Sunday, November 23, 2008

From the Clarkives 5: About a Band, Part 1

14 comments:
 
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.


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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.

   

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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.

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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.


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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!

14 comments:

  1. What happened to the money?-G

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  2. Awesome memories! Love those old pictures!

    You know I have MP3's of Under My Feet and I Belong to Jesus from Bootleg 1. This Clarkive would be rich with those. Want me to upload to blogger and send you the HTML code? This may make Richy cringe.

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  3. Fun to see the pictures.

    I personally benefited from the '98tour ; )

    I remember listening to the Everything CD- Josh sent it to me while we were dating long-distance. I really liked 'Everything' & a couple others on it a lot. Wow- memories of years past. 8 years! so long ago!

    Over here enjoying my precious Meara! My parents are coming today & my dad will meet her for the 1st time. Christmas will be so sweet with both Keith & Meara~ a newborn. I'm excited!!

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  4. Shannon ~

    I'm excited about having a three month old at Christmas this year in our new house!!!

    Today is Rachie's 2 month b-day!!! I can't believe it ~ feels like yesterday that I was in labor!! WOW!!!

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  5. I love the Clarkives Jess!!! I wasn't serving the Lord back then ~ I was busy being a very good sinner!! I'm glad Jere was part of that time and I like reading about you guys!!! Thanks so much for sharing!!

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  6. FYI:
    I still have bootleg 1 and 2 from Calvin....love them, and have uploaded them to my IPOD as well. Those were the good ole' days!
    Julie

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  7. did you get my email with the code?

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  8. just posted two of them... awesome, josh! lol

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  9. I have all or Bootleg 1 in MP3. I sent Richy a CD two or three years ago. Maybe he ran it through the shedder, don't know. Want me to burn a CD and send it to you for the Network Praise Band/Praise Band/Found/Radiant archives?

    If so, email or text me your address.

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  10. Not blogging today, on the road.

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  11. It was so great to see you 5 ....

    i am so happy! All my babies in the same town AGAIN!!!!

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  12. ok THAT (bootleg 1) was a part of radiant history i've been needing to be exposed to for a long time. thank you josh!

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  13. Those "bootleg" songs just brought back a whirl wind of awesome crazy memories!! <3 love it

    Lizz Burnett!!

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Jess here: if Blogger gives you problems, just click "Anonymous" and sign your name. Roll with the punches, folks...

 
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