Great Rock Road!

(This post is based on the original post about the classic live early 80's version of "Great Rock Road" put out July 15, 2010. CLICK the title to listen to a brand new mix treatment!)

{NEW! Great Rock Road VIDEO!}

It seems like this song is fitting perfectly with "Cast Your Soul" and the Mt. Carmel connection we noted last time. In the killing desert-dryness that sin and death is, there is a very Sure Way that leads to refreshing Living Waters. 

This song, believe it or not, came from the name of the road Dave & his family lived on for a while! (Most all of us got stopped in the speed trap the police had near there.) I said it, "Wow, Great Rock Road; sounds like a song." Everything sounded like a song, I guess. Plus, I managed to get the word "roll" in there with "rock" and "road". Lots of lyrical fun with a very strong underlying spiritual reality.

The biblical imagery that came to mind was the "great highway" in Isaiah's book of Consolation. God was going to make a road for the people to come back to Him from the Exile, lower the hills, fill in the valleys and so on. Of course, typologically this also refers to Our Loving God coming to us in the Incarnation to be Our Way out. Jesus talked about his yoke being easy if we let God make the way for us. This is the idea in this song. The way out of this desert valley of tears is the way of holiness rooted in Jesus who IS the Way, the Living Waters.

One memory with this is doing it at the Hartford Civic Center; I believe it was the show we did the whole "Prodigal Daughter" theme. Anyway, I remember the sound crew positively loved this song and they actually came to tell us about it. I remember there was tape of this version at one point and, boy, was it tight and it really rocked. We used to joke that we were all 'playing lead' during the lead.

Musically, this is a classic rocker, no doubt with all the 1-5 chords, but there are also a couple of nifty key changes and some of that major-minor back-and-forth action going on. Sure the chorus is repetitive, but sometimes a battle cry is exactly what is called for.

This live version is an earlier one.  Later, we cleaned up the intro; we got rid of that twangy vamp on D and made some other arrangement changes.  In particular, Greg & I on guitars and Dave on bass got really tight after this time. You may notice the 'Boston'-style pick-dragging on the strings the guitar used to do at the end.  In this version, I have been able to highlight the bass and drums. You can clearly hear those plastic "Roto-Toms" of Tony's drums (you can also hear them well on the chorus of "Love's Beginning"). Dave's 'walking' bass is delightfully 'running' here with some semi-chromatic funkage.

Funny, one time, John (Henry) took a stick of underarm deodorant and wrote something like "Anti-Evil Roll-On" playing on the words of the bridge, "I need to roll on"! We love puns.

Good times...thank the Lord for this greatly hopeful message so perfect for now.

Mark L.