Johnny Q. Public - Extraordinary
In 1995 I was about to head off to college, one box of my belongings under one arm, and a boom box under the other. I loved music so much, and it was one of the few things I absolutely knew that I needed to have when I moved into a dorm room with a complete stranger.
At that point in my life, I was almost exclusively a Christian Rock listener. In the months following my arrival, I had expanded my tastes to include bands as varied as Counting Crows, R.E.M., and Nine Inch Nails. But one of the few Christian Bands that stayed in regular rotation was Johnny Q. Public.
I’m sure there are bands that sounded like Johnny Q. Public in the mid-nineties. They didn’t tread much new ground, but they played hard, there was a rebel element to their look (Dan Fritz, the lead singer, had shock white hair that stuck up in every direction, not unlike the hairstyle made famous over 20 years later by Rick, from Rick and Morty) that I really dug.
My college years were tumultuous. I was still trying to find myself, (heck, I spent the majority of my twenties doing that), and for some reason, listening to Johnny Q. Public at the time felt right. The songs were unabashedly Christian, but they were honest, they felt real, and they were loud enough to appear sort of cool to the uneducated listener.
My friends and I would spend most evenings crammed into one dorm room, either working on projects or playing video games. When we were working on projects we would either listen to music on my friend Dan’s stereo, or we’d turn on MTV’s 120 Minutes and let it play in the background. One night, I heard the familiar sound of “Body Be” playing, and I tried to conceal my excitement, but I did tell my friends that it was a Christian band that I was into.
But the video…well…the video was not cool.
I wasn’t embarrassed, but I felt a little let down. The one time I could show off something cool about Christian music to my friends and it was a sparse video shot in a white room, and a guy was wearing a JESUS t-shirt unironically.
I’m not trying to bash the guys, I’m sure their budget was conservative to say the least. And hey, it got played on MTV
! But this was also the era of the “cool” music video, usually directed by Spike Jonze And this was not nearly creative, and definitely not cool.But I didn’t hold it against them. I still played their CD often through my twenties, and for a while, I made it a tradition to play it as the first CD whenever I got a new CD Player. Now, I listen to it on Apple Music, and I’m still impressed with how fresh the music sounds even thirty years later.
The album scorches out of the gate with “Preacher’s Kid”, a serious treatise on the stigma of growing up the child of a pastor, including asking questions like, “does anybody care?” Having grown up around a numbr of PK’s, I could totally see how they could have related to the impossibly high standards many people (including their parents) held them too, and the struggle to live up to even a tenth of those standards.
“As I Pray” is another serious, almost worship song, a bit of a retelling from the Garden of Gethsemane, but echoing the prayer that we often pray ourselves - “Don’t let me fall away, for a lack of understanding.” It’s probably my favorite “serious” song on the record.
And yes, there are silly songs as well, tracks like “Women of Zion” (a hilarious song inspired by Isaiah 3: 12-20)
and a cover of the Larry Norman hit, “Reader’s Digest”, with some updated lyrics to include references to River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain. Both are fun breaks between the heavier stuff on the record.Overall, if you like the sound of 90’s alternative rock, give Johnny Q. Public a shot. They deserved a bigger audience, but maybe that video held them back. They never achieved the success they deserved after ExtraOrdinary, released a second album a few years later, eventually parting ways in 2001.
Dan Fritz has gone on to produce new music, but it seems to be sparse. I wonder what happened to the rest of the guys? Sadly, Christian Rock rarely has long term success stories, and band members after a few years of limelight, typically disappear into ministerial jobs, production jobs, regular jobs, or sadly, end up leaving the faith entirely.
But that’s a subject I don’t feel I have the ability to tackle. I’ll stick to talking about CD’s that I loved as a young adult, and still enjoy time and again as a middle-aged one.
Back in the day, when MTV still played videos once in a while.
Spike Jonze was a music video god at the time - he directed a trifecta of excellent music videos - “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys, “Buddy Holly” by Weezer, and the absurd, but wonderful video for “Peaches”, by The Presidents of the United States of America.
When I fancied myself a lead singer of a band that went nowhere, we covered this many times.