The Melody Book was published in 2015 by Plastiq Musiq. From the official website:
“The official history and commentary on Joy Electric’s debut album, Melody and the years leading up to its making. Including never-before-seen photos and extensive liner notes by Ronnie Martin. Companion to the Melody 12″ vinyl.”
The story of how Michael Knott came to influence and the sign Dance House Children is covered in the section of the book titled “The Blueprints for Joy: A History of the Making of Joy Electric” written by Andrew Horton.
These quotations are posted under Fair Use guidelines for historical critique and review only. All commercial usage of any parts of this book must be cleared with the appropriate copyright holders.
From “The Blueprints for Joy: A History of the Making of Joy Electric” by Andrew Horton
“Purely for fun and to break the monotony, he [Ronnie Martin] picked up a guitar and started getting together with Jason (on drums) and their mutual friend Randy Lamb (bass) to jam on their favorite songs by New Order, the Cure, and Lifesavers Underground.
By the mid-eighties, Southern California was the epicenter of Christian rock music. Frontline Records had formed in Orange County in 1986 and quickly dominated the industry with its release of sixteen albums in its first year alone. Between the megachurch concert circuit and proximity to Los Angeles, the label had a captive audience. Though Ronnie thought Frontline often played it safe, one release became an obsession for the Martin brothers – Shaded Pain by Lifesavers Underground. Built around Michael Knott’s pitch-black lyrics and trashy guitars, the record sounded like nothing else they had ever heard. With song titles like “Die Baby Die” and “Plague of Flies,” it was part Bauhaus, part Danzig. Most importantly, it didn’t sound like any other Christian record. Horrified customers and retailers returned the album to the label, missing the biblical subtext and lyrical focus on the total depravity of mankind and the nature of sin. It was the most artistically subversive thing Ronnie had ever heard.
Lifesavers Underground (eventually just L.S.U.) never achieved the same level of mainstream Christian success as their Frontline labelmates. Instead, as they played shows around Southern California, Lifesavers Underground became the torch bearers for an emerging Christian alternative movement. It seemed there were other young Christian bands who were weird, artsy, experimental, and otherwise would never stand a chance of even playing in churches or getting signed to a mainstream label like Frontline. A new scene was beginning to emerge.” (pp.23-25)
“Scenes invariably give birth to record labels; where music is being made around a common sensibility, someone always wants to capture it. Greg Strange, a fan with sparse industry connections but money to work with, created Narrowpath Records in 1987. It focused on the types of smaller Christian bands he saw toiling away in local shows. From bands like Breakfast with Amy, a bizarre mix of art rock and SoCal post- punk, to the shrieking hardcore sounds of the Crucified. These bands were even more threatening to the status quo than L.S.U., and didn’t stand a chance of making it in the larger industry. To everyone’s surprise, the fledgling label took off. It seemed there was a hunger for a legitimate alternative to the more overt, accessible Christian music coming out of labels like Frontline, Sparrow, and Word.” (p.28)
“Ronnie wanted to try making this type of music himself – focusing more on the dance element, bringing the beats and bass to the front and focusing less on writing full pop songs and more on creating the right grooves and synth hooks. He bought the required synthesizers and drum machines-TR-909, TB-303, and one of the first cheap samplers, an Akai S-950, for manipulating weird vocal bits. His results were mixed, but he made demo after demo of primitive dance music that didn’t quite fit with anything he had done before. He casually played around with names. for the new project, scrawling them on cassettes – Hickory Dickory Doc, the Children’s Symphony, Love Children.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the implosion of Narrowpath Records had created one in the SoCal Christian indie scene. Michael Knott and L.S.U. were fresh out of their contract with Frontline Records following the Shaded Pain debacle. Though Knott carried maximum credibility with the Martin brothers and other smaller bands, L.S.U. had never grown large enough to be socially accessible. Knott was a familiar face around the scene, one who didn’t vanish into a lavish tour bus after the show but instead hung out, sold records, and talked. He knew everyone.
When Knott decided to launch Blonde Vinyl Records in 1990, he already had a full roster of Narrowpath refugees, including Breakfast with Amy, whose guitarist Chris Colbert had been tasked with finding bands in a sort of A&R role. Colbert and Ronnie had remained friends since engineering the Morella’s Forest album and, knowing that both Martins were happy to leave that band in the past, Colbert checked in to see if Ronnie had demos of any new material. In fact, Knott had heard that Ronnie was working on dance music and wanted the new label to showcase the most diverse and challenging music the industry had seen. Ronnie gave Colbert a three-song demo tape, marked “Children’s Symphony,” and the phone rang a week later. Knott wanted to launch Blonde Vinyl with a roster of five inaugural bands, and they already had five – but Knott was such a fan of Ronnie’s music that he was willing to bump one band, Blue Trapeze, if Ronnie would commit to getting a full-length album together quickly. And by “quickly,” he meant “in the next month.”
Ronnie initially balked at the deadline. Always a slow and deliberate worker, he was still trying to figure out how to make the kind of psychedelic UK dance music he was listening to. This was a genre that required very specific pieces of equipment to be used in very specific ways. Knott was firm on the deadline – it was nothing personal, but if Ronnie couldn’t commit to hitting it, he’d have to go with Blue Trapeze instead. Jason urged his brother not to blow this chance to impress their hero.
Ronnie committed to clearing his schedule and making the best record he could make in an uncomfortably short period of time.
The album that would become Dance House Children’s Songs & Stories was recorded from January to February 1991 back at the Casbah, once again with Chris Colbert. Lacking any way to sync up recorded tracks at home, Ronnie brought in his various synthesizers and drum machines with songs already fully programmed and Colbert would record them on the studio’s professional 16-track tape machine. The tracklist is a mix of Ronnie’s early songs perfected – one of the earliest Two Lads’ songs morphed into “Held by Your Wishes,” while “Silver Streams” from the Children’s Symphony tape was rewritten and re-recorded as “The Gingerbread Meadow.”
Jason Martin had transitioned from drums to playing guitar and contributing to the songwriting itself, writing one song for the album outright (“Galore”). The album was made under the heavy influence of UK house musicians like the Beloved, Candyflip, and Baby Ford – artists whose swirling, psychedelic dance music was also made quickly and cheaply, lending it a lo-fi charm where the seams showed around the homemade beats. Ronnie’s vocals became higher and breathier, an effervescent element floating around the uptempo beats, hyper synth sequences, and orchestra hits.
Ronnie and Jason had settled on the name Love Children for the new band, evolving from the Children’s Symphony and trying to capture that “second summer of love” sensibility filtering over from the UK music scene. Knott didn’t like the name – a common euphemism for illegitimate children – and countered with Dance House Jesus, which the Martin brothers weren’t comfortable with. Finally, both parties settled on the worst of both worlds, an awkward compromise: Dance House Children. Songs & Stories was released a few months later in 1991 and though almost nobody understood the ethos and intention of the record, it was like absolutely nothing else the Christian indie market had heard.
The average American’s idea of dance music in 1991 derived from C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” the sports stadium anthem that had stormed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart just as Ronnie and Jason were finishing their album. By comparison, Songs & Stories sounded homespun and inexpensive – the artistic intentionality of which was completely lost on the majority of critics and listeners in a Christian music market that was already getting used to cheap imitations of mainstream secular music.
The album wasn’t a blockbuster or a disaster – if anything, it was a curiosity and a feather in the cap of the weirdest new label in Christian music.
Though Dance House Children played live around California and immediate neighboring states, they didn’t tour heavily to promote the record. The national Christian indie touring network that would appear later in the nineties around the whole Tooth & Nail Records scene didn’t exist yet. If you weren’t signed to a major national booking agency that tapped into the national church and Bible bookstore network, you were likely to stay local. Ronnie and Jason experimented with various live configurations, bringing mannequins on stage and wearing gigantic, baggy jeans and open-chested flowery shirts in the Madchester style.
Audiences were perplexed and amused.
Ronnie began to figure out what did and didn’t work as songs went from the studio to live shows, and he often remixed songs into leaner, faster, dancier versions for the stage only. As part of the promotion cycle for Songs & Stories, the brothers also made their first music video, directed by Blonde Vinyl house videographer Michael Peleaux. Drawing heavily from the Madchester scene, and particularly Candyflip’s “Redhills Road” video, Dance House Children’s “The Old Oak Tree” promo features little more than sparse shots of the brothers in a pastoral, wooded scene and extreme close-ups of Ronnie’s lips mouthing the song lyrics, all buried under a haze of primitive visual distortion. From this less-than-auspicious beginning, however, grew a collaboration with Peleaux that would eventually lead to both Martin brothers’ most memorable videos, including Joy Electric’s “Monosynth” and Starflyer 59’s “A Housewife Love Song.”
Things were going well for Blonde Vinyl. Building on the momentum established by Narrowpath Records but with a more robust national distributor in Spectra, the label grew rapidly under Mike Knott’s supervision and credibility among music fans. Blonde Vinyl’s releases were diverse and expansive – new records from veterans Breakfast with Amy, Chris Colbert’s side band Fluffy, industrial weirdos Deitiphobia, and the dreamy pop of Knott’s wife’s project, Windy Lyre. Mike Knott even released a new L.S.U. album, This Is the Healing, through the label. Ronnie and Jason were beside themselves in sharing a label with one of their biggest inspirations.
Dance House Children’s follow-up record, Jesus, went even deeper into dance music. Playing live shows had taught the Martins that audiences responded to the beats and higher tempos; in a culture where some denominations still frowned upon or forbade dancing entirely, being the only Christian house music group was a mix of transgression and novelty. Acid house gave birth to rave culture in the UK, bringing a playful, manic sensibility to the music – chipmunked vocal samples, clattering digital piano riffs, and even faster, more frenetic beats.
Eager to evolve alongside what he was hearing on rare 12″ import singles, Ronnie dialed back his new batch of songs even further from the classic songwriting approach into mere refrains – two or three lines wrapped around a melodic hook instead of fully fleshed-out tunes. In place of traditional verses, he concentrated on creating extended grooves. Turning his back on the songwriting techniques that he had discovered and developed for years, Ronnie often found the new songs to be mixed or unsatisfying.
Never a fan of reading manuals and without a strong understanding of the musical principles behind this new style of dance music, Ronnie struggled to create a record that stood on its own production merits. To help fill this void, Jason – whose previous contributions had only been playing live and appearing in band photos – directly joined in the creative process, writing several songs and adding layers of seasick guitar. Both Martins had become obsessed with shoegaze bands like My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse, and Ride, who buried normal indie pop songs under yawning walls of guitar fuzz. The influence of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica – a breakthrough critical smash that found the jangle pop band mixing together acid house, sixties psychedelic rock, and Jamaican dub – similarly loomed large over the creation of the record.
Both Martins were already disappointed with Jesus by the time it was released in early 1992 on Blonde Vinyl. Ronnie felt like he still hadn’t captured the musical essence of this new style, while sacrificing his main strength – classic songwriting – in the attempt to get there. The album’s schizophrenic nature – bouncing haphazardly between dubby downtempo interludes, hyper rave anthems, and shoegazing washes of guitar – ultimately kept it from cohering into a single statement like Screamadelica or KLF’s The White Room, major influences that were similarly eclectic and broad in their range. For the first time, Ronnie had allowed his pursuit of uniqueness in the scene to get in the way of focusing on making the best record he could. Jesus was definitely a unique record – just not necessarily in a good way.
Everyone was surprised, then, when a local Los Angeles. radio station, MARS FM, suddenly put the album’s very first song, “Once Upon Your Lips,” into heavy rotation. Nobody was sure how a copy of Jesus even made its way to the station’s DJs. The dreamy, spaced-out, slow-motion pulse of “Once Upon Your Lips” didn’t suggest a likely single at all. Ronnie and Jason would be out driving for their father’s business, and the song would come over the radio for the tenth time that day. It was surreal. Though MARS FM covered most of Los Angeles, the increased exposure didn’t translate directly to record sales. Blonde Vinyl lacked the resources to capitalize on this moment; with a full release schedule on deck, there was no opportunity to rush out a 12″ single with club remixes to tap into the scene and keep the hype going. After a month or two, the song quietly dropped out of rotation. Later that year, MARS FM abruptly changed formats to become a jazz station, and the brief moment of opportunity, unsolicited and unexpected, dissipated.
Dance House Children finished the remainder of 1992 with a string of live shows. Audiences responded well to the new material, and the band toured in support of Mortal, a popular Frontline Records industrial dance band. Then a lot of things happened at once.
Blonde Vinyl’s distributor, Spectra Distribution, abruptly went bankrupt. The reasons for this remain shrouded in mystery, but suddenly the label was left with no way to sell records on the mass distribution scale required to sustain operations. Through 1993, Blonde Vinyl had expanded rapidly, even launching its own genre-specific sublabels. There were new records being recorded, records headed for manufacturing, but suddenly there was no money coming in. Worse, Spectra had filed for Chapter 11, meaning it would be months before Blonde Vinyl could recoup any money. In a story regrettably familiar to both Martin brothers, their label folded and Dance House Children found themselves unsigned artists once again.
Worn down by frustrations with the outcome of the Jesus record, Ronnie felt that Dance House Children had come to a logical end. Jason was spending more time playing straight surfy rock music with his friend Josh Dooley under the names Nova Satori and then the Hester Prynnes. He also grew busy writing and recording his own songs using a tape machine that Ronnie had purchased for making home demos. Soon a high school friend, Andrew Larson, joined in and they settled on the name Starflyer 2000. Jason had always been a willing participant in Ronnie’s projects, but it was clear that he was finding his own artistic path and moving on. Ronnie would soldier on as a solo artist.
Ronnie felt he had learned some tough lessons from Jesus and wanted to return to writing soaring, anthemic, classic-minded pop songs based around those simple rules and structures that had worked so well for him previously. He still loved dance music, but pursuing that at the expense of focusing on the actual songs had led to lukewarm results and frustration. He bought, sold, and traded equipment, finding himself increasingly drawn to analog synthesizers because of their immediacy of use – one knob or one slider per function. No menus, no manuals.
The lo-fi house music movement had been built around picking up these pre-digital relics for cheap and then using them to create wild sounds that didn’t even attempt to resemble anything natural. Playing with these synthesizers led Ronnie to increasingly seek out more sophisticated, older analog synthesizer records by Kraftwerk, Human League, Jean Michel. Jarre, and Tangerine Dream. He considered making an album built entirely around analog synthesizer sounds, but having been burned by his previous attempts at setting up orthodox rules and processes for his songs, he set the idea aside.
A few months later, Michael Knott came calling. He had salvaged a bit of money from the Spectra situation and was relaunching Blonde Vinyl under a new name – Siren Records. Knott wanted to keep things relatively quiet, as many Blonde Vinyl artists had been left in limbo by its collapse. He was hoping to make a quietly powerful launch with just two records – a new Dance House Children album and a new L.S.U. project. Ronnie was on-board, but wanted to go in a new direction with a new name.
By 1993, grunge had completely taken over popular culture. Celebrating misery and disaffection was the order of the day. as Nirvana and countless clones ruled the charts. Any non-dance music involving synthesizers was instantly considered passé, “eighties,” and campy. Ronnie found himself completely at odds with the zeitgeist, but ever the iconoclast, he loved it.
This was a chance to rebel against the rebellion.
The new songs that he wrote were almost defiantly celebratory, joyful, and more openly Christian while remaining cloaked in fairy tale imagery. He brought back two old favorites – the Two Lads song “We’ll Last So Long” and the Morella’s Forest song “Sweet Sweet Charity” – that he felt he had never perfected. Entering the studio to make the third Dance House Children record, he scrapped all expectations – there would be no orthodox rules for what sounds could or could not be included, no genre capitulations. He was going to make a “kitchen sink” record full of every different sound, instrument, and tempo that he liked, all in one place – his “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
The core songs were strong enough to be arranged in any way, so he arranged them in every way – distorted guitar alongside house beats, timpani and orchestral flourishes coexisting with outsized analog synthesizer squirts and boings. Almost every song radically shifted tempo between the verses and the choruses, something that nobody else was doing in modern music. Knott even paid to bring in live classical musicians to flesh out the already maximalist arrangements. To Ronnie, it was a glorious concoction, the throwing off of any past inhibition.
It would be charitable to call the album – released in 1993 as Rainbow Rider: Beautiful Dazzling Music No. 1 – a flop. It was a disaster. Ronnie wanted a clean break with the past and a fresh start with a new band name entirely, but Knott was desperate to maintain a connection to the Dance House Children brand that he had invested in. They compromised by including the Dance House Children name in tiny letters at the top left of the album cover while “Rainbow Rider” dominated as part of a cartoon flower design.
To this day, it’s a subject of debate and confusion whether the album is technically the third Dance House Children album or the first (and last) Rainbow Rider album. The truth is that it’s both at the same time; either answer is correct. This didn’t help the album’s sales. With Siren’s limited distribution, the few stores that received the record often didn’t know where to stock it. (Ironically, Knott tried a similar approach with Siren’s other inaugural release, L.S.U.’s Cash in Chaos: World Tour – simultaneously the latest L.S.U. album and the first album under the new band name Cash in Chaos – to equally confused audiences.) Complicating matters further was a defiant manifesto printed in the liner notes of Rainbow Rider: Beautiful Dazzling Music No. 1 which led to negative reviews and a small critical backlash in the close-knit Christian music press.
The Rainbow Rider album combined every style Ronnie had absorbed to-date. While retaining vestiges of the British house sound from Dance House Children, he was eager to showcase the orchestral sounds of the Children’s Symphony tape. Realizing that he was irrecoverably a classic songwriter at heart, Ronnie had returned to the melodic choruses and verses of the Two Lads. After three studio albums, Ronnie confidently embraced everything he had loved: orchestral arrangements, soaring leads, driving rhythms. And now, more prominently than ever, those primitive analog synthesizers. He knew the album was all but doomed before it started, but he made the record that he had to make in order to reconcile the past. He was closing the book on an era. He was already thinking about the next step for his music when he got the news that Siren Records was folding as abruptly as it had begun. Knott’s gambit hadn’t paid off as expected and Blonde Vinyl’s reincarnation was DOA. Ronnie was frustrated but less than surprised as the third small label he was signed to vanished overnight.
In 1993, Ronnie was hired to produce the debut album by the Echoing Green, a group of Blonde Vinyl refugees that had landed on their feet with a nice deal with Frontline Records, still the biggest Christian music label in the area. Through working on the record, Ronnie became friends with a young A&R guy, Brandon Ebel. Ronnie had seen Brandon at shows, but now they got a chance to know each other and bond over their favorite records and mutual ambition for Christian alternative music. A few months later, Brandon asked Ronnie to play a festival built around MYX Records, Frontline’s dance music imprint, and they ended up hanging out the entire day as Ebel enthused about the new label he was starting up. Ronnie had been in casual talks with Michael Sean Black of Frontline about signing under a new project name, but he urged Brandon to check out his brother Jason’s demos, which sounded like Pale Saints and Ride, mutual favorites that Ronnie and Brandon had bonded over. Over the next several months, Brandon would leave Frontline to start Tooth & Nail Records in earnest, with the debut album by Jason’s band (now rechristened Starflyer 59) appearing as one of its inaugural releases in early 1994. Frontline officially offered Ronnie a deal, but Brandon countered with an appeal to Ronnie’s outsider status. Frontline had always been a safe and more conservative label who hadn’t shown any interest in Ronnie’s music before. However, Brandon was taking a risk with a new label that seemed to be the logical continuation of the scene started by Blonde Vinyl. Brandon’s earnestness won Ronnie over, though Tooth & Nail was a far riskier proposition.
Ronnie was no stranger to failure; he signed with Tooth & Nail.” (pp.36-67)