I had a great time back on October 19 of 2002 with J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for the Christian parody band, ApologetiX. One reason it took forever to get the interview posted was that I lost a handheld computer that had much of the transcribed interview on it, and I had to start over with the tedious process. Interviews are easy--transcribing is a pain. Anyway, I finally got it finished on Easter Sunday (He is risen!). I hope you enjoy it. I interviewed J. in my van in the parking lot of Ethiopian Evangelical Church in Aurora, Colorado, about 90 minutes before the ApologetiX concert.
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The Interview
rb: Welcome to Denver, J.
jj: Thanks, Randy!
rb: Have you been in Denver before?
jj: Yes, well we were in Estes Park two years ago and I nearly killed myself singing in your high altitude but it's a little better here, and we were in Pueblo, which isn't Denver, but it's Colorado.
rb: Let's start with sports, then we can get on to the serious stuff. Super Bowl 1988--a dark day for Bronco fans, but something different in your life. Would you comment on Super Bowl 1988?
jj: Good, you're a great interviewer! Yeah, Super Bowl 1988 was when I gave my heart over to Jesus Christ. God had been working on me for a long time. I was religious growing up, and then I went through an [irreligious period]; actually that happened after a period of time when I was searching for God and I felt like the people around me weren't encouraging that and I thought, "Well, I'm just going to live like there's no God and just do whatever I want to do," and that was a real empty pursuit and I just finally came to the end of myself. I was in an empty church right before the Super Bowl in 1988--it was the Broncos and the Redskins; I'm sure you remember what happened (laughter)--and that's when I gave my heart over to the Lord. I didn't realize right at the time the significance of what I was doing; I went away and I probably didn't realize it was like a B-C-A-D kind of line in my life. You could see God's hand in my life throughout; I'd always had basically a fear of the Lord, but this was when it was a total commitment, giving my heart over to Him and I went back to that Super Bowl party a changed man.
rb: What about hockey? Do you follow hockey at all in Pittsburgh?
jj: Yeah, we follow the Penguins and went through the heartache of losing Jagr, and I hope we don't lose Kovalev too--you know, they just curtailed any negotiations until the end of the season. We love Mario there, and I was at the Penguins game where they the first year they went to the Stanley Cup, the first time they had ever gone past, I think, the second round. I think we were playing the Caps. We've made the Caps our whipping boys a few times.
rb: I noticed that a lot of our local CU Buffs ended up as Pittsburgh Steelers. You allude to the Steelers in Rewind Me. We did have some of our Buffs make the Pittsburgh Steelers: Kordell Stewart, Charles Johnson, Chad Brown, a lineman or two. Is that a good thing, to have a pipeline from CU over to Pittsburgh?
jj: How come we kept Kordell but we got rid of Charles Johnson and Chad Brown? Those guys were good! I like Kordell, and there was an interview with him on ESPN last year where he really was very outspoken about his faith and that was neat to see. Tommy Maddox, our new quarterback, I just read an interview with him in USA Today Sports Weekly and he said that the thing that inspired him--you guys know Tommy Maddox because you're from Denver and he was Elway in training, supposedly--Maddox said the thing that inspired him to get back into football was listening to Steven Curtis Chapman's song Dive, and he said it's about taking a leap of faith. I was pretty impressed by that; I don't think you usually hear that on the Top 40.
rb: That's great. I hadn't heard that. Maybe Kurt Warner was an inspiration, too, going that Arena Football route.
jj: They had the same coach. I just love it when athletes are outspoken about their faith.
rb: Were you a baseball fan back in the old We Are Family days with Stargell and Dave Parker and that gang?
jj: Absolutely! I got spoiled because the first year I started watching baseball was 1971 in the playoffs and they won the World Series so you think that's going to happen every year. The next year they went to the last game of the playoffs and in the ninth inning they lost it and then they were always first or second all through the 70s when I was growing up. In 1979, all these last inning comebacks, I remember we were down 3-1 to the Orioles and I went outside and played. When I came home my Dad said, "We won!" So I watched the next two nights. I had to baby-sit next door, and I was jumping up and down watching Tekulve strike them out and watching Stargell's home runs, so yeah, I'm a longtime baseball fan.
Frank Pastore, who was a pitcher for the Reds in the early 70s and 80s, became a fan of ours, and he's a teacher of apologetics which is a double honor me, and we finally got to meet him in southern California--he's a radio host. Recently we played in Atlanta and Steve Bedrosian comes up to me after a show, and I just saw this guy there with his little girl and I said my name is "J. Jackson" and he said "My name's Steve Bedrosian." I said, "Like the ballplayer!" and he said, "Yeah, that's me." I said, "You won the Cy Young Award back in the 1980s. That's rare for a reliever!"
rb: You covered a Josh McDowell event while you were a college reporter before you made your decision for Christ. Can you share a little about that experience?
jj: I must say, you are one of the most prepared reporters I've ever seen. As a former journalism major and former reporter I compliment you for that.
rb: Thank you. I did take a good journalism class in college. It must have helped even though it was twenty years ago.
jj: Only one? That's great. You're good! Yes, they had sent me to cover Josh McDowell. I'd never heard of this guy. He looked like Dick Van Dyke to me. He sounded like Pat Boone and looked like Dick Van Dyke. They said he's written like 20 or 30 books. I thought, What kind of books has this guy written? I've never heard of any of his books, so I go to cover him and I don't want to. I considered myself a Christian at the time; I thought you're American, you're Christian! The born-again Christians with "if you were to die tonight do you know where you'd go?", I thought they were arrogant at the time. I didn't realize that the Bible said that "these were written so you can have that assurance of eternal life." I didn't know that. I just thought, "How do you know your good deeds are going to outweigh your bad deeds?" I didn't know that had nothing to do with it.
So I'm going to see Josh McDowell and he had two topics: One was "Sex, Why Wait?" the one night, and the other night was "The Resurrection Hoax." I'm so glad they sent me to that one, because if they sent me to the first one, I'd have said, "Yeah, I know Josh, but everyone's doing it," but they sent me to this other one, "The Resurrection Hoax." What he did is, he talked about, first of all, how he had set out to disprove the resurrection of Jesus because he was annoyed by the Christians, he wasn't just afraid of them, he was annoyed by them and he wanted to take away what he thought was their phony joy and he wanted to disprove Christianity. So he thought to get to the crux of it first of all you can't disprove Jesus' existence, he found that out real fast, He's a historical figure, even atheists will acknowledge that. But you have to prove whether or not he really rose from the dead.
As Josh delved into it, he became more and more convinced, as many others had before him, that Jesus really did rise from the dead. I'm just typing this all down, and I'm thinking, "This is amazing!"
I'm listening, I had a little tape recorder I'm playing it back, listening to it again
I'm sharing it with other people
I'm not thinking anything like this was a threatening religious sort of thing, I'm just saying, "Isn't this cool? I never heard of this."
It affected me but it didn't convert me, but it definitely planted some seeds in there, and of course, our name now is ApologetiX with an "X" and apologetics with a "C" is what Josh does.
rb: I'm on your email list. I have been for a little while. Getting on a little more serious note I know it's been kind of a tough year for the extended ApologetiX family with some of the situations that have been going on. Would you share a little about some of the difficult life lessons God has been teaching you guys through the experiences of the past year or so?
jj: My older sister died. She had a long illness and needed a liver transplant. She finally got one, but by the time she got one, the rest of her system had gotten infected while she was waiting. It was a steady condition that she faced very courageously. I wouldn't have known she was even sick until my parents told me. My sister, the older sister wanting to be the strong one.
She was always very active in her faith, in her church, and she actually ghost-wrote sermons for the Catholic priest. She was very active with the youth and the priest in her parish was out of touch, and she was a speechwriter and so she started writing his speeches and people liked them so much that pretty soon she was writing nation-wide and they had us down to give apologetics seminars which is kind of a rare thing for that denomination we would teach people how to train them up in the faith, and at her funeral they read one of her sermons that she had written.
It was like hearing a lost tape of the Beatles, some lost nugget. Everybody's paying attention because it's wow it's Jeanine, what did she say? She's taking about how you have to make Jesus number one in your life, and how He has to be your priority. That was just amazing for me because first of all, just the whole situation we were in, in such a traditional church to hear that kind of language and afterwards two people who had been in her church down in Atlanta--she died when she was up in D.C.; her husband had been transferred a few times--they come up and said you know your sister loved your ministry and she said once, "If I ever came into a lot of money I'm giving it all to my brother, and I'm just going to say 'go and do this' because I so much believe in it." So that really meant a lot.
Bill's mother died--she was only 59--his dad died when he was very young. His mother remarried and his mother was a very strong Christian and very active in the community. I found out later on that she had been voted Pittsburgher of the Year for her work with soup kitchens and giving food to the hungry, but she declined the honor because she didn't want it to interfere with her work.
When she was sick--another terminal illness--she said, "Look, this is Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego time, and I believe God can deliver me from this fire, but if He doesn't, that doesn't change my faith in Him, that doesn't change that He is still God."
She declared that at her funeral she did not want anybody dressing in mourning clothes. So everybody had to dress in Hawaii shirts at the funeral home. No lie! Charlie, her husband, was a very strong Christian and it was a very dramatic thing. At the funeral home, you could tell if people were really close to the family because they were the ones wearing Hawaiian shirts--and I loved that! Then the funeral itself was like that. People would go up to talk to Charlie and to console him, and you could tell he was hurting but still he had this shine in his eye and he was telling people about Jesus, and that she had told me, "I want to be remembered for my faith in God. That's all I want to be remembered for." And he shared that with everybody. You could tell there were members of that family that thought, "They're Jesus freaks, and I don't need to hear any of this." But I'm sure he touched a lot of people.
Well, at the funeral they had a time when people could get up and give testimonies about what she had done in their lives--no lie, the funeral service lasted almost four hours. They had praise and worship--they had like 900 songs of praise and worship--but people came up and gave testimonies. It was very interesting because it was very integrated. That's in Pittsburgh, it's in a section where it should be integrated, but sometimes it's not, and so it was very neat. This one guy, an African-American, got up and was talking how when he had a drug and alcohol problem she'd say, "How are we doing today?" and he'd say "Not so good," and she'd reach out and give him a hug and how she always encouraged him.
And he said that when he got clean and sober again and he was back on the construction site, he'd see Bill's mother and Bill's stepfather walking Bill's kids to school or something--they lived with Bill--he'd be waving to them and people on the worksite would say, "Who are they?" and he'd say, "That's my family." It was just so powerful.
God protected us. We went through two car accidents this year. One was totalled and the one that replaced it was almost destroyed, but through it all (my wife was in both of those accidents--not a scratch) our baby daughter was inside of her for the first one--totally okay, with her the second time--totally okay. Our oldest daughter and I were in the first one--not a scratch. So God was really delivered us, and so those funerals there were some very powerful things.
rb: Thanks for sharing that. Life on the road's got to be kind of tough especially when you're going through things like that, like for Bill and for you with the accidents and your sister. What do you feel the impact is on the extended family with being in a touring band? Do you find that's one of the toughest things about being in a band?
jj: Yeah, it's a double-edged sword, Randy. On one hand I love traveling all over the United States. I want to see every state. I like going to cities like Denver. I'm not a big world traveler, because I have such Americanized fast foodish-type tastes. But, I want to see every state. We've played in like 35 of them or something, and coming out West is just great.
What you've got to remember is I worked in the workplace for over 10 years, so I know what it's like to get up and have to leave an hour for work to drive into town, take an hour getting back, you're gone nine hours then 11 hours counting drive time, so in effect we get to more time to spend with our families because we try and do most of our concerts on the weekends. We have the opportunity that we could book a ton even with doing them on weekends we'll do like 100 this year. Maybe once or twice we'll do a whole week's worth of concerts and go all over. But that is a tough thing. The nice thing is I'm home during the week so I can take my daughter to school--my older daughter--I change diapers for the younger one and give her a bottle, and so it's a tradeoff, and you do get weary and it's not glamorous. So many times we have to take an early flight. You've got to drive through the night. We've had ones with no sleep.
The funnier ones are ones where you have a hotel and you have an hour--so you have half an hour to shower and half an hour to sleep and that's not funny. It's funny in retrospect--it's not funny when you're going through it! So that's the down side, but the neat thing is that you run into people who know who you are, and that still just amazes me. Not just at your concerts, but when they see you at the airport and that's just amazing and an honor that we don't take lightly.
rb: Have you had any opportunities to take your families along to any of the Christian festivals, that sort of thing?
jj: Yeah, absolutely. In the earlier days we used to take our wives. Keith and I, especially--our wives would come to almost every single concert. They used to work the merchandise table. Now with kids in school and with more kids, it's harder to do that, but yes, they've gotten to go to a lot. They got to go to Hawaii with us when we went to Hawaii--that was hard leaving the kids behind, you know. I mean, it's so weird to think, "I don't know if I want to go to Hawaii, 'cuz I want to go there but I'm gonna miss my two kids so much; I hate being away from them.
rb: Does Karl bring his horse trailer?
jj: (chuckle) Nooo...he does not bring his horse trailer. Sometimes he brings his horse trainer, but not his horse trailer.
rb: Let's talk about music a little bit. I think that's what this is all supposed to be about. I was a little hesitant at first when I heard some of your stuff, not because it wasn't well done or you didn't have good lyrics, but the biggest concern I had was kids hearing the tune, you know, Eminem's for example, you know Slim Shady, and thinking of some of the nastier lyrics and I'm wondering if that's something you kind of had to work through as far as deciding if there were songs that maybe had so many negative connotations that you didn't even want to deal with them?
Some of the modern stuff that's pretty graphic, does that enter into your thought pattern when you decide what songs to parody?
jj: You know what, in the earlier days it certainly did. And I'm gonna tell why it doesn't as much now, just because I came to a point where I prayed so much about it, once I felt like He was guiding us in that direction, we followed that and believed, like "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who gives liberally and without finding fault," and don't second-guess it. But we prayed all along, "Show us if we're not going the right direction."
I come from a background where when I first got saved I got rid of every single--I mean, I was cleaning out drawers, and I had so much stuff. I had hundreds and hundreds of albums, hundreds of CDs probably. CDs were relatively new; I didn't even have a CD player and I already had like a couple hundred CDs, and cassettes--hundreds and hundreds of cassettes, hundreds and hundreds of 45s. Some people exaggerate but I know, cuz I counted them. I know how many I had. And I got rid of everything. I had so much that I was finding stuff in drawers; I thought I gave all this away--here's more! I really thought I was totally done with music. I used to be a real collector, everything was alphabetized and stuff, and so when I started getting Christian music I had to purposely keep them sort of out of order, and sometimes I'd purposely buy cassettes because they were junkier so it wouldn't make them my gods ever again. So it was really weird for me because I really thought I was done with music. It was a very strange story about how I felt God really specifically showed me I should get back in music but I was totally surprised when it happened.
I wasn't waiting on a leash like, "When can I get back into music, God?" It wasn't one of those things at all. And even though music had been so important to me, when I gave it to him, which was something that had been eating at me for maybe a year or two, even back then when I was a Catholic boy, for Lent it was a very serious thing, and at Lent, like in eighth grade or something, I gave up TV, and I took it seriously. And of course, this special came on TV I wanted to watch so badly that I copped out and I just tape recorded it, but it cured me of an addiction to TV at the time. So I really was feeling, "Could you give up music for God?" And when I finally came to the point where I said I'm willing to do this. I did it, and it was kind of like Abraham offering Isaac--not nearly of the significance of that, but I mean a similar thing where God wants to see if you're ready to do it; you do it, and He gives it back to you and He blesses you because you were willing to do that. I used to want to be a rock star, you know, and things would always fall apart. You get to a certain point where it looks like you've got a band running and this guy quits or you fire this guy and it falls apart. Then when I had no aspirations to be a Christian rock person or anything of the sort I started writing these parodies to teach myself Bible things and people loved them. At first when I did them I thought, "I hope this isn't a stumbling block for anybody. God, we don't want to do this if anybody has any problem with it." We prayed and prayed, and we just keep saying, "Open up doors that are meant to be open. Close them if you don't want us to do it." Doors just kept opening and opening and the biggest doors that have opened for us have been ones where we have nothing to do with trying--when we first got on 700 Club somebody else totally did that. Howard Stern--for better or for worse--playing our stuff three times. We didn't approach him. They came to us. All these various doors opening up have been through other things, so it's just been an amazing thing.
rb: It's like Psalm 37:4, you're delighting yourself in the Lord and He ends up giving you that desire of your heart back.
jj: My favorite psalm is Psalm 37. I love Psalm 37. We did a Neil Diamond parody in the early days called Psalms Come True to Song Sung Blue. It was about Psalm 37.
rb: So do you usually get a lyrical theme first and then look for a song or do you hear a song and then just start thinking of lyrics, or is there any pattern to how you do your parodies?
jj: It can happen a variety--three different ways, I'd say basically. One is, you have a song and you say, what can we do with this song? What lends itself well to doing a parody of this song.
The other is, you have a theme. What song has a word that rhymes with Mephibosheth? The third way is, you're not thinking of anything and you're just driving in your car or in the shower or praying...
rb: You drive in the shower?
jj: Or in the shower! Or praying. (chuckle) And God just puts something into your head. And I've said this before, but when I was a kid they had these toys and they were called Chip Away. I got them for Christmas one year. They were blocks of plaster, like cement. You'd get your little hammer and you'd hit on them. Inside there were statues of basketball players and football players. It made you feel like you were the one sculpting them, but they were totally in there all along, and it was just your effort. I feel that way with these songs, having written about 500 of them. It's like you start writing them, God already put this word...I didn't even know I was going to get to this word, or it's just a perfect turnaround rhyme and having done that over the years and believing that He has it in there and it's just you getting the blood, sweat and tears out of there, it gives you the confidence that if you get a little bit of a song you can go ahead, like the Eminem parody that you mentioned before. I had pieces of that. That took months and months. It's like working on a jigsaw puzzle where you do a little bit here, you work a little bit on the third verse, or you've got a little piece of the chorus or the first verse and you just keep moving to where you can get it. We're working on maybe 20 songs at a time, so it's like alright, I can't stand listening to this song anymore, let's work on this, let's work on that. Somehow it all comes together.
I was writing words to a couple of songs on the new CD up 'til the last week. There were just a few little things where I said, "Oh what do I do here?" Thankfully my wife loves our stuff, plays it a zillion times, and loves to listen to me rewinding it 7,000 times. She totally doesn't mind that so when we're in the car and I'm working on that I've really been blessed to have a wife who's a fan of the band, in fact she plays the new CD so much, I'm like, "I don't want to hear this anymore."
rb: That beats the alternative, right? Let's do a couple of quick fill-in-the-blanks here. I know you don't really like to talk and it's tough to get you going...
jj: Yes!
rb: ...but let's just do some quickies. What's your favorite food on the road?
jj: Cheeseburgers or pizza.
rb: Health food nut! Favorite beverage?
jj: Coca-Cola.
rb: Favorite sport to watch in hotel rooms if you're stuck and there's ESPN and everything else available, what are you going to watch?
jj: Hmmm. I love to read about baseball and do the statistics, but I'll acknowledge, I know it's a boring game to watch the whole thing. I like to watch football whenever it's a team that I care about, whether it's college or it's the pros.
rb: Any other hobbies outside of music and your interest in sports and Bible study? Do you do needlepoint or anything exotic our readers would be interested in?
jj: I love to play Frisbee, that's one of my favorite things to do. Like you said, music and sports and stuff. I like to stand on my head and take off my shoes and socks.
rb: Of course with the festivals and combined gigs, you've had the opportunity to meet a lot of Christian bands. What would be some of your favorite Christian bands to listen to?
jj: You know what? I love Christian music from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and now, and I think one of the all-time greatest Christian rock albums is Jesus Freak by DC Talk. I know a lot of people bought that thing, but it's just I think it's so many good songs and I think their Supernatural album is very good, too. The Newsboys, the trilogy of Going Public, Take Me to Your Leader and Step Up To The Microphone are just great.
rb: Have you heard the new one?
jj: Yes, I like the first song. It really rocks. You know that Giving It Over.
rb: Steve Taylor's back.
jj: Taylor was a huge influence on us. Steve Taylor, Keith Green and Larry Norman and Carmen...those guys taught me that you could put humor into Christian music and that it was okay to use your powers for good. The other thing is Franciso, Green and Carmen really taught me about telling a story. Telling a story from a character within the Bible so we owe a real nod to them. Petra was great because they were always incorporating Scripture and they were never ashamed to do that. It was never "Jesus is my girlfriend" and they would always put Scripture verses with their words and I always liked that so that was a big influence. I love all that stuff, stuff I hear now, there's a lot of great stuff out there and my wife's a big fans of things like Caedmon's Call, FFH, Bebo Normon, that kind of stuff, so I'm exposed to that, I like that. There's so much good stuff out there. I liked Stryper when they were out. I thought they were some of the most talented heavy metal musicians I've ever heard period. The harmonies, and the music.
We just played Hawaii with FFH. That was one of the best Christian concerts I ever saw. Those guys just made me want to quit what I do because they do it so well. They play, they harmonize so well, it was just overwhelming just how talented they are.
rb: What favorite dead writer?
jj: Dead writer? (laughing)
rb: Yeah, you know, like whether it's...
jj: Book writer?
rb: Yeah, like Francis Schaeffer, or...
jj: Okay. Walter Martin. His writing style was just so funny and he knew so much. When I heard sermons of his before he died when they used to play them on the Bible Answer Man on Fridays--him and R. C. Sproul, when I hear them teach--you know what they say about Jesus, that He taught the Word with authority. Now Jesus taught with ultimate authority 'cause He wrote it and He was the Word, but as far as a Christian who knows his Bible and speaks from the Bible and quotes from it, those guys teach with such authority, and yet they're not arrogant whatsoever when they're talking, they don't sound a bit arrogant. You'd just love to pick their brains.
rb: Any book you're currently reading?
jj: Why You Should Believe in the Trinity by Robert Bowman. The Encyclopedia of Christian Rock by Mark Powell. I think that's his name.
rb: Not Mac Powell.
jj: Not Mac Powell. He's in there. We're in there! I couldn't believe it. The Billboard Book of Country #1 Hits. I think that's enough. I'm always reading about a zillion books.
rb: J., thanks a lot for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
