Fun, Fun, Fun?

A friend recently queried:
…was New Hope all that much fun?
This is my embellished response.

Dear__________, I’ll preface my answer by saying …IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES…IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES.

Having been in many different performing and rehearsing situations, Continentals (both Originals and later 60’s years), Free Fare, LIFE, Goodtime Singers (back up for Tennessee Ernie Ford) and having been in charge of rehearsing (and later critiquing) hundreds of kids for work on cruise ships and theme parks I’d have to say…New Hope was certainly one of them. I could write a book. Oh, wait…I did. I covered a lot of tour stories in my memoirs GAS FOOD LODGING…next exit.

I’ll start this way. Each year, each personnel change within the year, and each tour combine to make bitter-sweet special memories. Each tour had it’s own landscape…face , if you will, to look back on. There are personalities involved in those three years that make them special above all the other tours I’ve ever been on. I met and performed with people that I shall call friends for the rest of my life. I cried with folks that couldn’t take the pressures of touring and for one reason or another left prematurely. I learned so many things that benefited and furthered my career in music. I have busloads of memories that could never be replaced or replicated. New Hope performed in large locations, Universities and colleges, high schools, churches, coffee houses, parks and beaches, etc. We did multiple shows a day, while staying in the homes of strangers at night and existing on offerings, sack lunches and pot luck dinners. Sometimes it seems like a miracle we could hold it together a week…much less a tour.

The concept of a Christian group, able to stand on its own or open for other artists, with a great look, good vocals and super arrangements was a solid one. I don’t think Cam ever thought of the New Hope Singers, at least the first two years, as a “rock” group, more pop and easy listening. With 7 singers and a four piece band that was more believable. Though we were out there on the front line in schools, coffeehouses, and colleges, we were not “Jesus Rock” like Larry Norman or Love Song. Campus Crusade had a similar sized group doing college campuses as New Folk, but they were strictly ministry oriented, and very similar to The New Christy Minstrels.

With the seeming success of that first year with New Hope Singers (the Tambourine Band part had been hotly dropped) Cam took a now-experienced core of performers and added horn players from various Continental tours and created a professional act called Renaissance, sponsored in that show biz venture by a businessman by the name of David Shine. Rick Barberio was enlisted to book this group while Bob Ferro was hired to book New Hope. New Hope was overseen, within Continental Singers Incorporated, by Steve Hilson, who later left to work with the people handling Pat Boone and The Imperials.

Quite honestly as soon as Renaissance came into being, New Hope got shoved into the background and over the next few months, as that “professional” project went south, the company eyes turned back to New Hope to bring back in the money. New Hope picked up some good people, costumes, and music when Renaissance fell. In my third year the consensus, as a group, was we really wanted to minister with our own music, in our own way. Looking back, if I could have hand-picked a group from the four years of New Hope and performed music created by Michael OMartian and many of our own guys I believe that New Hope could have been the first really big musical Christian rock group. Right there with Love Song, PETRA and Second Chapter of Acts. We had the horses but not all together at the same time or in the same group.

The second-year batch of New Hope Singers (the ones I joined in the fall of 1969) were all newbies, except the manager/lead singer, Will Renzema. Some were ex-Continentals and some were auditioned just for the group. Dave the Drummer was from Denver, Rick the bassist was from Indiana, guitarist Martin Downing was from Alameda, in the Bay area, and Alan the keyboardist was a piano player from Southern Oregon. Up front we had myself and Danette (sop) from Portland and Willie (an Original from Portland now living in L.A.)…all with Continental experience, and Cindy Perry (alto) also from the Bay area, Castro Valley. Then there was Connie Baker (second) from Fort Worth, Lyle Countryman from Bakersfield, CA, and Bruce Cripe, from Tucson, AZ. Our bus driver was Ray Smith, from San Diego.

We rehearsed at First Baptist Church Van Nuys, in L.A. and stayed in homes arranged by the church and Cam. I stayed with Cam’s vice-president and former Spurlows Bob and Cheri Miller. She was one of Dean Martins Gold Diggers, appearing weekly on his T.V. show. I just remember very little interaction with them and the vague feeling that something was amiss in the relationship. They had two kids and while we were out on tour that year they split, Bob left, and she ended up eventually married to Cam. Shari went back to Oregon with their two kids.

I believe we started camp without a bass player or had one that left or something, but Bruce knew Rick, had gone to school with him at Fort Wayne Bible College, and Rick (with wife Janice) in tow arrived shortly. It’s too bad we couldn’t have added the lovely voice of Louise, Willie’s wife, but she had just given birth to the youngest member of our traveling troupe, Todd. Yes…we modified our seating set-up just a bit and wedged a crib where a seat had been. Danette was the designated caregiver when Louise was busy because her seat was right by the crib.

The first publicity shot of that group showed a fresh-faced group, anxious to please and eager to hit the road. Anyway, I loved the sound and look of that first group I was in. But we started out traveling with a baby! And smelly baby poop diapers mixed with young 20 something’s is not a recipe for success.

The school show songs were a light pop variety that included a couple originals by last year’s band guys and songs like “Good Morning Starshine”; the Beatle’s “Hey Jude” and “Julia”; Simon and Garfunkle’s “Homeward Bound”; “Everything is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens; “People Gotta Be Free” by the Rascals, and Judy Collins “Both Sides Now”.
At some point in the year we had changes…not all at once, but changes. Dave the Drummer was replaced by Lynn Coulter from New Orleans. Danette was replaced by Bev Snell from Wichita, Rick left and Martin started playing both guitar and bass, with the slack being taken up by keyboards. Aubrey Bowles joined and Lyle went to Renaissance and Will (and family) got off the road and was replaced by Dan Burgess. I confess I do not remember in what order all those changes took place. I do not remember who ran sound although Bruce Braun ( ex-Spurlow, ex-Continental, ex-Renaissance was around to drive or run stuff. Also over the course of the next couple of years we had a business manager that traveled with us. I can’t remember exactly when or how long but one was Art Lindsley, from Pittsburg and Howard parker, from Yorba Linda, CA. Both had toured with Continentals.
As you can probably understand those kind of changes entail lots of extra rehearsal time…and relationship building. That, tour schedule (or lack of it), and bus troubles are the biggest killers of spirit.

Then, in the fall of 1970, after many of us had taken a summer to tour again with Continentals, there was Danny Burgess and his new bride, Soozie. New Hope dropped the Singers part of the name and added horns. Solid players and personalities all. Craig Ware (and wife Sharon) played bass trombone and arranged many charts; Bill Schenk was on tenor bone, Gordon Simmons and Randy Smith played trumpet. Then there was Justin Smith (from Florida) on guitar, Martin Downing now played full-time bass, Lynn Coulter hit the drums and Phil Perkins (from Oklahoma) was our keyboardist. Singers were Lucia Taylor (from big Spring TX) as alto; Judy Cole (from Oakland area) sop; Bruce, Dan Robbins, and Dan Burgess were the guys.
Other Jerry Lanier from Lakeland FL was brought in to play keyboards but he was partially deaf and that created many problems during rehearsals and the few shows he did. The sound and lights department got a whole lot better when we were joined by Dave Misner, a really pleasant fellow from one of the islands in the Puget Sound near Seatlle. He was a wiz and went on to work with a sound and lighting company in L.A. along with Howard Parker. At one point we had a really thin creature, her waist was the same size as Bruce’s thigh, named Pam, singing soprano, but she was so skinny she fell thru a crack in the bus floor and disappeared. I think it was the last year of New Hope that Charlie Steele from Nachadoges (sp), TX joined us a bus driver. . Larry Kingery (tenor) came into the group somehow…or was that the next year? Wow…brain freeze.

One of the bigger projects New Hope took on was the recording and performing (for Gospel Films) of Don Wyrtzen’s musical called “What’s It All About Anyhow”. We did the filming at KTLA. The two young stars of that project were A. Martinez and one of T.V.’s Van Patton boys.

In the fall of 1971, in order to create an instant family Dan and Soozie bought a puppy while we were in the Pacific Northwest and kept it on the bus. Again…poopy dogs and 20 something’s do not mix well in small confined areas. The dog’s legacy was a wet one, always peeing in the bus and would even wonder back down the bus aisle and pee on Gordy’s’ shoes. He died…on the bus…of distemper. Dan and Soozie left the road at Christmas with a broken heart.

I had started my second year with New Hope as sound man. That’s a long story but since you are going nowhere I’ll tell it.

My first tour with New Hope ended really strange. For some reason…lack of booking or whatever…we ended our tour a few weeks early, sometime in April) in Albuquerque. Next morning as we headed across the Southwest towards Tucson to drop off Bruce I became deathly ill. Never found out what I had but when we got to Bruce’s house his mom said I shouldn’t travel and I should stay there a few days and get better. The bus pulled out and I was there for 5-6 weeks…three of which I was pretty sick. When I got better Bruce and I worked for a man his mom knew and earned a bit of cash doing landscaping. When I finally got home to Portland I couldn’t find a job…most of the summer-only jobs had been snatched up by students.

I had already told Cam I was not going back into New Hope but about three weeks into summer I called him and asked if any of the Continental groups would be coming thru Portland and if so could I join one. As it happened, Steve Hilson…the director I had joined for three weeks the previous summer, was headed thru the Pacific Northwest, Canada and Alaska and on to Hawaii. That very satisfying tour carried me into late August.

A number of the folks on the Alaska tour were going to be in New Hope that fall. I contacted Cam and said I would like to go back myself. He said that my spot had tentatively been given to Dan Robbins but I should plan on going to camp (the first couple of weeks in September) anyway in case that didn’t work out. Then a couple days before camp when it looked like Dan would be back Cam asked if I would be the soundman…with the possibility of coming up and doing a rock song now and then when needed. So….I became a sound man. No experience but a good ear and lots of ambition.

Once I was taught where things plugged in, the most difficult thing for me was repairing cords. Mr. Fix-it I am not. That got a whole lot better when Dave Misner came in because besides doing lights he did most of the fixing. I grew to love that job as much as anything I ever did on any tour. Very gratifying. Throughout the fall Martin Downing and I had sat back and discuss the ins and outs of tour and comment on how relieved we were not to have the responsibility of making decisions. All we had to do was get on the bus, get off the bus, set up, do the show, tear down, get on the bus, and go wherever someone else had deemed that we go. Then, as the inner workings of tour became shaky I became disillusioned.

I took my Christmas break in Fort Worth TX because that’s where my girlfriend, Connie Baker, the second soprano from the year before, lived. Connie’s mom had offered to help me get a job there in Fort Worth if I decided not to go back on tour. So I called Cam and expressed my unhappiness with the management and said I wanted to quit. He said “how would you like to be the road manager?” He informed me that Dan and Soozie wouldn’t be returning. He said he would send Ken Waggoner (with his wife Nancy) out for a few weeks to train me and then I could take over management as well as sound. I agreed and New Years day found me in waiting in the Wichita, Kansas airport for the New Hope bus as it slowly moved across the country toward our January destination of snowbound Minneapolis. Ken Waggoner and wife, Nancy, came on board for almost two months to “train” me.

My reason for taking over the management was simple. I believed I could do it correctly because I had seen enough people perform the job badly. I would be working with a great circle of friends and if we had problems they would be group problems…bus, booking, schedule…and not personnel problems. We would work on them together. Developing almost a “them against us” situation with the management, instead of speaking to the group from a management point of view. That philosophy served me well throughout many more years of touring and “being in charge”. The major change for me was being confident about my own decisions and not taking advantage of the management position. I got out of the bus first and met principles and pastors, spoke during offerings and altar calls and called any meetings or rehearsals.

My third year of New Hope started after a restful non-Continental summer in 1971. I had toured with Continental Singers parts of, if not whole summers, in 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70. The summers of 66 and 68 were spent with Uncle Sam. I spent the months in Portland living with my oldest sister, Ginny, and doing things a young 20-something guy does. Going to concerts, playing basketball with my buddies, dating young ladies, and being involved in our church college-age group.

There was a good core group of musicians coming back to New Hope. We had been told we were going to record near the front of the tour so we’d have new product to sell at the concerts. The line up included returnee’s Craig Ware (with wife Sharon), Gordy Simmons, Bruce Cripe, Lucia Taylor, Martin Downing, Dan Robbins, and me. New folks were Kevin Peterson on trombone, Ric Schultz on trumpet, George Gagliardi on guitar, Gary Hughes on keyboard, Jon Robinson and Kerri Martindale (vocals). Charles Steele was driving bus and Dave Misner running lights.

The rehearsal camp was held out west of Los Angeles off I-10 at the site of a small defunct bible college in West Covina, I think. Rehearsals went well and we found a couple of writers among the new people. Between our guys and Michael OMartian and Ralph Carmichael (because we were on Light Records we always had to have a Ralph song or two) we went into the studio (in…Downey?) and came out with a nice recording project. A bit sterile and not exactly “Jesus Rock” but out in front of the Contemporary Christian Music of it’s day, still in the formation stage. We used our own musicians and singers but brought in “ringers’ when it came to keyboards. Our keyboard guy had to leave tour because his father had just passed away. We were doing school shows around the area while recording so we called Don Wyrtzen, who’s musical we had done the year before, a keyboard player himself, and asked him to help us out, which he did. One side of the record had Michael OMartian playing and the other Tom Keene, another well known Christian player from the area.

After our rehearsal period we went to Lake Arrowhead to the Campus Crusade headquarters and went thru a week of evangelism training. We wore our brand new school outfits to do a show that ended our time there. It didn’t go so well. The girls were in hot pants with long vests over them and Jon was wearing a jumpsuit…but no underwear. Oh, the Jon stories I could tell. He had the opposite of sugar diabetes and there fore need to keep his nourishment up. He fainted a few times, both on and off stage. He didn’t last more than a couple months.


I had help in the tour management that year. Helping in their respective areas, especially when it came to critiquing and rehearsing were Bruce Cripe, with the vocals, and Gordy Simmons with the band (later Craig Ware took over when Gordy left mid-tour).

One of the most obvious problems was that yearly we were let down by our bookers. Too many shows (in 1971 we were in the Pittsburgh area and did 42 shows in 14 days), too few shows (both 1970 and 1972 we ended the tour 5-8 weeks early because of failed or non-existing bookings, and weird shows (in 1972 we had to learn a dance set because in one week we played a dance at Mankato State College in Minnesota, headlined a three group rock show in St. Louis, and played an officer’s club dance at Fort Sill, OK). And the really tough one was to try and figure out why we were in Minnesota for a month…in January. The plus side of the Minnesota dates were the shows we played with youth evangelist Bill McKee. But cancellations, bus freeze ups, etc made that winter really hard. And the clincher was the falling thru of 6-8 weeks in Florida, causing an early tour end and eventual demise of New Hope. The name was used by CSI a year later to put a seven guy band on the road (sort of like the Imperials) but it was a short lived effort. That last year we had a booker by the name of Bonnie Larson.

Maybe, in retrospect, all was not fun, fun, fun in the New Hope years. I guess when I look back on things I tend to remember the good stuff better. Or maybe it’s just that the good stuff made all the bad worthwhile.



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