“If you don’t love rock ‘n’ roll, put this back where you got it,” the again cowl of Mylon LeFevre’s 1979 album Rock and Roll Resurrection demanded. It was a daring order from an artist who had been within the rock and roll sphere for a decade. He’d grown up singing together with his household’s group, The LeFevres, when a tune he’d composed as an adolescent, “Without Him,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1967. Regardless of his conventional environment, Mylon was branded a insurgent: he’d been expelled from a Christian school for enjoying “Jesus jazz,” frolicked in a reform faculty, and was fired from his household’s group over a dispute in regards to the size of his sideburns.
Freedom from the confines of southern gospel meant he might discover the music he actually wished to make. He recorded one of many first gospel rock albums, Mylon: We Imagine. Produced by Allen Toussaint, the album was launched in 1970 on Cotillion Data. His imaginative and prescient, which fused a Black gospel sound with southern rock, earned essential acclaim however as the last decade progressed, the religious content material disappeared, and Mylon targeted on establishing his id as a rock artist, collaborating with Little Richard, Alvin Lee, The Who, and Tanya Tucker amongst others.
Take heed to Mylon LeFevre’s Rock and Roll Resurrection now.
After two uneven albums for Warner Brothers, Mylon landed at Polydor feeling one of the best he had in years. He’d kicked a heroin behavior in 1973, however then developed a cocaine dependancy. He informed The Atlanta Journal and Structure in early 1980, “I withdrew from taking drugs slowly. I quit…sleeping pills in August and that was the first time in nine years I slept without having to be knocked out. Now I play racquetball and basketball and run…I had forgotten what an advantage it is to have an alert mind.” Superstardom had been predicted a number of occasions since he’d left the southern gospel world, but it surely had eluded him. “The company believes in this record,” he informed reporter Keith Graham. “They believe I should have been a big star a long time ago.”
Polydor reunited him with Allen Toussaint and the resultant Rock & Roll Resurrection took LeFevre again to the rock and rhythm & blues fusion of his early work. Critics who understood the true roots of rock music, like Mike Duffy from the Detroit Free Press, praised the album, calling LeFevre “a tireless juke joint evangelist who has a lot of gospel in his gutsy approach to the basic R&B beat.” He offset his authentic compositions with two covers: Sam Cooke’s “Shake” and The Isley Brothers’ “Work To Do.”
The album mirrored LeFevre’s existential quest as nicely. Within the album’s opener, “Let It Flow,” he contemplates his need for greater than stardom, to be “more than a picker in a music making band.” Equally, “Life Saver” ranked love as being extra necessary than fortune and fame. Toussaint’s composition, “Declaration of Love,” went the furthest and maybe got here the closest to verbalizing LeFevre’s new focus, on “love’s guiding light.” LeFevre had reconnected with this religion and was retooling his method to being a rock artist. “Just having faith is something that is constant. And that constant is God. I’m not pushing it or trying to change what anyone else believes, but it makes me happy,” he informed The Atlanta Journal and Structure that yr.
Simply months after the album was launched, LeFevre made the choice to extra deeply concentrate on his religion and stroll away from his profession. He was ordained into the ministry in November of 1981 and re-emerged in 1982 with a brand new band, Damaged Coronary heart. Their debut album, Model New Begin, was one of many final releases on MCA’s Songbird imprint, and have become a number one pressure in modern Christian music, the style he’d helped create within the first place. By means of the 80s, they recorded eight albums, earned 5 Grammy nominations, and a Grammy and Dove Award for 1987’s Crack the Sky.
Within the 90s, Mylon shifted out of music into an evangelistic ministry, however he remained related to his musical roots. Allen Toussaint, his buddy and mentor, inducted him into the Georgia Music Corridor of Fame in 2007. He’s additionally within the Gospel Music Corridor of Fame. After a battle with most cancers, Mylon LeFevre died on Friday, September 8, 2023.
Take heed to Mylon LeFevre’s Rock and Roll Resurrection now.
