Mike Rimmer talked at length to legendary piano player, conductor and arranger TOM HOWARD

He continues, "So there was a conscious effort with varying degrees of success to not just co-opt the entire process and pander to a particular ilk of evangelical Christianity. In that sense it was a contradistinctive movement away from the Southern gospel element that had all of its catchphrases. To this very day, I think much of Christian music is a spin-off from that. That's why you have philosophical differences between people who are Christians but just work outside of the Christian industry."

In those days, the Christian music industry was in its infancy in the USA. There was a scene in California, in Los Angeles with Solid Rock and down the road in Orange County with music emerging from Maranatha. It hadn't yet moved to Nashville. Solid Rock's parent company, Word, was still based in Waco, Texas. Did that mean that the artists had more creative freedom? "There was complete creative freedom," he asserts, "because that's where Larry structured his production deal with Word. Man, we could have put out polka records and they couldn't have said anything! So when you're given that kind of freedom you also have a certain sense of intrinsic responsibility to do a really good job. But we did enjoy writing records that no A&R guy was going to come in and mess with."

Tom in 1987

In that era, many of those involved have expressed to me that the camaraderie between artists was extremely important. "Absolutely!" Tom agrees. "That was probably the most essential element of those years. We ate together, laughed together, cried together, travelled together. It wasn't like a cult or anything; I mean we'd go off to our own families and our own pockets of friendships but there was definitely a sense of gathering among that small handful of artists." Those early years of his career have been very influential for Tom's creativity in the decades that have passed since then. "I think the best art, as far as communicative art like music, that expresses and draws in communities of listeners is always a collaborative effort."

In those days, I asked him, just who was hanging out at Solid Rock? "The main players were Randy Stonehill, Mark Heard; but then there's a whole collection of people kind of brought in from different places. Steve Scott became a real good friend. Steve Turner would show up. I didn't know Steve Turner as well but he was really close with Larry and Randy. But every now and then we would be hanging out at the Solid Rock offices on the seventh floor of Hollywood Boulevard and some other artist would show up, like Randy Matthews; just a bunch of 'em would kind of come through. I think they basically wanted to hook up with Larry. Paul Stookey I remember at that point in time. Barry McGuire didn't come to us, we went to him, because Larry did a TV show with Barry during that time and I went down to the taping of it. But it was a real loose collection of very, very intriguing and wonderful people."

The artists would also go on tour together and in 1979 Tom Howard travelled to England with Randy Stonehill and a backing band to play at the Greenbelt festival. It just so happened that it was the year when numbers at the festival exploded with the appearance of Cliff Richard who was number one at the time with "We Don't Talk Anymore". It was also the first time I had visited the festival and I was excited to see Tom Howard performing on the Monday evening.

He remembers his performance very well: "It was surreal for me because I was all of a sudden able to do some of my own material in front of 16,000 people. It was a blast! I was personally surprised when I got up on stage and it was my set, at how absolutely comfortable I felt. I had no nerves whatsoever. I was surrounded by some of my best friends playing with me and it was just a wonderful experience. It's something I'll just always treasure and remember. I couldn't see anybody!" Tom laughs, "But you could feel the crowd. At one point I told them to turn their torches on and it turned into this huge field of dancing light. I just did that because I wanted to see them. I wanted to see some manifestation of the crowd because when you have spotlights in your face you just don't see anything, but I could feel that energy. I never was a prominent artist for that matter so for me it was just a great memory. It was something I felt very grateful to be able to be a part of."

As the '80s dawned, Solid Rock started to go through changes and not for the better. The same weekend I interviewed Tom Howard, I also attended a small party where artists and management, Solid Rock workers and friends all gathered together to watch a new documentary film by David Di Sabatino about the life of Larry Norman. The full story of that evening would make an article in itself but it seemed that as friends from those days talked about the events that caused the collapse of Solid Rock, they were still trying to make sense of it. 30 years have passed and still, they are not totally sure what happened.

From his perspective, Tom is guarded but says, "We were headed into a perfect storm from the tail end of the '70s. Larry's marriage was in a lot of trouble. People were splintering off. It turned into a soap opera there in the way that marriages were falling apart. Why all of that happened is anyone's guess. But there were also business considerations; part of it was the policing that started happening with the parent company and part of it could have been interpreted as the 'shenanigans' that were going on right in the Solid Rock offices. Some of the fissures that started occurring just for me personally was that these guys started showing up that Larry brought in as new artists and they didn't have any particular spiritual, artistic or emotional connection with what Solid Rock was doing. I didn't understand why they were even in the mix. Not that anyone was guarding their turf but it almost felt like, 'What is really going on here?!'"

Tom is too honourable to name names even 30 years on! "I'm just saying that all of a sudden the Solid Rock we knew and loved was being compromised in a very new business model that was coming in and I don't think anybody really understood what that was all about. Poor Daniel Amos were kind of caught in that morass and their album was put on hold. Daniel Amos and Terry Taylor in particular, came in late in the game but there is a case for instance where they felt like a hand in glove; they felt exactly like they should be there at every level - emotionally, the social, the artistic level. But because all these other ancillary artists were all of a sudden swarming around there and Larry had brought them in, the darkest reading of that is that the more artists he was bringing at that time the more record budgets he could wrestle out of Word. Honestly, I don't know what the whole intention was but it felt like all of a sudden something was being stirred which shouldn't have been; that's just what it felt like."

So how did it end for Tom? "With a whimper!" he laughs. "There was nothing explosive with Larry and I. Other artists had explosive endings, I didn't. Mark Heard was smart enough to run off to Switzerland so nothing happened there. Larry and I stayed in contact somewhat but I made a very smooth shifting of gears realising that although there had been talk for a year or two about a second Tom Howard record, it was not going to happen. I started being much more open to getting more into behind-the-scenes stuff and arranging. Fortunately with contacts that I had and with a certain amount of respect that I had garnered in the industry I could make a pretty painless transition out of Solid Rock, out of that whole thing. I did try an ill-fated production company with Terry Taylor called Rebel Base Productions and I did one record with that. It was a lot of fun to make but it didn't quite have the heart and the soul of the Solid Rock experience. It was more of a solo artist record and it got some good press but it didn't do anything."

Tom in 1991

That album, 'Danger In Loving You', released in 1981, marked the end of Tom Howard recording solo vocal albums. He collaborated with another former Solid Rock acolyte Billy Batstone on a worship project, 'One By One' on Maranatha! Music's A&S label, and then switched to meditative, instrumental albums, some under his own name and some not.

These albums, 'Harvest' (1985), 'The Hidden Passage' (1986) and 'Solo Piano' (1987), found a niche with Christians looking for reflective instrumental music but alienated by the New Age spirituality that often went with the packaging and, indeed spiritual influence, of mainstream ambient albums on labels like Wyndham Hill. For a season Maranatha! Music, with their Colours series, and Sparrow with their Meadowlark albums, slotted into the Christian New Age niche and Tom's calming, tranquil music found many purchasers. In fact, Maranatha! Music milked Tom's albums years later by reissuing/repackaging Howard's 'Solo Piano' in 2000 in their Sanctuary series under the title 'Serenity' and similarly 'The Harvest' became 'Reflection' and 'The Hidden Passage', 'Shelter'. Tom has also composed soundtracks for movies (the Christian China-set drama Bamboo In Winter making it to CD in 1991), more instrumental albums, 'Beyond The Barriers' (1991), 'Flight To Boston' (1997) and more recently a veritable swathe of albums in 1999 for Unison Music titled 'Passage To Adventure', 'Passage To Tranquillity', 'Passage To Mystery', 'Passage To Peace', 'Passage To Joy' and 'Passage To Romance', all credited Dorian. If that wasn't enough, in recent years Tom has written the string arrangements for such albums as Petra's 'No Doubt' (1995), Bob Carlisle's 'Songs From The Heart' (1998), Phil Keaggy's 'Phil Keaggy' (1998), Randy Stonehill's 'Thirst' (1999), Chris Rodriguez's 'Beggar's Paradise' (1999), Jennifer Knapp's 'Lay It Down' (2000), Anointed's 'If We Pray' (2001) and Sheila Walsh's 'The Hymns Collection' (2002).

I ask Tom whether it's writing string arrangements which pays most of the bills these days? I imagine an artist phoning him up and saying, 'I've got these songs, can you arrange some strings for me?' He explains, "That's certainly part of it. For instance right now I'm writing for television and that's a seasonal thing; underscoring and this sort of thing. I score movies. Just this last year I worked on two short films. There is a film being made right now in Tennessee about Billy Graham which I will have some musical involvement in, orchestrating and maybe doing some composing for it. But it's that and then doing the occasional instrumental record."

He muses for a moment and thinks aloud, "What else do I do. . .?" He seems to do so much that a lot slips through his mind as I discover as the conversation progresses. It would be almost impossible to create a definitive discography of his musical endeavours when Tom himself can't remember! He laughs as he remembers something, "Oh! I go out with Peter Cetera and conduct concerts with him sometimes because he goes out with a full orchestra. I mean, we have a pick-up orchestra but I'll rehearse the orchestra on the day and then put on a tuxedo and go out and conduct it."