Cliff Notes version...

M!M was started with a several thousand dollar loan by Chuck Smith since the
want for recorded material of what was being played at the fledgling Calvary
Chapel was so great. With that money, I believe it was Chuck Girard (Love Song)
and Pete Jacobs (The Children of the Day)... the only guys that had any
recording experience... produced two albums; Everlasting Livin' Jesus Music
Concert and Come to the Waters by The Children of the Day. Combined, those
albums sold 25,000 copies... a whopping amount for those days.

Buoyed by that success, they set up an infrastructure to do it again and record
some other projects. A number of people helped manage the start-up company
(which was really kind of an ad hoc development of the church, which was the
main gig) including Mike MacIntosh who went on to curry Horizon Fellowship in
San Diego, one of CCs flagship churches.

In 1975, Chuck Smith brought in his nephew, Chuck Fromm, to oversee the
administration of M!M. Fromm had been a city planner in Yuba City, and had also
been involved in helping organize some of the routes that the M!M bands were
travelling between churches and venues in the more Northern California regions.

The musicians will give you various stories, vacillating in between "we were
naive kids that were just in it to minister and who didn't really know what
we're doing" to "the people who were in charge are either the devil or a close
relative." Management, on the other hand, suggests that the musicians were
naive, that they didn't really know what was going on, and they were a bunch of
whiners.

With this tension going on behind the scene, somewhere in the late 1970s, after
a concert called Hosanna USA where the company came very close to bankruptcy, it
was decided that management would divest themselves of the cadre of musicians...
and move from a company that had a number of high profile musicians who were
difficult to please and who were intent on making artistic statements of musical
faith to a bunch of nameless and faceless musicians who would concentrate on
making music for church folks to sing in their congregation (i.e. worship
music).

This suited management nicely because, well, for one thing, it sounded great;
we're serving the church and not trying to be some Christian version of A&M
records. Too, it was a lot easier to manage. And three, it stood to make a whole
lot more money. Thus was born the Praise Album, the Praise Series, Kids Praise
series, Colors, etc., and a whole bunch of things whose intent was to serve the
church with resources.

If you are in to the artistic statements, though, Maranatha! Music was a total
flop. They had some of the most excellent Christian musicians, and didn't really
know what to do with them. Didn't have the mindset to bring Daniel Amos or Sweet
Comfort Band or some of the other excellent bands they had to a place where art
and commerce could have melded.

So, it depends who you talk to. If you dug worship tunes, this was a God
encounter. If you thought the rock stuff was your bag, your were out of luck.

In either the late 1980s or the early 1990s, the "non-profit" was turned into a
"for profit" when the four principle owners of M!M - Chuck Fromm, Tom Vegh,
Tommy Coomes (ex-Love Song) and Mike Dodack - paid off Calvary Chapel and turned
the thing into a regular business.

By the late 1990s, only Fromm and Vegh were left... and most recently, Vegh
bought Fromm out... and M!M is the sole ownership of a fellow named Tom Vegh.

I am sure there are some mistakes in there... and Kevin Thomson could enlighten
you far more than I can... but that is the Reader's Digest (and very tame)
version.

Hope that helps,

dd



> From: "rb_lifer" <rb_lifer@...>
> Date: 2003/10/31 Fri PM 04:33:08 EST
> To: Jesus_Music@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Jesus_Music] Maranatha Music
>
>


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