It's impossible to underestimate the impact of Love Song in the early '70s. Their 'Love Song' album was hugely influential despite the limited distribution that Good News Records had at the time. In The Encyclopedia Of Contemporary Christian Music author Mark Allan Powell boldly called it "the best Christian album ever recorded, on a par with 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'.
However important the music seems looking back, Girard and the band didn't have much of a clue about how important it was. He observed, "Everything that happened in those days was pretty much without planning or guile or the way the industry runs today. We were sort of inventing the rules as we went along. Of course there was a music scene but we weren't really a part of that because our music was so different from what would be considered standard gospel. So we didn't really know, in any way, how to function. It was just live performances. You played at churches. You played at a campus, with all the radical students. Every kind of situation was presented to us. So you had to kind of write the rules as you went along. There were no trade journals in those days, no radio stations actually playing the music on any regular basis. Once in a while somebody would pick up a song and play it in the context of the rest of the music but it wasn't until years later that there were actually speciality stations. CCM came along a few years later, which was the first contemporary Christian music magazine."
[ from an
interview with Chuck
Girard by
Cross Rhythms
Magazine ]
