually wrote that classic, Under My Feet. UMF was a sort of speed metal high praise song with a rap-influenced bridge. Net Work Praise Band borrowed an ADAT from someone and made a bootleg CD, on cassette only, of Under My Feet and several cover songs. If Dennis Jernigan had been dead, he would have been turning in his grave. It’s highly unlikely he, being alive, was ever made aware of our version of “I belong to Jesus”.
We sold 100 copies of Net Work Bootleg (if you’re the feds, somebody else sold them) for $5 each. I don’t ever remember seeing the money. Hmm.

   

As we got more organized and Richy wrote a few more hits, we dropped the Net Work and became simply, Praise Band. We were experiencing a revival in our youth group, and the songs from that season carried so much breakthrough and passion. We recorded our first CD as Praise Band in 1997, I think. The CD was called “Everything” and it is no longer available. We went on our first tour in 1998, up the West Coast for a 2 week period. I shudder to think of what we looked like, and sounded like, since we can tell from the pictures that we were mega-geeks. Still, everywhere we went, God moved through the music, and people were saved.

Soon, we had evidently reached the degree of fame that we were detected. We were contacted by Maranatha Praise Band and legally ordered to drop the name Praise Band. That’s the bigtime, folks.

Our next band name was Found, despite my objections. We were still leading worship multiple times a week at our home church, both for the youth and the adult services. The band had somehow morphed into a very, very large group of people. Richy was working at the church fulltime at this point, and was having good long devotional times to write songs... so some beautiful stuff, including You Are Holy, came out of this time. We were leading the youth, and we had them leading multiple home groups, really a fruitful season. We recorded Take Me There, live at Christ the King Church.

Somewhere in here, we did a live concert at Houston Baptist University, and my dad made a live bootleg recording (for real, bootleg. We told him not to) and sold them on the side. We never saw that money either. Hmm.

Stay tuned for more wacky adventures with those rascally Radiants!