By Mike Perschon / Photographs by Bryce Meyer
Sweat runs down my face. Drops sting my eyes, which are half-blinded by the glare of stage lights. I strain to see people I know in the shadows of this dimly-lit bar: the women’s rugby team our bassist’s girlfriend plays for takes up an entire table, pounding back drinks; our drummer’s tech-head buddies, looking emasculated next to the rugby players; a few friends from the church I attend, completely comfortable despite the fact that our band, Seven Devil Fix, is playing hard rock. Their faith is anonymous here. They’re simply part of the scene, applauding in waves whenever we finish a song. Our own volume is a tsunami by comparison, a roar so loud my ears will ring until I drift off to sleep around 4 a.m., after the final song has been sung, last call announced, and the gear safely stowed in our practice space. Tomorrow night we’ll haul it out again. I’ll set up my amp and plug in my guitar in a very different venue.
Tonight, wine is one of many spirits imbibed, probably the least popular in the type of places Seven Devil Fix plays. Tomorrow, if wine is present, it will be a sacrament of the spirit, consumed in a ritual nearly two millennia old. Tonight I sing for the pleasure of these patrons; tomorrow I will sing for the applause of heaven. In less than 24 hours my feet will touch down in two worlds, and while I’m learning to live with the tension between the secular and the sacred, it hasn’t always been easy.
Music and faith. These have been the two constants of my life, and my work, for as long as I can remember. If it’s true that we practice our future professions through childhood play, then I started sowing these career seeds very early. I made my public debut at age five, singing “Jesus Loves Me” and accompanying myself, bereft of skills, on a plastic toy electric guitar, in front of a small church congregation in Fox Creek, a logging and oil town midway between Edmonton and Peace Country.
I delivered my first sermon that same year, atop a dirt pile in the schoolyard at recess. My family was heavily involved in church work: my father led music, singing “Amazing Grace” to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun,” while my mother taught our Sunday school. We sang in church on Sundays, but we also danced to the Beach Boys and Elvis in our living room. As a child, I sensed no tension between worlds.
When we moved to Medicine Hat and began attending a conservative Baptist church, however, the divide became apparent. At our new church, “Amazing Grace” was not open to modification, and kids didn’t play toy guitars. Baptists are the brunt of many jokes because they consider dancing a sin, so my sister and I stood straight in church and at our youth group. But we also won “crazy dance” competitions at school dances and shoved our way through the crowd to get a better view of Duran Duran and David Bowie at Commonwealth Stadium in 1987.
I wasn’t a hell-raiser or a rebel. I loved my faith. I was raised to believe in a better world, and I do. But I was also drawn to pretty much every ’80s-era Christian anathema. I played Dungeons & Dragons, devoured Conan The Barbarian paperbacks, followed my love of myth and legend to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (which wasn’t yet in vogue for Christians), and by my late teens started to play – gasp! – heavy metal. I grew my hair long, traded Roots sweatshirts for T-shirts adorned with skulls, and doctored my jeans with sandpaper and bleach.
“Mike,” one venerable church usher asked, “when are you going to start dressing like a Christian?”
Just as I started gearing up to become a rock star, I came under the mentoring guidance of an associate pastor named Craig Ginn. Associate pastors are often in charge of a church’s younger congregants, but Craig was like no pastor I’d met before. His long black hair, faded jeans and leather jacket were more John Cougar than John Wesley. He sang U2 and Bob Dylan tunes in his sermons, and performed in bars to support his first indie release (which the backup singers for – again, gasp! – Bon Jovi had sang on).
Until then, I’d been waffling on what to do after I finished high school. I wanted to do something artistic and was basking in the popularity that came with being the lead singer of one of Medicine Hat’s few live rock acts. But 18 years of Protestant guilt therapy was telling me to use my talent “for the Lord.” Until meeting Craig, I thought I’d have to choose one of two paths. Instead, I decided to pursue dual careers: pastor and rock star.
If I knew how complicated my life would become, I would have quit my band and become a teacher, just like my father had advised. But I was stubborn, young and idealistic. Once I had a degree from a theological school, I figured, my ideas about rock music in the church would be respected, accepted and implemented. So I moved to Edmonton and, during the day, attended classes at North American Baptist College. At night, I was either rehearsing or playing in clubs around the city in a metal band called Athan Asia.
Christian rock in Alberta was still in its infancy. Christians were just starting to ask why the devil should get all the good music, so in addition to clubs, Athan Asia played churches. Yet for our efforts, we were accused of myriad infractions: our music couldn’t be “Christian” because it was too loud and the lyrics unintelligible; we encouraged dancing; one elder denounced our stage backdrop, painted to look like a brick wall, as “Satan’s cloth”; we saw countless frowns and demonstrative walk-outs; we were denied payment for a set and told, “If Jesus walked by the church and saw what was going on, he would have walked right on by.”
At one Christian music festival, a country artist sat us down and enlightened us that his God was the God of the “quiet stream and the rippling brook.” I remember thinking that he’d never read the part in the Bible about the walls of Jericho falling down.
Category: Career Track, Entrepreneurship, Profiles, Work
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