300 Greatest CCM Albums of the '80s: #269 SHADED PAIN by L.S.U. (1987)

SHADED PAIN by L.S.U. (1987)
Frontline Records - RO9024

Producer:

Chris Brigandi

File Under: Rock/Goth Rock

Time Capsule-Worthy Track:

Die Baby Die

Whoa...who turned out the lights?

Some say 1987 is the year Christian rock went dark. This album by L.S.U. is said to be greatly responsible for that power outage. (Heck, even Russ Taff's music took a darker turn in '87.)

Us Kids (1981); Dream Life (1983);
A Kiss of Life (1986); Shaded Pain (1987)

Shaded Pain was L.S.U.'s fourth studio recording and did indeed take a darker, more gothic rock direction from not just CCM in general, but from their own earlier albums. The record contained what has been described as "bleak, introspective, death-obsessed lyrics" that were allowed to just lay there. No moral of the story was presented, no painful storylines were resolved, no answers or solutions given. "When Shaded Pain came out, I was basically banned from playing many churches for two years," Mike Knott said in an interview with True Tunes. "They were too taken back by the darker tone of the album." It's been claimed that tons of Christian bookstores returned the album to the label because of the negative tone of the lyrics (not sure how the so-called Mom & Pop bookstore owners would know unless they opened a copy and listened to it, which seems unlikely).

The knottheads website says, "This is the place where [Knott] stepped out of the constraints of CCM music and began doing what he wanted to. Shaded Pain is dark, honest and realistic about the struggles that Christians face in life. This type of brutal reality was unheard of in Christian music at the time it came out. Shaded Pain changed all of that as it influenced countless bands to be real with their lives – not just give cookie-cutter answers for all of life’s problems." One reviewer wrote, "At a time when Christian 'music' would only sing songs that had to reference Jesus in every lyric and were all about feelings of light and goodness and happy faces, Knott & Co. came in and banged on the church doors and shouted about the toils, trials, and dark places that so many people really lived in and struggled with."

Wow. A lot to unpack there. First, Shaded Pain is by no means the first Christian album to ever discuss struggles and challenges. For proof, just listen to a song called Why Don't You Look Into Jesus by Larry Norman from back in 1972. And there were many, many others by lots of different artists. And anyone who thinks that there was an expectation that the name of Jesus had to be mentioned in every song in 1987 either has a faulty memory or wasn't there to know what he's talking about. Again, I could give countless examples. Now, did Shaded Pain kick up the negativity a few notches? It certainly did. But for me, the fact that the record offers no real hope or solutions is not a badge of honor...it's problematic. Does every song need to be resolved into a happily-ever-after scenario by the end of the tune? Absolutely not. But it's my personal opinion that a Christian artist should offer hope and encouragement in his or her lyrics, in at least a few songs, based on the Truth of God's Word. Not "cookie-cutter answers" (as knottheads.com puts it) but solid, Biblical principles.

Yes, there was a lot of naivete in the early days of the Jesus Movement. Much of the acoustic-based Jesus Music in the 70s presented an unrealistic picture of how Jesus would simply come into your life and take away your problems, one by one. That approach was also problematic. I guess what I favor is some sort of compromise between these two extremes. It's been said that Shaded Pain recalled a "hollow, threatening darkness" and that Michael Knott moaned "like a prophet of doom." The Wikipedia entry on this album says, "There is not much absolution on Shaded Pain, just endless emptiness." Well, praise the Lord!

Brian Doidge got saved at age 14 at The Mother Ship - Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. Brian talked about how his faith intersected with his music in an interview with downthelinezine.com. "That was back when the whole punk rock thing hit, I cut off all my surfer hair, and I got the look of the Sex Pistols. Some of my friends and I got really involved in church and in the born-again movement, but we wanted to be like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, so we started a band."

Christian rock had been a thing for about a decade or so, but there weren't yet many Christian punk bands around. "Yeah, there was this 70’s rock, Daniel Amos and Randy Stonehill," Doidge remembers, "but this was like ’79 or ’80 and we had started a band that played Ramones-style music, but we didn’t have a singer, so we put out an ad and Michael Knott showed up. He walks in, comes up and I remember thinking, Who’s this guy, he thinks he’s Elvis, because he had this jet black hair and pompadour, but when he played with us I knew he was good. We had already started playing shows then, but there was this other band, The Lifesavers, and they were having trouble with their singer, so Michael ended up going with that band." The band to which Doidge belonged was called The Chosen Ones. They played the famous Saturday Night Concerts at Calvary Chapel alongside groups like Undercover, The Lifters and The Lifesavers. “The Lifters were rockabilly," Doidge says, "Undercover was more of a rock band, and The Lifesavers and The Chosen Ones were playing punk and people were packing the place. It was this big move of Jesus, and that’s basically how I met Mike Knott."

The Chosen Ones disintegrated before ever making an album, and Doidge started another band called The Altar Boys (no, not those Altar Boys). Around that same time, The Lifesavers recruited him to play guitar behind Michael Knott. "I don’t remember if we ever played a show as The Altar Boys," said Doidge. "We were going to, but Kevin Lee’s brother was Mike Stand and he came to me one day and said he was starting a band and wanted to use the name Altar Boys, and I said sure, we weren’t going to use it so you’re welcome to it, and then the Altar Boys went on to play for a long time. It was an exciting time, I was really blessed to have been a part of it. It was a lot of fun."

From that point until sometime in the early 2000s, Brian Doidge played Robin to Michael Knott's Batman.

Musically, this album rocks. Michael Knott sang and played some keyboard parts; Kevin Lee played drums; and Brian Doidge played a Les Paul gold top, an Ibanez 12-string acoustic, and a Yamaha 6-string acoustic. Doidge played bass as well. Bridgett Knott sang on a couple of tracks. A rich soundscape was created by post-punk guitars with raw, echoed chords. The creepy classic Bye Bye Colour and the memorable, in-your-face rocker Die Baby Die (with its punk intensity) are standout tracks. One reviewer wrote that "Knott sings like a man possessed," alternately howling, shrieking and moaning. Brian Doidge's guitar work was compared to a screaming, rabid swine. That's a first. Pretty sure I've never heard guitar-playing described that way before.

The song Lonely Boy Gone Bad is actually about guitarist Brian Doidge. "I was all messed up over this girl, over the relationship ending," Doidge recalls. That’s about when I started drinking. Alcoholism can affect anybody...it was just something I kind of slid into. When I was about 20 or 21 I just started experimenting with it, but you just don’t realize that it can reach out and grab a hold of you...I didn’t realize until I was about 30 that something just wasn’t right here." Doidge says that in his 30s, he lost recollection of entire weeks, shows, spans of time. "It was just a nightmare," he says. "I really didn’t know what to do. God helped me through a lot of tight scrapes."

Doidge was still with Knott in the formation of Aunt Betty's Ford (later known as The Aunt Bettys). But he said he was in a blackout most of the time and that led to the two parting ways. "It was a really weird time," Brian says. "It was understandable considering what a mess I was. I was a little hurt, but looking back on it I understand where he was coming from. I was really fighting my disease, and not being very successful at fighting it, and I think a lot of people saw that and were probably just thinking, man, what the hell is wrong with this guy? I was one of those alcoholics that just couldn’t stop drinking even if I had a show, and I played some shows very intoxicated, and the guilt from that was just horrific."

The Aunt Bettys

Doidge left the Aunt Bettys and his addiction to alcohol sent his life into a downward spiral, complete with a divorce and chronic joblessness.

The title track was a departure from the rest of the album - a ballad sung over acoustic piano. It is by all accounts a classic. An Amazon reviewer described it this way: "Wow. Just...wow. This is and always will be one of Knott's standouts. And what an important song. Ending the album with a simple, sad, evocative piano line over profound and important lyrics...this is just...wow. What an absolutely fantastic song." (I think he was wowed by it.)

Blogger David Lowman made the point that Knott's musical genius on this album was overshadowed by all of the talk concerning negative subject matter. "Lost...in the discussion of the dark and eerie content is Knott’s remarkable penchant for memorable hooks and unforgettable melodies," Lowman wrote. "In fact...the album is really a wonderful collection of sensible pop songs filtered through a darker and more transparent songwriting style."

Shaded Pain was recorded at 3-D Studios in Costa Mesa, CA and Asylomar Studios and was produced by Chris Brigandi. Brigandi and Joey Taylor served as engineers on the record. Colleen Hammond took the pictures while Ed McTaggart of DA was responsible for art direction and layout.

Let's delve a little deeper into the backstory of L.S.U.'s frontman. He is enigmatic, multi-talented and extremely complicated. He's also an alcoholic, he's survived a heart attack, and he is remembered for some of the wildest live performances in the history of Christian rock and roll (one of which I personally witnessed). Knott has either participated in and/or formed ten different bands. They are The Hightops, Lifesavors (or Lifesavers), L.S.U. (aka Lifesavers Underground), Bomb Bay Babies, Idle Lovell, Michael Moret, Aunt Bettys (originally Aunt Betty's Ford), Cush, Strung Gurus and Struck. He has 19 solo albums to his credit. He's either prolific or suffers from attention deficit disorder.

In addition to the extremely memorable festival performance that I witnessed (described here), I was also on hand as our then-youth pastor booked and welcomed Mike for a solo concert at a youth club-type venue that was a part of our church in Taylors, South Carolina. This would've been in the early 2000s. The show drew a small number of die-hard fans. Knott was quiet and aloof off stage. He seemed shy and retiring. I remember him offering lots of CDs and paintings for sale (yes, he's an artist in more ways than one) at his merch table. There was a $5 or $10 optional donation at the door for that particular concert. Worried that he wouldn't do well financially due to the small crowd, I specifically remember dropping a check for $100 into one of the buckets. That was as good as I could do at the time. I think that's the most I've ever paid to attend a concert.

I know that ranking this album so low on this list is going to earn me a lot of criticism and maybe a few death threats. And while I don't think I deserve the death penalty, the anticipated criticism is probably warranted. After listening to this record again for the first time in many moons (a little Native American lingo for you there), it's pretty fantastic, at least from a musical standpoint. David Lowman said it's "one of the finest and most important albums ever released by a Christian label." The knottheads website calls it "THE classic Knott album." J. Edward Keyes with allmusic.com calls it a "cult classic." A blog called The One Hundred said it has only gotten better with age. Yeah, it should've been ranked higher on this blog (not that that really matters).

You might be wondering whatever became of Brian Doidge. Well, according to the most recent information available online, he got a job with a company that manufactured speakers and power amps. Came in on an entry-level and worked his way up to supervisor. After surviving an alcohol-induced, near-death incident, he checked into a 30-day treatment program and got sober. "Sobriety is a big part of my life now, it has to be," Doidge said, revealing that he was living full-time in a "sober living home" (in 2009) and was helping other residents to get their bearings.

"There are other people here just like me that are taking it day by day," he said. "I just go to work, go to the movies, don’t drink, hang out at the pool, ya know the normal stuff that everyone else does. I was having trouble eating when I drank, and now just being able to eat is a blessing, and going to the movies instead of just having a movie as background noise in a hotel room. It’s a lot of little things, like being able to look people in the eye when you talk to them. I was always ashamed of what I was, I never looked people in the eye, I was ashamed to talk to God, let alone other people. Now, life is good, I have no complaints at all."

Hopefully, Doidge is still doing well. If you know, please leave a comment below.

Mike Knott is also a painter, frequently signing his artwork under the name 'Gerard'. His works have been used for cover art on many of his own releases as well as projects by The Choir and others.

On Shaded Pain, Knott not only literally painted the cover art...it's been said that he also "painted" beautiful soundscapes with gritty lyrics and superb song structures on this album, the darkest and "most honest" album ever released to the Christian market at that time.