Remembering GARY S. PAXTON

Gary S. Paxton

CCM’s Eccentric Uncle has gone Home.

It’s very difficult to adequately describe the Christian music phenomenon that was Gary S. Paxton in the mid- to late-70s. He was a multi-talented artist, producer and songwriter with a knack for novelty songs and humor. He also had a keen sense of issues and problems plaguing America and Christendom, and never shied away from sounding a warning call. Paxton was involved in a substantial way (artist, songwriter, producer, engineer, arranger, label owner) with records that are said to have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide since 1956.

Gary had a storied secular music career before meeting the Lord. It gained him a great deal of notoriety but also saddled him with substance abuse issues and broken relationships. He wandered into a Nashville church and made a life-changing decision in the mid-1970s. “I was walking around completely stoned and kept hearing this voice in my head,” recalls Paxton. “I was walking up and down Music Row, and there was a little Christian bookstore and a church there. Don Pinto was the pastor; Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant went there when Amy was about 15 or 16. I went in that church, drunk out of my mind. They said I ought to come back. So I did – the next week. Rev. Pinto said, ‘You need to get saved…from yourself!’ So I went down to the front, got saved and baptized, and that was the last time I ever touched drugs or alcohol.”

Keeping one foot in the secular music business (he had some huge success as a writer and producer for country artists in the mid-70s), Paxton also began to try his hand at Gospel music following his dramatic conversion. His “Midas touch” worked there as well. He wrote popular songs for The Imperials like No Shortage and My Child, Welcome Home. Other Christian music successes came with typical Paxton titles such as If You’re Happy (Notify Your Face) and If Nobody Loves You, Create the Demand. He won Grammys as writer and producer for The Blackwood Brothers and The Imperials.

Then in 1976, the Wildman took center stage as an artist in his own right. He released an album with an unusual gatefold cover that featured Paxton, smiling, bearded, and dressed in a red jumpsuit and hat, coming up out of a manhole cover. If that didn’t clue us in that this was going to be something entirely different, the album title itself would leave no doubt: The Astonishing, Outrageous, Amazing, Incredible, Unbelievable, Different World of Gary S. Paxton. Even though Paxton had already been around for a lifetime or two in the music industry, this record served as an introduction to most Christian music listeners.

Other Christian albums followed and Paxton infused them all with eccentricity, individuality and hippie humor. Lyrically, the surreal and satirical would be set to humorous poetry. One reviewer described him as a cross between Steve Taylor and Frank Zappa. Musically, Paxton alternated between country, gospel, rock, disco and funk. You never knew just what you were going to hear next!

Gary S. Paxton’s life and times always had a fair amount of craziness swirling about. Early in his career, by his own admission, he was married to one woman and simultaneously engaged to two others; he tells of an incident in 1980 during which he was attacked and shot three times by hit men who were trying to avenge a music deal gone bad; while in the hospital a business partner embezzled a half million dollars from him, resulting in his sleeping in a sleeping bag on a concrete floor for two years; he went bankrupt and lived on welfare and food stamps after having been a very wealthy man four or five different times; and then he was rumored to have had an adulterous affair with Tammy Faye Bakker during his time of appearing on the PTL Club television program – a charge that he vehemently denied.

Paxton lived out his final years in Branson, Missouri with his fourth wife; he suffered from hepatitis C and almost died from the disease in 1990. He was inducted into the Country Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1999. 

“I had to begin again with Jesus,” said Paxton. “If you have God on your side, no matter what, you can begin again. I thank God for every trial, every scar, every setback I’ve ever had, because they help you grow.”
 

Gary S. Paxton died at his home in Branson on July 16, 2016. He was 77 years old.

I mean no disrespect whatsoever by sharing the following video clip. It's a song that Gary wrote and recorded about the end of life that we all will face sooner or later. I think it's a great representation of the genre that Gary perfected in the mid to late 70s: novelty songs that disarmed with humor but also drove home an important spiritual message (in this case, that your soul had better be prepared when you take your last breath). Killer ending, too!