Like many other Pentecostal preachers – who were moving into politics at a rapid rate – Swaggart believed that the Holy Ghost emboldened him to witness the arrow-straight truths of the Bible. Some stations even took him off the air for his religious and cultural bigotry. Critics reviled his holier-than-thou pulpit posturing and his bellicosity. He had honed a brash, bold, loud style of preaching that made him a revered figure, both in the context of the Assemblies of God – a group of affiliated churches that formed the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination – and in the broader world of evangelicalism. At its peak, his ministry was taking in over one million dollars a week. His popular crusades and regular services appeared on television sets across the United States and around the world. Russ Ballard’s It’s Good To Be Here is out now (opens in new tab) via BMG Records, and he tours Europe from March 13.The television preacher Jimmy Swaggart became a Christian megastar in the 1980s broadcasting from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And that line: ‘If you’re young and you’ll never be old, music can make your dreams unfold’, I still believe that. “I think the song will resonate for the next hundred years,” he considers, “whether people want to believe there’s a god or not. Russ Ballard believes God Gave Rock And Roll To You’s message lives on, now more than ever. I believed that he could somehow turn things around. Eric showed up and stayed until the very end of the video shoot, which lasted until three in the morning. “We were concerned about whether he was healthy enough or strong enough to do it. “When it came time to shoot the video, Eric begged to be in it, even though he hadn’t played on the record,” Simmons wrote in his book Kiss And Make-Up. Touchingly, God Gave Rock And Roll To You II marked the final contribution to Kiss of drummer Eric Carr before he succumbed to heart cancer, aged just 41. God knows how much money that song has made me, but it’s probably bought me my house."Īlthough Kiss reached No.4 in the UK with their version, in January 1992, for once the song’s commercial performance was not Simmons’s chief concern. Apparently, Gene said on the TV show School Of Rock: ‘When I wrote God Gave Rock And Roll To You…’ But at least the royalties are good. I don’t mind that most people think it’s a Kiss song. “Funnily enough, when I wrote the song, it was about the speed Kiss made it. “That new lyric was more universal, perfect for what Kiss were doing,” he says. Now, instead of the quaint instruction to ‘ love your friend and love your neighbour/Don’t step on snails, don’t climb in trees/Love Cliff Richard but please don’t tease’, listeners were urged to ‘ put your faith in a loud guitar’. The tweaked title of Kiss’s version, God Gave Rock & Roll To You II, denoted that the New Yorkers had raised the tempo and rewritten the verse lyric. That evening, when they came on, I was in the wings, and suddenly Kiss walk up in their makeup and platform heels, about seven-and-ahalf feet tall. At the sound-check, they weren’t in any slap. “One night in about 1973, we were playing in New York with Wishbone Ash and Kiss,” he remembers. They tried out a few bands, then came back and said: ‘ Kiss are going to do it.’”īy this time Ballard had already made the acquaintance of Gene Simmons and co. Nigel told me he was collating the soundtrack, and he’d suggested God Gave Rock And Roll To You for the final scene. Then in the early 90s, Ballard was sitting in the lobby of a US record label, when former Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison stopped and told him about an upcoming movie called Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the sequel to a hit comedy about two rock-obsessed slackers, played by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.
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