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CHUCK GIRARD-  Singer, Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Worship Leader 
A Pioneer of Contemporary Christian Music, Member and Co-Founder of the CCM group 'LOVE SONG.'

Print Media

"ROCK IN JESUS"  
Article Sept./ Oct. 1972
        In the April/May issue of ROCK IN JESUS, a review of the first album released by Love Song said, "You can hold us to this: 'Love Song' is one of the three best Jesus Rock albums yet produced." Behind that LP, now selling fairly well around the United States, there is a history of failures and successes experienced by many of the group's members: the same frustrations of many young people in their teen and college-age years. Love Song, now about two years old, have traveled from Minnesota to Florida from Dallas to Lawrence singing music designed not only to entertain, but to minister. 

        It's all done without charge except for travel expenses-- and all the members of Love Song take their work extremely seriously.Chuck Girard, 28, is the founder of the group. He was raised as a Catholic, but at 15 parted ways with the church. Chuck told ROCK IN JESUS: "At that time, the whole trip of religion---goin' to church on Sunday and all that---- kind of seemed shallow to me. Some of the teachings of the church at that time were that if you missed church you were going to hell and all that. I decided if I was going to hell, might as well go to hell for something worth going to hell for, and not for just eating meat on Friday or missing church." 

        So Girard began his late teens doing what he really loved: singing rock 'n' roll music in a band. He left home, "because my mother didn't know what to do with me," and began rebelling against all he'd been taught. In Chuck's words, "I slipped into sin." Girard did well for quite a while, singing backgrounds on recordings and cutting records himself. Bars and pool halls became his habitat when not recording. As was the case with many teens at that time, drinking was the "in" thing rather than drugs, because drugs weren't as much in the open as they are currently.
      In 1964, the Beatle era ruined every thing for Girard. Self-contained groups like the Beatles, who wrote their own material and recorded it without backup help from hired singers, knocked Girard right out of his fairly successful work. His money began running out. For a while, he worked with a band which copied all the top recording artists, singing the top hits of those artists, working five and six nights a week in clubs.

      Up until that time, Chuck drank to get high. But the drummer of the group with which he worked introduced him to marijuana. A search was beginning for Girard that would finally culminate with Jesus Christ.

      Girard moved to Hawaii with his rock band, and there was where he began experimenting with LSD. His search for some kind of religious belief took him through the various eastern religions, vegetarianism, and even hermitism to the point of spending weeks alone on a Hawaiian island meditating.
    He became restless because he realized he was doing no one any good by "sitting on a rock 2400 miles from nowhere." Admittedly confused, Girard returned to the States and joined a group named "Love Song" The group's gospel at that time was LSD, but Girard says their intentions were not malicious: They really thought the answer was in drugs. "I felt drugs were part of God's philosophy," he tells 

    ROCK IN JESUS.

Chuck Girard's Music
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