Chuck Girard wrote and sang and played from the time he was a kid—rhythm and blues, blue-eyed soul, doo-wop, pop, and even a top-ten radio hit about Honda motorcycles. When he experienced the love of Jesus at age 26, that didn’t change the way he felt about music.
“I want you to know I still love rock-and-roll music,” Girard wrote in a subsequent song, “but now I have something to say.”
Girard and his band Love Song started to perform what they called “Jesus music” in Southern California in the early 1970s. They became one of the regular groups at pastor Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, where thousands of young people flocked to hear about God’s love and peace, get baptized in the ocean, and join the “Jesus People movement.” Love Song’s earnest folk rock—with tunes like “Welcome Back,” “Changes,” “Little Country Church,” and “Since I Opened the Door”—became the soundtrack of salvation for a generation.
Girard went on to further shape the sound of American evangelicalism with his work producing the first Maranatha! Music compilation album and solo hits like “Sometimes Alleluia” before turning to worship music in the 1980s.
Contemporary Christian music (CCM) legends Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith both described his music as life-changing.
Andrew Erwin, one of the producers of the film Jesus Revolution, said Girard deserved “a standing ovation” for his originality and extensive influence.
“He was one of the true trailblazers of Christian music with Love Song,” Erwin told CCM Magazine. “They were the first of their kind, paving the way for artists like Larry Norman, Keith Green, and so many others who followed. Chuck stood at the very forefront.”
Girard, for his part, said the earthly accolades were nice, but he was looking forward to something greater.
“The real treasure is in Heaven,” he said in 2012, when he was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. “I pray that we will all be in Heaven’s Hall of Fame someday and hear the most amazing words we will probably ever hear: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your lord.’”
Girard died at home in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 11 at age 81.
He was born in California on August 27, 1943, one of Clarance Girard and Dorthea Tomany Girard’s four kids and their only son.
Girard wrote in his autobiography, Rock & Roll Preacher, that his father was an abusive alcoholic. His first memory as a child was trying to get his father to stop hurting his mother. He also had vague recollections of his father taking him to bars and giving him alcohol when he was a toddler.
Girard’s mother was a Catholic who also believed in New Age mysticism and told people’s fortunes. She told Girard that she had had a vision of him as an adult playing piano on a big stage. She enrolled him in lessons when he was 10.
Girard had no interest in music at first. But then he heard the chord progression of “Heart and Soul,” also known as the “doo-wop progression,” and became obsessed.
“I had no other goal in life than to make music,” he said.
In high school in Santa Rosa, California, he and some friends formed a pop group they called The Castells. Girard’s mother gave him $100 to make a demo tape, and The Castells went to Hollywood and landed a record deal. They signed with Era, agreeing to 3.5 cents per record, split between the four boys.
The Castells had a hit in the summer of 1961. The song “Sacred” was the 20th-most-played song on the radio. The following spring, “So This Is Love” rose to 21.
Girard soon found himself sharing stages with some of the biggest acts of the time—Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Vee, Brenda Lee, The Righteous Brothers—and spending the rest of his time at house parties, drinking without stopping for days.
“I felt like I was floating,” Girard wrote, recalling one binge. “From the day I first got drunk, I attempted to stay in the state of some degree of inebriation as much as I could.”
The Castells floundered and fell apart, but Girard stayed in Los Angeles. He started working with producer Gary Usher, who was close with the Beach Boys and hoped to replicate their success with another band that captured a youth culture fantasy he could package and sell: surfing or hot rods or something.
In 1964, with Girard along for the ride, Usher threw together “The New Sounds of the Silly Surfers” by the Silly Surfers, “The New Sounds of the Weird-Ohs” by the Weird-Ohs, “Hot Rod Hootenanny” by Mr. Gasser and the Weird-Ohs, “Surf Route 101” by the Super Stocks, and “Little Honda” by the Hondells.
They got lucky with the Hondells, when the group’s paean to Japanese motorbikes, “Little Honda,” charted at No. 9.
Girard was also along for a generational ride. With the rest of the hippies, he discovered marijuana and psychedelic drugs and came to understood his life as a spiritual quest.
“I believed that I had discovered the key to the secrets of the universe,” Girard wrote in his autobiography. “A dimension of consciousness opened up. … I had no realization of the implications regarding God and the devil.”
He experimented with Eastern philosophies, astrology, the occult, and radical vegetarian diets. At one point, Girard ate only avocados, asparagus, and bananas.
Rock musician Denny Correll, part of a band called Fifth Cavalry, convinced him that Jesus was at least part of the spiritual answer he was looking for. Backstage at a concert, Correll pressured Girard to declare Jesus his Savior.
“I halfway meant it, but mostly it was to get him off my back,” Girard later wrote. “His fervor was infectious, and he could easily make you believe that what he preached was true.”
The two men and a group of hippie musicians started a commune. They shared everything they owned, did drugs, played music, and talked endlessly about the Bible. One man emerged as the leader and started having revelations that they were supposed to move to Hawaii, where they could live off the land until Jesus returned to establish his millennial kingdom, with New Jerusalem located on the islands.
It didn’t work out. Girard ended up, as he would tell the story later, wet in a cave by himself with a guitar. He returned to the mainland to try to relaunch his career in music.
He continued to pursue enlightenment through drugs until he had a horrible experience with LSD in Utah.
“I had no sense of any other living thing in the universe. … There was complete silence,” Girard later wrote. “It frightened me to the core of my being.”
At about the same time, Girard’s new band, Love Song, kept getting invited to Calvary Chapel. Girard, Tommy Coomes, Jay Truax, and Fred Field would pick up hippie hitchhikers. Again and again, the hitchhikers asked them if they’d heard about Calvary Chapel.
Girard finally decided to check it out for himself. He sat in the back and was overwhelmed by the feeling of Christ’s love. The pastor preached about sin and redemption and how Jesus died for us because we could not get right with God on our own. Girard started crying—deep, heaving sobs.
“Snot was all over my beard, and tears were all over my face. But, I felt clean!!!” he later wrote. “I had asked, and it had been given to me. I had sought with all my heart and I had found. I had knocked incessantly, and the door had been opened to me.”
Unexpectedly, the other members of Love Song also had born-again experiences at Calvary Chapel. They added another member, John Mueller, and started writing and singing songs about Jesus in 1970. Their music style didn’t change, but now they had “something to say.”
Love Song become one of the house bands at Calvary Chapel, developing the folk-rock sound of the Jesus People movement.
As a professional musician with the most recording experience, Girard was also brought in to produce the first Maranatha! Music compilation in 1971, which was called “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.” He was not credited but made key decisions about keeping the music simple and evangelistic.
As Girard told Rolling Stone magazine at the time, the music was meant to glorify God, not the musicians. And he didn’t want the songs to get tripped up in artistic ambiguity. Every song, he said, should present its message in “plain simple language with no deep intellectual vibes. What we’re saying is Jesus, one way. If you want the answer, follow it.”
The Maranatha! Music album was sold to Christian bookstores out of the trunk of a car but sold 160,000 copies and launched a series of compilation albums that defined early CCM.
Love Song released its own self-titled debut album in 1972 and headlined at Explo ’72, the Christian music festival and evangelistic rally that was promoted as a rejoinder to the hippie movement and its big music festivals, especially Woodstock.
Girard was not the biggest star of the Jesus music scene, but he was very influential. As Songwriter Magazine reported, he “always possessed a rare combination of musicality, heartfelt simplicity, and spiritual conviction,” and “his talent helped bridge secular musicianship with evangelical faith at a pivotal moment in American culture, lending authenticity to what would become a major genre.”
Love Song produced a second album, “Final Touch,” in 1974, and Girard went solo in ’75. The final song on his first album, “Sometimes Alleluia,” became one of his biggest hits. Girard would call it his “first worship song.”
In the midst of all his success, however, Girard continued to struggle with alcohol addiction. He got to the point where he couldn’t make it a day without consuming alcohol and was drinking vodka in the morning, hoping he could hide the smell.
His wife, Karen, confronted him in 1979 with the help of pastors Chuck Smith and Kenn Gulliksen, whose church would later grow into the Vineyard movement. They sent him to rehab.
Girard recalled it was a crushing moment when he first sat in a circle of addicts, opened his mouth, and said, “I’m Chuck Girard. I am a backslidden Christian singer, and I’m an alcoholic”—but it was also the beginning of healing.
After rehab, Girard went to a Vineyard Bible school and studied what Scripture said about music. He grew convicted that he should serve the church and focus his talents on worship more than performance.
“Music is almost always about worship in the Bible,” he later wrote. “Sometimes it’s warfare, sometimes celebration, all of it brings praise to God.”
He shifted his focus to worship ministry in the 1980s and, according to the obituary written by his family, embraced a “church-centered calling that remained his passion for the rest of his life.”
Girard released his final album in 2024. It is an eclectic collection of songs about pain, uncertainty, and, of course, Jesus. He released it at the same time he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.
“Here’s what I know,” Girard said. “I was blind but now I see; Jesus is the only answer to life’s problems; the Bible is the truth and can be trusted; surrender yourself to doing it God’s way; build your life on believing the truth and forgiving and being forgiven.”
Girard is survived by his wife, Karen, and their four daughters, Kristin, Alisa, Cherie, and Nikki. Memorial services are planned for The Gate Church in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 26 and at Calvary Chapel Golden Springs in Diamond Bar, California, on September 20.
