The Puzzle~

I was living in South Lake Tahoe California in 1978 where Mike Clark and Ron Rager opened a Shiloh Christian Coffee house, right next to the Shiloh House where we lived, called Common Grounds Coffee. A few of us started a band called Oasis and we started playing music there backing several solo artists!
After That incredible summer when people came from all over the country, including 100 Campus Crusade for Christ students on a project where they work and evangelize the beaches and campgrounds, Mike and I decided to go get discovered at a huge talent search at Calvery Chapel Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith was senior pastor and had started the Jesus Movement where thousands of young people were getting saved at his tent rallies, where all kinds of great musicians and bands played!

These young people were getting baptized in the ocean!

The winner of the talent search would cut an album! Hundreds of wannabees showed up! Mike and I both sang in different rooms but there was this guy with long scraggly hair and round Grandpa glasses, singing in a Dillonesque, Midwest, Nasally Tone, with a young guy in a crew cut!
What an odd couple!

I thought they were great!

Maybe a year later I was in Monterey CA at Calvary Chapel church when Tim Koller comes walking in with his guitar and his new bride who was dressed like an Indian in a white Squaw dress, leather suede purse slung around her shoulder, with dark makeup and long blonde braids!

He said Chuck Smith had picked him to cut the album and they were on tour!

He handed me his album, "Last Days"!

They had limped up there from LA in their decrepit old jalopy, stopping along the way to sing in churches and places by the road up Highway Number 101 through central California.

Their old Audi was making noise, needed braked and axles etc. and I just happened to be a mechanic with my own "Stan's Gutter Auto Repair" business, at the time, fixing people's cars from the church in the streets.

I repaired their car and while they were stranded in Monterey, I gathered up some musicians from our old Christian Coffee House band, Oasis, from South Lake Tahoe, who had moved to Monterey. We had played many times at an outreach called SOS San Fransisco that was started by a guy we knew from our days in Shiloh Youth Revival Centers in Oregon named Larry Rosenbaum.

We'd set out a hundred Gideon's Bibles in the shape of a cross in Union Square, and people took them all while Scott Crawford, a Flaming Red haired evangelist from Glad Tidings Church, in a suede leather vest with a big cross on the back, would preach! He used to drive around Lake Tahoe in his painted-up old bread truck with crosses and scriptures painted all over the sides with a megaphone mounted on the roof, while he preached, driving down the road! What a guy!

We learned a bunch of Tim's songs off his album, and then we drove up North to play at Larry's SOS outreach at Civic Center in downtown San Fransisco!
I remember, some big, ugly, tattooed, pierced-through, black leather vested biker dude mocking at the back of the stage right behind me, stepping up in kind of a threatening manner!

"You're nothing but a piece of trash!" he yelled at Tim!

Tim was singing and peaching about the Lord!

Tim turned around and looked at him and said in the mic to the audience of several hundred people, "He says I'm nothing but a piece of trash... That's true! I'm nothing but a piece of trash that Jesus saved!"

The guy stepped down and looked kind of flustered and disappeared! I think the Holy Spirit zapped him or slapped him!!

This was typical of things that happened at the SOS outreaches in Downtown San Fransisco, like the one where angry mobs of all kinds of weirdos were protesting and the police were out in riot gear! The group of Christians just gathered and sang praises to God and the crowd dissipated!

I still have the album Tim gave me and I love it! Praise Jesus!!