Chuck Girard of Love Song dies at 81
Chuck Girard of Love Song dies
Chuck Girard, the co-founder of the band Love Song, died on Monday, August 11. He had been diagnosed with cancer which spread to his lungs. He was 81.
Chuck Girard was one of the founding members of the iconic Jesus music band Love Song, which had its birth at Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa in 1970. (The band was briefly featured in Greg Laurie’s movie “The Jesus Revolution.”)
After Love Song, Chuck had a solo career marked by his worship anthem, “Sometimes Alleluia.” He gave concerts several times in western Colorado during the 1990s.
Around 1976, Girard gave his testimony of how he and his friends had formed Love Song around 1968, before any of them actually knew Jesus.
“We felt that drugs and psychedelics were part of God’s plan to reach men who could be reached by no other means. We thought that LSD was the key to spiritual knowledge. I thought the Beatles were Second Messiahs. I really thought they had discovered something and they were trying to convey it to us in little doses.
“And when their White Album came out, I felt ripped off. I felt the Beatles had copped out, that if they did know anything spiritual, they were afraid to tell it, and perhaps they didn’t know.
“So we got obsessed with this idea of having a band that could communicate God to people. And we started--in the middle of our psychedelic period--a God band that was called Love Song, and we would go into nightclubs and throw in our God songs in the middle of our music, and a lot of the songs would have Jesus’ name in it, and people were just not used to hearing Jesus’ name in a rock ‘n’ roll band in a bar!
“And we would go out and evangelize people on our breaks. We would go out and say, ‘Hey why don’t you come out with us on Sunday. We’re gonna drop acid and get into God.’ It’s a classic example of the blind leaving the blind, of people who were sincerely deceived, sincerely wrong.
“And 2½ years later, after we started that first band, the Lord was faithful to draw us up to a place called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and for the first time in my life, the gospel was communicated to me. And for the first time in my life, lights went off and I went: That’s what it’s all about! And I really discovered that what I’d been looking for my whole life was Jesus Christ, the victorious Son of God who died on a cross and three days later, rose again from the dead!”
(transcribed from audio of an unknown source. Here is a similar testimony from 1971 at Calvary Chapel, when Chuck was just 28.)
Postscript: in 1971, a copy of the original Love Song record made its way to a small Colorado town called Wray, where a 14 year old boy listened to that album over and over after becoming a Christian. It was the first, and only, contemporary Christian music we had ever heard. And 54 years later, that boy is still playing Christian music for anyone who will listen!
