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HAMMERS AND NAILS:
The Life And Music of Mark Heard

Author: Matthew Dickerson
Publisher: Cornerstone Press / Pages: 225
HAMMERS & NAILS : The Life And Music of Mark Heard  - cover



I can honestly say as an adult, a radio DJ and a Christian that there are three men who have shaped what I consider to be good quality music. The music of these three men is the benchmark by which I have come to judge everything else. They are Jeff Johnson, Terry Scott Taylor and Mark Heard. When I first heard Mark's song "Victims of the Age" it was a turning point for me as to what Christian rock n roll could and should be. The only time that I actually got to see Mark perform was at Cornerstone '92, it is a concert that I will always treasure as one of my musical highlights. Mark's music was and still is great music.

Now eleven years after his death, Matthew Dickerson has put together a book that is not so much a biography as it is a collection of stories and anecdotes shared by family members, friends and musical peers. The book does an excellent job of drawing a picture of who Mark was, flaws and all. It is an honest portrait of an honest man. For those who are too young to remember Mark's music as it was being released during his lifetime, this book and the companion CD collection being released by Paste music is an invaluable introduction to the life and music of Mark Heard. Some of the folks who contributed to creation of this book are Mark's wife, Janet, his manager and friend Dan Russell as well as business partner, Chuck Long. Some of the musical friends helping out are of course, Pat Terry, Tom Howard and Randy Stonehill.

It must be said that any proceeds from Hammers and Nails, the new release and from the sale of his Fingerprint efforts go to Mark's wife, Janet and their daughter, Rebecca.

Chris MacIntosh ( The Phantom Tollbooth, 6/7/2003 )
www.tollbooth.org


Hammers and Nails is an overdue tribute to the life and music of Mark Heard, a respected, revered but not widely accepted musician who unexpectedly died in 1992.

Part biography, part memoir and paired with some of Mark's own writings, it paints a portrait of an artist, husband and father. The book is not a light read as it often deals with hefty topics, such as the debate of art and commerce, a subject he often wrestled with; but it is also insightful and thought-provoking in its approach.

The author, Matthew Dickerson, shares his experiences of working with Heard; and he talks to others who knew him, interspersing this dialogue with segments of Mark's lyrics. The true gem of this book is the first appendix, an excerpt of Mark's journal titled "Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary." His prose is just as poetic as his songs - a fitting representation of his talent and impact.

Jessica Robin ( CCM, August 2003 )
www.ccmmagazine.com


Aching for Something Deep

For those with ears to hear, Mark Heard left the gift of a more authentic faith.
Hammers and Nails, reviewed by Eric Miller

Discovering Mark Heard in the late 1980s was like mainlining hope itself. DJS on Christian stations rarely played the music of the man whom Bruce Cockburn would call America's best singer/songwriter. He didn't sing much about his "walk," or about "reaching out," or even about Jesus. No, he spoke of "red fires of war," and some "threat of annihilation" that "pounds at your door." No wonder I heard him only occasionally.

After my college years, in the midst of an aching search for something deep enough to sustain my shredded faith, I bought a best-of collection of Heard's acoustic songs. Never since has such a small investment yielded such amazing returns. His wedding in word and melody of raw confession, revealing observation, and restless probing far surpassed anything I had encountered by a Christian artist.

I was immediately in his debt, and Matthew Dickerson's new book about Heard, Hammers & Nails, reveals that debtors like me abound. Crafted more as a mosaic than as a textured biography, it offers an unprecedented chance to peer into the life of a man who displayed a rare and beautiful vulnerability, song after song. His albums now total 20 with Paste Records' production of a companion CD featuring previously unreleased songs Heard recorded in the late 1980s.

Heard aficionados will find the book (and CD) irresistible, but the story Dickerson tells has significance beyond the life of one musician. If the intersection of art, theology, and the market has any bearing on the future of Christianity in America, believers of all varieties will find something instructive, and perhaps ominous, in this story.

Born in Macon, Georgia, in 1951, Heard, we discover, was picking out songs on a piano before he was 4. By the time he entered college at the University of Georgia he had found his way to the guitar and to Christ, writing original music for his band and edging toward the Jesus Music scene.

His music bore the imprint of the era - country-tinged folk in the singer/songwriter vein - while his nascent faith was distinctively Southern and evangelical. In key respects, his life by his mid-20s had become a quest to transcend these worlds, while somehow staying true to what they were at their best. After hearing Francis Schaeffer speak at a Presbyterian church in Macon in 1975, Heard, like so many others of his generation and disposition, ventured to Switzerland and L'Abri in the hope that he might find answers to his deepening questions, and perhaps join his faith and art in a more satisfying way.

The long and costly sojourn Heard began that year turned out to be a rough one, as this book amply shows, but his lifelong musical and lyrical record of it is a treasure. Heard's experience at L'Abri, intensive throughout the 1970s, gave him a counterpoint of near-salvific value to an evangelical Christianity that, he was discovering, had little ability to nurture him and his art. Still, he found himself wedded to that subculture (he called it "the ghetto") through the auspices of two CCM record companies.

In the course of making seven albums for them between 1978 and 1985, he won the respect of critics but little favor from record-buyers. Dickerson's interviews mesh with Heard's lyrics and liner notes to reveal a man striving energetically, often angrily, to make contact with a world that couldn't fathom him: when he sang about his own life the theme was often not triumph but anguish; when he turned his gaze toward the world he spoke, sometimes awkwardly, a language of social criticism that sounded alien alongside the lyrical fare of Amy Grant, Leon Patillo, and the other evangelical celebrities of the era.

In the mid-1980s Heard made a quick exit from the CCM scene. Without a record contract himself, he produced records for other artists, performed occasionally, and kept making music. Finally, in 1990 he established his own label, Fingerprint Records, and released three albums that were, in a word, stunning; one critic went so far as to posit that "arguably, no artist has crafted three consecutive albums with both the lyrical radiance and the musical vibrancy to rival The Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand, and Satellite Sky."

As he was nearing an agreement with a mainstream label in 1992, he died at the age of 40 after suffering two heart attacks.

By the time he recorded his last three records, the dense brilliance of his art crowned a pilgrimage of unusual intensity, honesty, intelligence, and pain. On his last record, he describes himself as a "broken man... outcast on the outskirts of the promised land" -- poignant evocation of his bewildered disappointment at so many levels. But he goes on in the album's last song to steer the listener toward another lonely place, where triumph mingles always with pain.

I saw the city at its tortured worst
And you were outside the walls there
You were relieved of a lifelong thirst
I was dry at the fountain
I knew that you could see my shame
But you were eyeless and sparing
I awoke when you called my name
I felt the curtain tearing

It's a fitting final confession for a man who sought above all to help us to be true. Of his many gifts to us, this was his greatest. Fortunately for us, it's a gift that keeps on giving. Maybe someday we'll receive it.

Eric Miller ( Christianity Today, September 2003, Vol. 47, No. 9 )
www.christianitytoday.com


Just think how different the American Christian musical landscape could be today had Mark Heard's father signed his son's contract with Columbia Records before his 21st birthday back in the 70's.

It helps, of course, to understand the empathetically humane depth and stylistic eclecticism of the late Heard's songwriting. Sadly, the emotional/intellectual wellspring of his artistry was largely underappreciated by the evangelical subculture which he found himself butting his head against until his death 11 years ago at age 42. Thankfully, Matthew Dickerson's biography of Heard, Hammers & Nails, reveals its subject as a character as impish and creatively intuitive as he could be beautifully besieged by the woes besetting this fallen world.

Between interview snippets from prominent people in Heard's story and the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer's own memoirs, a couple of things Heard fans and followers of CCM could have probably guessed are affirmed. Renaissance man Heard likely had a genius I.Q. and may have been borderline bipolar. And the Christian market music biz - at least that of the '80s and early '90s - was a stifling and stifled environment to an nigh Nazi-like extreme, especially for someone of Heard's no-malarkey disposition.

Scads of Heard's lyrics, some previously unreleased until a recent compilation album (also entitled Hammers & Nails) are worth the price alone. Otherwise, it's a book worthy of lovers of well-written biography as it is an object lesson for any musician looking to evoke sincere, thoughtful Christianity in his or her art.

Jamie Lee Rake ( HM, September/October 2003, Issue #103 )
www.hmmagazine.com

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