Praise the Lord, and tighten the guitar strings
Among the Thirsty is reaching out to its generation - and the recording companies.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published August 28, 2005
COCOA - One sunny Sunday late last month, the members of the Christian rock band Among the Thirsty were in the back of a green Ford Expedition, on their way to a battle of the bands and a shot at a godly kind of stardom.
Ryan Squitieri, the lead singer, was in the back. Greg Smith and Josh Yates, drums and guitar, respectively, were in the way back. Brock Douglas, who plays bass, was in Australia on a mission trip.
At the wheel: Al Squitieri, Ryan's dad, a Pinellas County sheriff's deputy who doubles as the band's manager.
"We'd love to get our music out everywhere," he was saying. "We'd love to get them on secular stations - not just Christian radio."
Lots of bands want that, of course, and while it's a more likely option now than it was, say, five or even three years ago, making it in music is never easy. But Thirsty's off to a good start.
These four boys have been together for only 21/2 years. But in February, at Real Fest, a Christian band competition in Tampa, they came in third out of 30 acts. In June, Breakaway, a magazine for Christian youth, picked one of their songs to be on a 15-track CD - and that was out of 300 entries.
Now they have a chance of signing their first deal.
"We have not actually, technically signed anything yet," Al said. "We'll probably make an announcement on our Web site."
In the meantime, they do stuff like this road trip to Cocoa.
They travel in the Expedition, a 1998 model with just under 100,000 miles on it and a white Wells Cargo trailer attached to the back. They go from venue to venue around Florida in a loose circuit of gigs from Christian coffee shops to Wednesday night church services. Their bookings have taken them from Dunnellon to Zephyrhills to Plant City to Safety Harbor to West Palm Beach to Brooksville and back.
Their music, they all say, is a ministry - the word of God delivered with drumsticks and guitars.
But it's also a way to spread a different sort of word - and get their piece of a growing, increasingly big-money piece of the recording industry.
"God knows your dreams'Ryan, Josh and Greg are 19 years old; Brock is 18. They like Subway and Taco Bell and Whataburger. They wear Old Navy jeans. They drop constant quotes from the movie Napoleon Dynamite. Ryan loves the PlayStation video game called Brotherhood of the Blade. Greg wears a retainer when he sleeps.
They all went to school in Pinellas County - Ryan and Brock at Tarpon Springs High, Josh at Palm Harbor, Greg at Clearwater's Calvary Christian - and they attend large, evangelical churches.
They dropped out of college to try to make Among the Thirsty work.
They quit part-time jobs.
They live at home.
On that sunny Sunday last month, when they got to the Cocoa Riverfront Park on the Indian River, they unloaded from the trailer three Tupperware containers of Among the Thirsty T-shirts.
Around the park were tents: the Apostle Clothing Co., outreachthebeach.com. Banners hawked shirts with Jesus slogans: The Way, The Truth, The Life; 1 Savior+
3 Nails = 4 Given; Changin' The World. Sponsors included the First Christian Church of Merritt Island, the local Re/Max realty team, JC's Inspirational Tee's and Beef O'Brady's.
The crowd was mainly teens, tweens and 20-somethings.
According to their do-it-yourself media guide, the mission of Among the Thirsty is "to edify and encourage the Body of Christ, and to reach our generation with the Good News of Jesus Christ."
Ryan and the boys pray before they drive, pray before they eat, pray before they practice, pray before they play. They'll ask for strength, a productive day and "to continue to make us that well-oiled machine."
In Cocoa, a bit before their turn on the stage, Dawn Valentine, a friend from near Weeki Wachee, led their regular preperformance devotional.
"Satan," she told them, as they sat in lawn chairs set up in a circle, "will put things in your path that will throw you off the course."
"We could be presented with riches, possessions and fame," Greg said to the group, "with the price of compromising our belief, our truth, our morals. I know we're not going to do that.
"We know that God is going to take us there."
"God knows your dreams. God knows your expectations," Ryan would say later. "God doesn't put dreams in you just so he can break your heart. God's not like that. He's not a cosmic killjoy."
A big collection plateSay this much for God: He's doing really, really well in pop music these days.
Once a niche category, Christian rock is shifting from Christian book stores to Virgin MegaStores.
"The lines between secular music and Christian music are starting to blur," said Jaime Feldman, a Los Angeles-based exec for Capitol Records.
Some who follow the scene say the music is better, that's all. Others say the genre's surge is part of a larger trend that includes the stunning commercial success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, the rise of so-called megachurches among America's estimated 100-million evangelical Christians and the faith-first presidency of George W. Bush.
"Christians are coming out of the closet," Paul Lauer said.
He's the founder of Motive Marketing in Westlake Village, Calif., and the man who was in charge of marketing Passion, which made $370-million at the box office.
"Christians in general - and that filters down to Christian consumers - are asserting themselves more in popular culture," he said. "They're engaging in that culture and deciding to have an effect on how that culture goes."
Church attendance overall is static at best in this country - if not in decline after a brief post-Sept. 11 spike - although those numbers depend on who's getting measured and who's doing the measuring.
This much is for sure:
God is getting hipper.
And more marketable.
Counting movies, books, TV shows and anything and everything else, the Christian "market" is $4.2-billion strong, according to the evangelical Christian trade group CBA.
Music is very much a part of that.
"In the last three years," said Cameron Strang, the publisher of Relevant magazine in Orlando, a religion-focused music magazine, "there's been an explosion of Christian artists being successful in mainstream rock."
The biggest of the big labels - EMI, Sony BMG, the Warner Music Group - are buying up the smaller Christian labels. Meaning: "Christian artists," Strang said, "are now part of a bigger machine."
It's no longer just Michael W. Smith and dc Talk.
MercyMe got big in 2001.
Casting Crowns did in 2003.
Switchfoot broke through in 2004.
The newest huge "crossover" band: Relient K. The Christian pop-punk quintet from Ohio started to gain notice with Gotee Records, a smaller, religiously oriented label, before signing with Capitol Records earlier this year. Their album Mmhmm has since gone gold.
Sample lyric:
I fought you for so long
I should have let you in.
"One day we got a call from Capitol: "How do we do this together?"' Gotee president Joey Elwood said from his office in Nashville. "Capitol has absolutely not made a false move."
"I didn't pick up Relient K because they were a Christian band," said Feldman, the Capitol exec in L.A. "I picked them up because their last record did 400,000 without air play, and they can do 2,000 to 5,000 a night on tour, and they bring an Internet fan base of 80,000 to 100,000. Why wouldn't you want to be in business with this band?"
"The Christianity thing didn't frighten me," Feldman added. "That's a whole market to tap into."
Some say that's because of the supposed crassness of culture in this country, this vague idea of a general crumbling of morals in America.
"Now there's a positive alternative to the garbage out there," said Bob Waliszewski, a media specialist for the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family.
The boys from Among the Thirsty have thoughts too.
"People are searching," Ryan said one day in the Expedition. "They're looking for a reason.
"War is always good for Christian music."
In the end, though, Ryan and the rest of the Thirsty kids don't totally care why the opportunity is there.
Just that it is.
Flip-flops and blue jeansThree of the four sets of parents pitched in $1,500 apiece to get this band off the ground - mainly for CDs and studio time. Josh's dad is the "public relations" man. Greg's is "the CFO."
Al talks about quitting his job as a deputy to be Thirsty's full-time manager. He says they're going to have an "in-house spiritual adviser" out on tour.
For now, though, they play for small crowds in churches and for little kids at summer camps and Christian retreats. Sometimes they play for food. Sometimes they play for free.
They have shows every weekend until Christmas, Al says, "with a dozen pending."
But his talks with Symeron, a studio and small startup label in Tampa, have not led to anything official.
"There's more interest than there is an agreement," Symeron's Robert Coates said one day over the phone.
So here they were at the battle of the bands over on the Atlantic coast.
"We know we're going to probably draw attention from the major labels," Al said. "Only because of their talent. Their songwriting is their own. They're talented. They're extremely gifted.
"I've done security work for a lot of festivals," he said, "and they really are that good."
Thirsty was the last to take the stage.
They were dressed the way they always dress. Flip-flops, blue jeans, white collared shirts untucked with the sleeves rolled up, all "fresh and clean." Their look.
Josh's red Calvary Christian shirt showed through his white, Saks Fifth Avenue button-down, and he had on a bracelet with a Jesus fish.
They look good together, Thirsty does. Josh is the short and slim one, Ryan shaggy and stocky, and Greg plays the role of class-clown drummer with black-dot earrings with bright-red crosses set in the middle of the studs. With Brock, and his sprigs of dreads, they look even better, and sound better, too.
Here, though, in Cocoa, the three of them on stage got loud cheers from the young, smallish crowd sitting and standing on a grassy field. Maybe the loudest. Ryan sang:
Jesus, savior, I call on you
Take me, cleanse me, make my heart pure
"Cause today, that's fallen away, yes today is a brand new day.
Of the 10 or so bands, Among the Thirsty was voted third place.
For that, they won $50, Al said. They gave it back to the youth group that put on the event.
Back in the Expedition, on the way home, Ryan asked out loud: "Who wants to be in a band?"
"I do," Greg said from his seat in the back.
"Me, too," Josh said.
"I want to be in a band," Ryan said, slowly, with the sound of sarcasm - but with a smile on his face.
"I pray that the place is full'The boys say they know where they're going.
"We know what our calling is," Ryan said.
"The more we give to him," Greg said, "the more he will return it in abundance."
On another Sunday, a week after Cocoa, Dawn Valentine, the friend who leads the preperformance devotionals, was sitting in a pew near the front of Palm Harbor United Methodist Church.
It was about an hour before an evening show.
"I pray that the place is full," she said.
"Ryan said he hoped God would bring a billion people to tonight's show."
After sound check, and before $4 at the door, Mike Valentine, Dawn's husband and Thirsty's "sound guy," called out: "Let's break!
"Y'all need your devotion time."
They gathered in a small room where the pastor gets ready.
Al was wearing Rockports and a Hawaiian-style shirt and had his Among the Thirsty business cards in a clear plastic lanyard hanging from his neck by a strap that said What Would Jesus Do.
"No girls in the green room," he said. "You guys will thank me for that five years from now."
Under Brock's white shirt was a Tarpon Springs Fellowship of Christian Athletes T-shirt.
Josh had on a black Nike ball cap. Forward or backward on stage?
"Forward makes you approachable," Al told him. "Backward makes you a gang banger."
Dawn led the devotional, and then the boys put on their white shirts and their pink ties with their loose knots, and there was more prayer.
"Minister from the stage, like you do," Al told them as they filed out of the room, through another door and toward the stage.
Show time.
A huge wooden cross was up above, hanging behind them, the merchandise table with T-shirts and CDs was out in the hall, and inside, down in front of the raised stage, were screaming kids in padded pews in maybe the front third of the church.
"All right, everybody!" Ryan yelled into the microphone. "This is what's going to happen! I need everybody to get out of your seats ..."
And they did, hands in the air, palms facing up.
- Michael Kruse can be reached at 352 848-1434 or mkruse@sptimes.com
TO LEARN MOREFor more information about Among the Thirsty, visit the band's Web site at www.amongthethirsty.com