From Rock To Riches

If Peacock does own a watch, he keeps it in a drawer somewhere. The days when he raced the session clock are gone. Years have passed since Bill Graham and Chris Blackwell plucked him from the San Francisco punk/pop underground and pegged him for stardom. He works more deliberately now than he did when he moved to Music City in the late ’80s and plunged into a ten-year run of full-time, Grammy-winning work as a producer.

His pace today is less frantic, though he still keeps up a brisk pace with Sony/ATV Publishing as a songwriter, publisher, and senior A&R consultant. His studio, home, and guest quarters, a cluster of airy wood buildings on the western edge of town, enclose a meditative garden and center around what was once a Methodist church. Known collectively as the Art House, it’s a place where musicians might do their best, rather than fastest, work.

He is, it’s safe to say, at peace, which is not to say that he’s stagnant. Peacock remains one of the most respected musicians in Nashville, particularly in Christian music, where his contributions extend to writing books and essays that ruminate on the symbiosis of faith and creativity. As if to make his thoughts on this issue clear beyond doubt, he released an album last year, Love Press Ex-Curio, an avant-garde exercise that’s about as far as you can get from the hymnal without slipping into perfidy.

Of course, Peacock doesn’t see it that way. In his world, there’s nothing blasphemous about, say, Thelonious Monk jabbing out minor ninths or running a rough whole-tone scale. And there’s nothing particularly enticing about simplistic, even sappy, music, no matter how exalted its intentions.

What, then, were the musical consequences of his decision to embrace Christianity twenty-odd years ago? “There weren’t any,” he answers. “Of course, I pray for discernment and wisdom, but I love this world. I love the human imagination. I was still playing in clubs when I became a follower of Christ, and I had a couple of songs that used the ‘F’ word prominently, so I decided they weren’t too cool anymore, especially in the context of degrading women. Other than that, nothing really changed. In fact, when I first heard so-called ‘contemporary Christian music,’ it appalled me. And for a while I was worried, like, ‘Am I going to get zapped and start sounding like this?’”

These doubts disappeared when he came across Art and the Bible, a pamphlet by the theologian Francis Schaffer. “It made two important points,” he explains, “the first being that you can never assess an artist’s work from a single song. That released me from fundamentalist pressure, which is that you have to fit everything you believe about reality in the person of Jesus into each song. The second point is that creation itself offers a tremendous diversity of beauty for beauty’s sake, or oddness for the sake of oddness, so that conforming to any sect’s ideas about godly music seems absurd. Those two things gave me a methodology for art-making that seemed congruent with what I intuited as an artist.”

Good thing too, because up until his conversion Peacock had developed some distinctively edgy tastes in music. Growing up near the Bay Area during the late ’60s, he taught himself piano, with Monk, Andrew Hill, and Carla Bley among his inspirations. When punk began to transform the local music scene in San Francisco, the young pianist went along with it, until it left him at a crossroads. At approximately the same time that saxophonist Eddie Henderson invited Peacock to audition for his group, other interests targeted him as a possible rock headliner, based on his stage chops and a growing song catalog that combined elements of Elvis Costello and Jackson Browne.

“They wanted to use me to chase the dollar,” he remembers. “I understood that. In fact, I was interested in that too; I had a pretty healthy ego. So even though I probably didn’t have the skills at the time to compete as a pianist, I went in that direction.”

Peacock signed a demo deal with A&M Records in 1980. Working initially on piano, he quickly added the basic new-wave tools to his setup: Farfisa organ, Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos. By 1984, recording with producer David Rubinson at the Automatt in San Francisco, he completed his solo debut, Lie Down in the Grass, released by A&M. Soon he was on the road, sharing the bill with the Fixx, Missing Persons, Let’s Active, and other headliners, playing a Memorymoog on a slick, swiveling stand that had been commissioned by his management, Bill Graham Presents. (That instrument sits today in storage at the Art House, alongside artifacts from Hohner, Wurlitzer, RMI, Farfisa, Rhodes, SCI, and even an ancient Beckworth pump organ, any of which may turn up in a Peacock mix.

After a switch to Island Records and a couple more albums, though, the wind fell from Peacock’s sails and he found himself in L.A., his future somehow slipped past him. Committed by now to Christ, he accepted an invitation from producer Jack Joseph Puig to take part in a session with gospel singer Russ Taff, who was covering one of Peacock’s songs, “Down in the Lowlands.” This set off a series of connections that led to an assignment from Sparrow, the Nashville-based Christian label, to produce the next release for singer Margaret Becker. They cut the basic tracks in the Bay Area, and then Peacock flew to Nashville to lay down her vocals. Once they’d finished, Sparrow showed its appreciation by signing him to his own artist deal.

With that, Peacock moved to Nashville with his family and accepted his first assignment, as arranger, producer, and keyboard player on Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion. Over the next ten years he completed nearly 70 albums, for himself and a stream of artists, almost all of them Christians itching to spread their good news through the most accessible music they could conceive. It took about a decade for Peacock to get restless with the routine. More important, he realized that his mission differed from those of most artists who shared his faith.

“The fact is, I’m an eclectic,” he says. “As a young person in the Bay Area I could see a concert that might include Mike Bloomfield and Miles Davis. I grew up on James Taylor and Mahavishnu Orchestra. My musical pleasure is in shape-shifting. Sure, I make pop records whose lyrics for the most part reflect a Christian world, but that’s just one piece of who I am.”

It’s easy to imagine a secular producer, pigeonholed by his or her success in one genre, feeling the same. If you add Biblical to commercial priorities, though, that makes the dilemma even heavier. For Peacock and his colleagues in Christian music, the challenge is to balance the instinct to explore with the responsibility to reach as many listeners as possible, to sustain the faithful and to enlighten the lost. And, frankly, when you pattern what you’re doing after artists who have trouble being heard even in the jazz mainstream, that doesn’t make things easier.

Yet Peacock professes to be untroubled by all of this. “I still believe that there’s more than one way to leave the world a better place than when you arrived,” he says. “It’s never been a numbers game for me. I never felt I should be trying to help every Tom, Dick, and Harry make a record. I never got into this to be a Christian artist or a Christian record producer. I certainly didn’t get into music to work with lawyers and accountants. You don’t even need to be a Christian to intuit that we’re not made to just churn out widgets or make profits for entertainment corporations. That’s why I cut back in 1999 to producing what I consider to be great artists who work in Christian music, like Nichole Nordeman and Sara Groves. But I can’t just produce one record or another anymore, within a restrictive system. That’s inhuman.”

Nor can Peacock restrict his music according to the attitudes of others, Christian or otherwise. In his book At the Crossroads: An Insider’s Look at the Past, Present, and Future of Contemporary Christian Music, he states it simply: “Looking for practical applications for any part of creation, including CCM, is not the place to start with our thinking about the stewardship of music. We are free to let it be and we are free to use it responsibly.”

In Peacock’s case, that means honoring the urge to take chances, as he did most dramatically on Love Press Ex-Curio. There’s no Scripture quoted, no themes drawn from familiar hymns. Instead, a group of adventurous players, including saxophonists Ravi Coltrane, Jeff Coffin, and Kirk Whalum, set the groundwork through free solo improvisations, with Peacock then assembling the results through Pro Tools into performances that sound as if they had sprung from preconceived arrangements.

“It’s interesting when you improvise and you’re not thinking, ‘I’ve written music for this,’” he says. “Instead, it’s like, ‘oh, this is in G minor, and now it’s in G major. Oh, that’s a bar of 5/4.’ You start to see that if you don’t bring a strict compositional sense to bear, a different kind of compositional sense emerges, and it’s just as good, just as true, and just as beautiful. That’s what happens when people are set completely free to fail. That’s what it means to be human: If you set up a lifestyle that doesn’t allow for failure, then you never achieve anything.”

But there’s a subtext beyond even this, as Peacock admits. “It’s important to say to whoever cares to listen, ‘Don’t think you’ve got me figured out yet.’”