The Code Cave

UPDATE: I’m getting a lot of traffic from searches for Rose and Tom. Please leave a comment or shout out here. I’d like to see where you all are coming from. It might also be nice to turn this into a tribute page for Tom, Thom and/or Rose (even though she’s not dead yet 😉 – Hmm maybe I’ll do another post for her and put up a few pictures from 20 years ago 😉 I think I might have one or two of her at Creation ’86 with a towel wrapped around her head).

Also, if you are just looking for the song “Forty Brave Soldiers”, here’s how to get it…
(This links directly to LightMusic.tv. I don’t get a cut or anything like that. You’ll exit my site when you hit buy now…)

Thanks to the generosity of Candy Green and the Green family, we are now offering “40 Brave Soldiers” for download (mp3). Proceeds will benefit lightmusic.tv, which is dedicated to preserving Tom’s memory. We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover. Thank you. $9.99

I came across a friend’s obituary again today. I thought I would post it. Tom Green was a good man. Set a good example and lead a life that lead others. To him, I was probably just some teenager he knew by name from a church he visited off and on and went to retreats with. But he’s one of the people that showed me early what a successful life truly meant…

I was already in a bit of a weird mood since I was looking at three somewhat related websites and trying to figure out what I thought of them. One is Slacktivist, another is BadChristian, and another is Anabaptist Monk (which has two mirror urls that are censored for nudity at the office for some reason I do not understand he’s a baptist preacher after all…). Discovered in that order. They’ve in this whole subculture of liberal Christians and I’ve been trying to decide where I come down one each of their sites.

I gave up on that for the night and moved on to trying to find an mp3 or a track of Tom Green’s song “Forty Brave Soldiers”. I’d really like to sing it in church or at least hear it a few more times if I can’t get an accompaniment tape. So, I stumbled across his obituary again. I’d found it out of the blue about a year ago and it was a bit of a shock. The shock tonight was less, but I’m still shocked at how strong an emotion it pulls out of me.

I still think about Tom on occasion as as another person that was equally influential in my early life can be heard on the radio every morning Rose (Somma) Tennent co-host with Jim Quinn in their “war room” http://www.warroom.com. She actually helped put Lightmusic on the air. I guess I feel protective over Rose as I considered her, and still do though we haven’t spoken for two decades, a very close friend. She was one of our youth group’s (The Cornerstone Crusaders) leaders and a good person. Some of Quinn’s attitudes and demeanors are not, shall we say, founded on intellectualism. I think Rose could do, and deserves better. I’m always melancholy when I listen to their morning show. So I usually don’t. But like I said, I’m a bit over-protective.

Oh jeez, I went out to http://www.lightmusic.tv to find a picture of Rose and found out that someone else I knew just died in a car accident. Thom Hickling, co-creator of light music and the man who hosted “His Place” from 1989 to 2003. You can read about him here: http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Featured/Thom.html

Now, Lightmusic was nationally sindicated and was one of the driving forces of Christian Music as it is today. Some of you may have heard of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith? They can, in part, thank the chocolate chip cookie loving Tom Green for their success. If you haven’t heard of “His Place”, that might be expected, it was more of a Pittsburgh thing as far as I know. I sort of missed out on it as I was away at college for the first few years it was around…

OK, I just saw that the song is available for 9.99 from Candy (Tom’s wife. Nice woman.) I listened to the first 15 seconds. That’s all I can do right now. It’s the kind of song that makes your hair from your arms all the way to the back of your scalp rise, and your heart catch in your throat even when you aren’t giving it your full attention.

I’m going to bed before anything else even more emotional happens…

For Tom Green, one of the brave soldiers:http://www.post-gazette.com/obituaries/20030709green0709p3.asp
Obituary: Tom Green / Christian television program producer

Wednesday, July 09, 2003

By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Tom Green, 55, a creative force and lovingly scathing critic in Christian media, died Friday after heart surgery in New Zealand, where he has lived since 1997.

Mr. Green was a longtime producer for Cornerstone Television in Wall, where he was best known as the host of the “Lightmusic” video show. He was also a co-creator of “His Place,” a soap opera and talk show set in a diner.

With his wife, Candy, he wrote and recorded many songs, including “Forty Brave Soldiers,” a Christian radio hit about Roman soldiers who were left to die on a frozen lake because of their faith.

“Tom was a groundbreaker, both as an artist back in the late 1970s and certainly as one of the pioneering Christian music video shows,” said John Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association. “He was a real innovator who took chances.”

Born in San Francisco, Mr. Green in the 1960s ran the lights at the Troubadour, a club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Many of the elite folk and rock artists who played there also came to see the art theater that Mr. Green produced.

After moving to Vermont, Mr. Green, who was Jewish, became a Christian, along with his wife.

“They almost instantly became Tom and Candy Green, the guitar-strumming evangelists,” said Thom Hickling, a friend and co-worker.

After their first child was born, Mr. Green became head of the theater department at televangelist Jim Bakker’s ill-fated Heritage University in North Carolina. They entered that world of clean-shaven Southern evangelicals as “a couple of hippie types from the Jesus movement,” said Roger Wilson, a close friend and co-worker there and at Cornerstone Television.

Mr. Green was never comfortable in the evangelical media industry.

“He didn’t care about fund raising and making a commercial appeal to the donors. Tom wanted to make good television that people who didn’t love God would be willing to watch and maybe it would have an impact on them,” Hickling said.

Cornerstone Television received complaints that he ran secular videos like Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise” on “Lightmusic.” Mr. Green insisted that Collins’ message about homelessness was biblical. After the show was nationally syndicated in 1985, not-yet-disgraced televangelist Jimmy Swaggart threatened to pull his preaching from any station that carried “Lightmusic.”

“[Mr. Green] was on the cutting edge of contemporary music, not afraid to disagree with [the president] or the general manager or anyone about what we had to do if we wanted to reach young people,” Wilson said.

In 13 years, Mr. Green produced more than 3,000 episodes of “Lightmusic.” But he complained that too many evangelical hits sounded like last year’s secular hits with the name “Jesus” inserted.

“The difference between art and propaganda is often blurred in Christian videos,” he wrote. “Propaganda tells us what to think. Art allows us to come to truth on our own. Propaganda keeps everything easy. Art forces us to confront issues that we perhaps would rather not think about.”

“Lightmusic” won three consecutive Billboard magazine awards for best Christian music video show, but in 1997, Mr. Green was offered the opportunity to run a pioneering Christian station in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Christchurch station did not feature preachers. It ran old American sitcoms like “Leave It to Beaver.” Mr. Green produced specials designed to make the faith appealing in a highly secular society.

When the station was purchased by American evangelicals, Mr. Green believed that his creative wings would be clipped. He left to produce independent videos. While he was preparing for a working trip to Antarctica, a physical revealed a leaky heart valve.

There was a lag of months before surgery, and he was extremely weak by the time of the June 30 operation, Hickling said.

During his last days, New Zealand was hit by the coldest blast of Antarctic air on record, Candy Green wrote.

“At the time of his dying we were not only praying for Tom but we prayed for the peace of Jerusalem and peace in the world. Our children had spoken forth great words of faith and prayers of healing for their father. It is now our prayer that these words were caught up with this blast of air which takes 10 years to travel around the world. I am going to be looking for answers to these prayers.”

A local memorial service is planned for sometime in August. Details will be posted at www.lightmusic.tv.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Green is survived by two daughters, Shoshanna Hill of King of Prussia, Montgomery County, and Hadassah, at home in Christchurch; two sons, Joe and Nate, both of Christchurch; his mother, Dottie Green of California; and one grandson.

——————————————————————————–
Ann Rodgers-Melnick can be reached at arodgersmelnick @post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416.

You know your back yard has a hill if lazy ducks just land in your trees because so that they can take a rest and not change their flight path….