#61 ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE by Dan Peek (1978)

ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE by Dan Peek (1978)
Lamb & Lion • LL-1040

In early 2011, Dan Peek gave an interview to Randy Patterson with boomercity.com. During their conversation, Dan said, “I don’t think that I’ll make it to 80, personally. My doctor told me when I was in my thirties that I was a thirty-year-old man in an eighty-year-old body and I said, ‘Doc, it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.’ It was all that ‘healthy’ living on the road. Never sleeping. Rarely eating.”

“I’ll be sixty-one in November,” Dan continued. “I had a lot of ill health as a kid – rheumatoid arthritis and it’s persisted on and off my whole life, and then living like an absolute lunatic for 15 years or so, and then got right with God and started taking better care of myself. But I still think, ultimately, you gotta pay the piper, you know?”

A few short months later, he was gone.

Catherine Peek found her husband dead in bed in their Farmington, Missouri home on the morning of July 24, 2011. It was determined that he had died in his sleep from a heart condition known as fibrinous pericarditis. He was 60 years old.  

Dewey Bunnell of the band America released a statement that read, in part, “I am so sorry to learn of Dan's passing…I have never forgotten the good times we spent making music and learning about life together." Peek’s other America bandmate, Gerry Beckley, said, “His contributions to the music of America have always been present and will last forever. This news brings great sadness.”

Daniel Milton Peek was born into a military family in Panama City, Florida on November 1, 1950. His dad was an Air Force officer, and Dan spent his childhood in various parts of the world – the U.S., Greenland, Japan, and Pakistan. The family moved to the UK in 1963 when Dan’s father was assigned to an Air Force base at West Ruislip.

It was there that Dan met Dewey and Gerry at London Central Elementary High School, then a K-12 school for the children of U.S. military personnel. The three boys discovered a mutual love for music and decided to form a band.

“We were sitting around one acoustic guitar and as we began to sing, our voices combined in this little space,” Peek told Scott Ross in a television interview. “I think all of us looked at each other and went, ‘We’ve got something special here.’”

"Dan was a pretty prolific songwriter and pretty good guitar player," his father, Milton Peek said after his son’s passing. "His mother's family was very musical, and he got his musical talents from her family."

The three young men began to play and sing together under different monikers. They even dissolved briefly when Peek returned to the United States to attend college. Dan quickly found that studying wasn’t really for him at that point in his life and returned to London a year later. Peek, Bunnell and Beckley reunited and eventually chose to call themselves America.

“We wanted to set ourselves apart and not be seen as English guys trying to do American music, but instead accentuate that we were an American band,” Dan Peek said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

The group’s self-titled debut album was released in Britain in 1971 and in the United States by Warner Brothers the next year. Nothing could have prepared the young trio for what came next.

The smooth harmony of the soft-rock group was perfect for the time. America won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1972. The group released three platinum and three gold albums as well as eight Top 40 hits between 1971 and 1975.

“The rocket took off so quick and was followed by hit after hit after hit that we were running so hard to keep up with the success,” Dan Peek told Scott Ross in an interview for The 700 Club. “It’s like being a kid in a candy store with a sweet tooth. We went from not having anything we wanted materially to suddenly having whatever we wanted. I think in some ways it was too much. People sending limos, flying here, doing this or that. It’s overwhelming. I gotta admit, I tried everything. I tasted every possible thing. I had a spiritual compass but I abandoned it completely. I decided to just taste all the fruits that the world had to offer. I became the biggest rebel in the band. I became the bad boy. I did everything.”

The stereotypical “rock and roll lifestyle” had become very real to Dan. And it was affecting even his desire to play music. “I would come back after an eight-week tour where we’d only had two nights off, and I would want to destroy my musical stuff,” Dan said. “I didn’t want to look at anything that had to do with music. I didn’t want to hear music. I wanted to take all my guitars and smash ‘em. I reached the point where I was so strung out on cocaine, smoking dope, Quaaludes, whatever. I was just a total trash dump of chemicals. It was very unhealthy, and I realized I couldn’t do it within the context of the band. I got to the point where I really wanted to change. I got right with God.”

Dan prayed to accept Jesus as Savior when he was twelve years old. “My mother, who had just gotten saved herself, basically came and told the entire family the Gospel,” Dan related to blogger Randy Patterson. “I had never heard it. I had been to a lot of churches and I heard ‘be good, be a good boy, be nice.’  But when I heard the Gospel, it absolutely resonated with me and I got on my knees and prayed.  I knew I was a sinner at twelve already and asked Christ into my heart and life and to be my Savior. But the years drifted on and…when we formed the band America, I went into my own little room and I got on my knees and I said, ‘Lord, if you’ll make this group a success, I will use it as a platform to tell other people about you.’ I never told another soul.”

Dan continued: “Well, within a year of praying that prayer, we had a number one album and a number one single around the world. It hit me like a ton of bricks one day. Bam! ‘God answered your prayer! Now you need to live up to your end of the bargain!’  I kind of – not half-heartedly – I tried to share the Gospel with Dewey and Gerry. They weren’t interested. I tried to share it with some other people – they didn’t want to know. So, I just kind of withdrew into my shell as a heathen and then just became a practicing hedonist.”

Dan soon became painfully aware of the God-shaped hole in his life.

“I’m living in a million dollar house in Malibu, overlooking the sea,” he recalled. “I’ve got the fancy-schmancy cars in the driveway, a beautiful wife, the hot tub, the whole nine yards. The walls covered with gold and platinum albums and a Grammy on my piano. And yet, inside, I was so, so lost and in deep, deep despair because it was like, ‘Wait a minute! All this stuff is supposed to make me feel good! It’s not doin’ it. I’m lost!’  I knew there was darkness inside. I remember my mother, she said, ‘Son, if ever at any time, you wander away from Jesus, he will always take you back.  He will always take you back!’ So, I got on my knees in my beautiful home by the sea and cried out a prayer of repentance and I said, ‘Lord, I have sinned grievously against you. I don’t need all this stuff. This stuff’s not doing it. I want you now to be my Lord as well as my Savior and I want to live my life to glorify you.’ God met me, found me, picked me up, cleaned me off and made me whole again. He doesn’t just fix the broken things. He makes you new.”

Within three months, the million dollar home that Dan and Catherine shared caught fire and burned to the ground. Gold and platinum records, a Grammy, and other irreplaceable memorabilia was destroyed, but Dan Peek was now filled with a peace that surpassed human understanding.  

Before his salvation experience, Dan’s inability to function on a normal, human level due to drugs and alcohol had become a big problem for Beckley and Bunnell. Now, Peek’s enthusiasm for his newfound faith was also creating friction in the band as a result of the trio being together almost 24/7. Something had to give. Shortly after the February 1977 release of the Harbor album, Dan Peek officially left the band.

Sadly, the relationship between Peek and his two former bandmates was always strained following Peek’s departure. At times, it was downright hostile. Peek, never one to beat around the bush, told boomercity.com, “Gerry hates me, I’m sorry. It’s beyond dislike or ignoring. I’m an inconvenient truth for them.

Dewey and Gerry, if left to their own devices, they want to have absolutely nothing to do with me. It kind of hurts my feelings but that’s just the way it is. I don’t blame them on a personal level. It could just be a spiritual thing.” Sounds like all three of them should’ve been required to sit in a room together and listen to Dan’s song Forgive Me, Forgive You. But I’m jumping ahead in the story.

So Dan’s on fire for the Lord, now…he’s out of the band…and he and Catherine have moved to the Midwest. Now what?

“I had this incredible idea,” Dan related in an interview with Randy Patterson. “I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to make an album of songs about the Lord!’ modern kind of music, not the old, standard, piano thumping music. I thought I had invented contemporary Christian music!  Little did I know that there was this huge industry already out there. God put the right people in place to be able to make All Things Are Possible. So, suddenly, there I was. I was able to share the glory of God and explain the Gospel and explain what God had done for me.”



Dan signed with Pat Boone’s Lamb & Lion record label and was set to go.

Enter Chris Christian.

Chris Christian

Now, it would only be fair to acknowledge that Chris Christian is a multi-talented artist and producer who deserves a great deal of credit for raising the profile and the quality of Christian music in the late 70s and 80s. He is generally credited with discovering Amy Grant, and he made undeniable contributions to the careers of artists such as the Imperials, B.J. Thomas, and many more. But I would be negligent if I didn’t also acknowledge that Christian has a reputation as a shrewd businessman who was at times...difficult.

“When I left America I wasn’t really thinking in terms of working with a producer,” Dan recalled. “I really kind of wanted to self-produce which, probably, wasn’t a smart move but, as it turned out, the deal more or less hinged on using a producer. I met the guy, and he’s a very, very talented guy. Very talented. But, the impression I got from the guy was, ‘Who cares about your songs? Let’s get as many of my songs on the record as humanly possible.’ We butted heads constantly on everything, really. On some level, it was ego – getting in the flesh and just ego. But I will say this: In the long run, it turned out, probably, to be a better album than it would have been had I self-produced.” 

All Things Are Possible was loaded with top-shelf session players, including Michael Omartian, Steve Porcaro of Toto, David Hungate, Hal Blaine, Jay Graydon, and Jai Winding. This, too, was a point of contention between Peek and his producer.

“He’s a big one for working with studio musicians,” Dan said. “I think that in all the records America had recorded over the years, we might have had two or three outside dudes come in and play stuff. I just figured we’d get a drummer and maybe a bass player and I’d go in there and knock these things out. For whatever reason, he had his own little list of ‘A-List’ of players that he wanted to use.”

Peek himself played some acoustic guitar and electric 12-string, while Chris Christian also played acoustic guitar, sang some of the background vocals, and added a little banjo picking. A young Brown Bannister served as one of the album’s engineers. The project was mastered by Glenn Meadows at Masterfonics in Nashville. Gary Heery’s photography and Stan Evenson’s graphic design gave the album a memorable cover.

The album’s title track and very first song was also the undisputed highlight of the record. All Things Are Possible had “radio-ready hit” written all over it. Piano and strings…light and breezy…with Dan’s effortless falsetto soaring above it all.

Written as a collaboration between Dan and Chris Christian, the song doesn’t exactly express any powerful, life-altering sentiments. It contained simplistic phrases like “The good things will come true, just believe in your heart” and “There's nothing too much for you with me there to help you through.” Benign lines like “Keep your eye on the Son and your feet on the path” had an almost hippie-like feel to them. But the chorus was understood by believers to be somewhat of an alternate take on Philippians 4:13: 

All things are possible
With You by my side
All things are possible
With You to be my guide

The song was written while Dan was still living in that mansion on the coast in Malibu before that home was destroyed in the fire. Dan told an interviewer, “I was writing All Things Are Possible before the fire and I remember sitting at the piano looking out at the clear blue sea. The America breakup had happened and I had a lot of problems with other things that were happening in my life and so I was just desperate and crying out for help. So I sat down on the piano and it came out…When you turn misty blue, I have my eyes on you. Good things will come true just believe in your heart. There's nothing there too much for you…just keep me in your heart. It was melded in the crucible of pain, suffering, and weirdness and questioning what we all go through on a daily basis yet trusting in this almighty God that He can make these things work.”

All Things Are Possible was described by one reviewer as “a moving, sweeping, captivating pop tune.” One writer suggested that it should have been “the biggest Christian rock crossover hit” of all time. It did pretty well. The song reached #95 on the Cashbox Singles chart, #78 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart, and #6 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. It also spent thirteen weeks at #1 on the CCM charts and was nominated for a Grammy Award. Not bad at all.

Catherine and Dan Peek

Divine Lady is a musical thank you note from Dan to his wife Catherine, for her role in leading him back to faith in Christ. It’s bright 70s pop, embellished by Buddy Skipper’s saxophone. Divine Lady is the longest song on the album, clocking in at 3:16. Musically, the song sounds a lot like something the late-70s Imperials could’ve done. By the way, All Things Are Possible missed out on winning a Grammy when the award went to the Imperials’ Heed the Call instead…produced by Chris Christian.

The next song turned out to be historic -- the last time that Peek would ever record with both of his former America bandmates. Bunnell and Beckley joined Peek in the studio and provided vocal harmonies on Love Was Just Another Word, a song written by Chris Christian and Steve Kipner. [Kipner went on to write chart-topping songs for Olivia Newton-John, Heart, Janet Jackson, Rod Stewart, and many others.] The harmony created by the three original members of America really shines on the song’s bridge:

All I remember is the loneliness
I was so confused
And I saw the same in people that surrounded me
I was much too blind to see
My vision had been blurred
I was lost until I heard

Love was just another word
Love was a shallow word to me then
But love keeps getting deeper the more I get in

It was 2 and a half minutes of easy-breezy, pop airplay perfection.

Chris Christian says he was responsible for this collaboration between the original members of America. “I put it together because I knew Gerry real well and I knew Dan,” Christian told an interviewer. “I called Gerry and said, ‘Hey, would you and Dewey come over here and sing on this Christian record for Dan?’ He did it for me. I recorded that whole session. I had a recording going in between the takes so I not only got what they sang but I got all the conversations in between. I’ve never gone back to really listen to that. But it was all cordial. There was not any animosity – at least, not any apparent negative exchanges. I think that’s the last time the three guys sang together.”

He’s All That’s Right was another bouncy pop song, competently played and sung. Like several of the songs on the album, though, it suffers from lyrics that present the Christian life as just a little too perfect and carefree. 

Some fairly muscular rock and roll closed out Side One in the form of a Chris Christian-penned song titled One Way. Of course, Larry Norman is generally given credit for popularizing the “one-way” sign, and also wrote and recorded a song by that title. And this would not be the first time Chris Christian followed Larry’s lead – you might remember a song on Chris’s debut solo album titled Why Does the Devil (Have All the Good Music) which was not only a country-rock send-up of Norman’s song Why Should the Devil (Have All the Good Music), but also mentioned Larry by name in the lyrics! But I digress.

Norman’s One Way was a ballad played primarily on piano. Peek’s One Way had crunchy electric guitars and was the only tune on this pop album that came close to rocking. I couldn’t help thinking of the “Coexist” bumper sticker so popular with American liberals as I listened again to Dan Peek sing, “There’s just one way to Heaven, one way to paradise…” There certainly is. And that’s a message that can’t be sung, written or stated too often.

I’m not a big fan of the song that kicks off Side Two. It’s one of those “God as my girlfriend” songs that Chris Christian was famous for in the late 70s. That is, a song that appears to be a romantic love song…but could also be taken as a song to or about the Lord. Early albums by Amy Grant were littered with these types of songs, as were Christian’s own albums and B.J. Thomas’ early CCM records. In fact, this tune, Ready for Love, would’ve totally been at home on Thomas’ Home Where I Belong or Happy Man. For me, lines like these are just way too ambiguous:

I'd been wasting love without a care
It never seemed to matter
'Cause somehow I knew you'd always be there

But I found you in time
While inside I was dying
Now I'm living like never before

And now I'm ready for love
I never was before
You were always there
But I just found the door
I'm ready for love
I'm ready for all your loving

“Ready for all your loving?” Really?

Ready For Love employed a trio of female backup singers -- Donna Sheridan, Jackie Cusic, and Janie Frickie – all of whom went on to enjoy successful careers in both Christian and country music. The song reached #7 on the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart.

Lighthouse is another two-way tune; it can be interpreted as a plea for God to shine His light and provide divine direction…or it can be interpreted as a young man asking his girlfriend to guide him “to that safe harbor in your arms.” We report, you decide. A nice steel guitar (played by Sonny Garrish) gives this one a decidedly country flavor.

The aforementioned Forgive Me, Forgive You mines deeper territory lyrically, challenging the listener to let go of "deception, hatred, and grief" by learning to "forgive and forget." Production-wise, it's standard Chris Christian CCM MOR.

The tempo picks up and the mood lightens on Hometown. The banjo and harmonica-drenched country rock song employs some humor and sounds like something that America could've done once upon a time.

We went to the drive-in, it wasn't so good

So we changed the letters around
When folks saw what the new title said
They liked to run us out of town

Hometown living and loving 

Just can't be beat
I've been all around the whole wide world 
And nothing is so sweet

The next song also had a little bit of an America aftertaste, from a purely musical standpoint. You're My Savior was a testimony song, a fairly simplistic expression of Peek's faith in Christ. At just under two minutes in length, this was the shortest song on the album. 

The record concludes with a song that many assumed was aimed at his former mates in America. I Have to Say Goodbye had sort of an upbeat, fifties feel, complete with saxophone, and it packed a punch lyrically as well.

I wasn't so blind
I guess I knew all the time
I still don't know why you lied
Well, who's to blame, you or I
There's a reason why
I have to say goodbye

I want you to know

I'm really glad it turned out this way  
And I want you to know
It's not so sad
No matter what your friends may say

In 2003, interviewer John Beaudin asked Peek if he was still pleased with the album, some 25 years later. “Very much so,” Dan answered. “It was a labor of love. I think I took the making of it more seriously than anything I had done up until then. It was just such an undertaking to go from this America genre to an entirely new genre, to write things with a completely different focus. I really wanted to bring pop sensibilities to Gospel music. The response from the radio community on a very personal level was so overwhelming, in fact, that's what kept me going.”

Inexplicably, it would be another 5 years before Dan Peek recorded a follow-up to All Things Are Possible. Why the long pause? 

“The producer who I shall not name, we were just like oil and water, constantly banging heads,” Peek told Steve Orchard for an interview with Goldmine Magazine. “In fact, I made one album, and then I didn't make another album for, like, five years and part of that was because I couldn't stand working with the guy who was the producer. He ran me up the wall. But he was one of these people that you either love him or hate him and a lot of people loved him. But for whatever reasons we just did not get along. Part of it was because he kept trying to cram all of his songs onto the records. He was a great songwriter, great vocalist, a tremendous musician... he's got it all. But he just did not have the personal touch when it came to me, and we just didn't get along. It took me almost three years to get the courage up to go back in the studio. Believe me, there is no love lost there which is a shame because ostensibly as Christians, we're supposed to love each other, but you're always gonna run into people you can't get along with for whatever reason. But I will say this: the end product was good. What we came out of the studio with was great. And so in some ways, it was worth the head butting.”

Dan Peek did eventually record again, releasing well-received albums like Doer of the Word, Electrovoice, and Cross Over.

“Like I said, later I swallowed my pride and called him back up and we mended fences and we did Doer of the Word and it turned out to be a really good album. He wasn’t quite so aggressive about putting every song that he had written that morning on the record.”

Years later, Dan was literally on the verge of signing a multi-album country music deal with RCA Records.

“As time went on, I was going to segue into a pure country career,” Peek remembered. “But, all of a sudden, one day I sat down. My marriage was really on the rocks, really suffering because I had been on the road for so long. It puts such a strain – even as a Christian – it’s very stressful on a marriage. We used to do about 290 dates a year as America. If I do country, I’m looking at 322 dates a year and I thought, ‘I can’t go down that road again’. I spent the last twenty years touring and I had had enough. My wife and I decided to move. We moved to the Caribbean. We wanted a fresh start.”

Dan and Catherine Peek left the rat race of the states and moved to Bodden Town, Grand Cayman, where they lived for 15 years. 



Dan and Catherine

“We didn’t have a TV. We virtually didn’t have a radio, so I went through the most creative period of my entire life while we were living on Cayman,” said Dan. “I got more into writing books and stuff. I’ve written the equivalent of probably six books. We spent eight years rehabbing this 100-year old cottage that was right on the sea.  It was a labor of love and had a ball doing it. We worked like dogs daylight to dark. But, at the same time, because of the lack of entertainment coming over the wire, we had to entertain ourselves. We were writing poems, my wife and I. I wrote a book while I was there and, I don’t know, 20 – 30 songs, at least. I spent about four or five hours a day reading the Bible, and I got closer to the Lord during that period.”

Dan self-released his own music during the Cayman Islands years, selling the CDs on his website.

Dan had married the former Catherine Maberry in 1973. She was a lifelong companion as well as a songwriting partner. She had a hand in writing 3 songs on All Things Are Possible. And, fortunately for Dan, she was a spiritually perceptive woman.

Dan relates the story of why the couple ended up moving back to the States: “My wife, who is a prayer warrior, came out one day and said, ‘The Lord told me that it’s time to move’ and I go, ‘Honey, this is ridiculous!’ We just spent eight years rehabbing a hundred-year-old house right on the ocean and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was move! But she was adamant. ‘It’s time to go! It’s time to go!’ So, we sold and left. Within three years, Hurricane Ivan struck and just demolished the house we had been in – demolished the entire road we had lived on – pretty much demolished the island.”



Dan Peek

Dan never again lost his way spiritually. The Lighthouse that he sang about on All Things Are Possible shone brightly for Dan Peek. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, I am the truth.’ Let's face it, in life, there are a million things you can look at. I mean, one day they say that cholesterol is bad for you, and then the next it is good for you, and all those things are shifting sand. They change constantly. I want something that never changes,” Dan remarked in a 2003 interview. “I want that bedrock truth. Look around the world and everything just changes constantly. We are human beings and our emotions change, styles come and styles go, and thoughts come and thoughts go, but I want bedrock truth. It is the thing that people can latch onto. That is my story and I am sticking to it.”

When asked how he would like to someday be remembered, Dan said, “I think, probably, that I gave it all I had. I did my best and I hope that it was good enough.”

There’s an old Gospel song that says...

I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold

I’d rather be his than have riches untold
I’d rather have Jesus than houses or lands
I’d rather be led by His nail-pierced hand

I’d rather have Jesus than men’s applause

I’d rather be faithful to His dear cause
I’d rather have Jesus than worldwide fame
I’d rather be true to His holy name

That is, in many ways, Dan’s story.

Many of us claim that we would choose the Lord over riches and fame.

Dan Peek did.