Tom Lynch

There isn't much action 360 days of the year in Bushnell, Illinois, a five-hour drive south from Chicago. But for a five-day stretch at the start of July, 30,000 people park their cars and set up camp in a massive field; some have instruments, some just blankets and barbecues. The Cornerstone Festival comes to town. And Jesus comes with it.

Cornerstone is one the largest annual Christian rock-music festivals in the country, yet most people do not know it exists. More than 100 bands play each year, including the likes of P.O.D., MXPX and The Danielson Famile. It's Woodstock for Christ, and now it's on film.

Two Chicagoans, Heather Whinna and Vickie Hunter, decided to shoot a rock doc, though neither had any film experience. Three years later, "Why Should The Devil Have All the Good Music?" is ready to show.

"I had been considering the idea of making a documentary for many years before this," says lifelong Chicagoan Whinna of her days when she worked at the Reckless Records on Broadway. "But I just didn't have the balls to do it. But then the whole Christian rock thing came into my life through Steve"--the prominent Chicago record engineer Steve Albini is her longtime boyfriend. "He recorded a couple of Christian bands, and I was very nervous about them coming over and what they would think of us, and I didn't understand why they would want to record with Steve. And I was nervous because I have a really foul mouth, I really got freaked out on every level. And then I met them and they were relatively normal people, and the whole thing intrigued me."

Meanwhile, the Seattle band Silkworm was considering a move to Chicago. During their trips to town to record at Albini's studio, Vickie Hunter, wife of Silkworm bassist Tim Midgett, became friends with Whinna. "Then I made the decision that I wanted Silkworm to move to Chicago," Whinna jokes.

Before long, Hunter was aboard the doc project. Whinna and Hunter are children of the punk-rock golden age, when Black Flag and Minor Threat dominated stages and the heads of rebellious teenagers. The idea behind their film project was not to mock or preach, but rather just to show the scene, bring light to a wildly popular subculture of music fans that seem invisible to the secular mainstream, like punk rock was in their youth.

"I think most people were really interested and excited about the idea," says Hunter. "Heather knew more about the themes of Christianity, she had become friends with some of the Jesus People."

Whinna met a few members of Jesus People USA, or JPUSA, a sort of hippie religious commune on West Wilson Avenue, while she promoted rock shows throughout the city at independent venues, as they worked as an effective "pacifist" security team. JPUSA owns the piece of land that hosts the Cornerstone Festival, and their amicable relationship with Whinna proved priceless with access to the bands and backstage areas.

Budgetless, Whinna and Hunter scraped up a film crew, mostly Columbia College film students who were friends, and a few Sony home-video camcorders, and hit the road to Bushnell in summer 2001. Nearly all of the bands were new to them, and the themes behind Christian rock were still a mystery. "I just knew what I learned from Heather, and from watching late-night Christian television," says Hunter. "The late-night music programs, with bands that look just like any other band, except you've never heard of them."

Neither Whinna nor Hunter were raised Christian. "I went to church a little bit with my grandmother because it was fun, but basically no," says Hunter.

"My father is an atheist," Whinna says. "I had made the decision by the time I was 17 that I didn't believe in God, and I've never been religious. I'm not spiritual. I think that kind of worked for us because we didn't have any issues."

Cornerstone proved to be a Christian rock Mecca. Thousands drove in from across the country, some who had purchased tickets a year in advance, and camped in the field. Musicians not on the bill constructed stages in their campsites and put on free concerts, to spread the music and the word, which is essentially the same thing. "It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to," Whinna says. "No one was drinking, no one was smoking, no one was trying to grab your ass. But there were so many punk-rock things about it, too. Everybody brought instruments and played whenever. There were ten shows happening at once."

The bands were receptive to being interviewed by Whinna and Hunter, despite the nascent filmmakers' admitted nervous nature and awkwardness during questioning. "Our interviewing skills got better over the years," says Whinna. "Anytime in the beginning, if the situation got awkward and controversial or intense, we'd be like, `It's OK, we don't have to talk about this.' But then they were like, `No, I want to talk about this.'"

"In the beginning it was uncomfortable for us," says Hunter, "but never for them. It was sort of uncomfortable on a lot of levels just because people are talking about religion in this incredibly open way, and for the first few days, it was a matter of us getting the nerve to talk to people."

The inexperienced filmmakers were unsure of how to proceed. The small crew adventured around the festival shooting every set and interviewing as many bands and fans as they could. The two filmmakers developed a straightforward style--they just point and shoot and are never seen on screen themselves. During interviews, they would begin with questions about favorite records and favorite bands, but rarely talk of religion or God. But after a few days, after they realized that hardcore Christian rock musicians were just as interested in talking about their beliefs as they were speaking of their art, it flowed like a river.

In the film, David Bazan, of indie-rock staple Pedro the Lion, discusses the band's journey from the suspicious Christian-rock tag to secular fame, citing a total sense of relief after he realized they had escaped. Josh Caterer, of punkers Duvall and formerly of the Smoking Popes, tells of his late-life conversion, and how in the process he trashed all of his Black Sabbath and AC/DC records. Mark Nicks, singer and drummer of the Christian emo clan Cool Hand Luke, professes that the higher power writes their songs for them. And, as the film shows, as much as the bands take it seriously, the fans live it tenfold.

Most of the audience at Cornerstone consists of teenagers. Flesh-and-blood, hormone-driven teenagers, who in most people's minds would rather drink beer and make out after a rock show instead of fold hands and pray. Says Whinna, "Those kids only want to buy Christian rock. I mean, you were rebellious as a teenager, right? You wanted to listen to the most fucked-up thing you could. But these kids don't want to listen to anything with swearing or about sex, because it leads them off their path."

Despite successes like the Cornerstone Festival, Christian rock has failed to reach the mainstream without being masked. P.O.D., rockers of current positive hard-rock anthems such as "Alive" and "Youth of the Nation," have gone multi-platinum with their last two albums, while embracing the Christian rock tag but hiding behind beards, beer and distorted guitars. Grammy-winner Evanescence is on fire, but no one would know of the band's Christian heritage without careful inspection. However, for every mainstream rock trendsetter, a copycat Christian band waits in the wings. It's this quality that strikes some as uninteresting and blatantly unoriginal, and that harms the movement's credibility.

"Indie bands don't want to be seen as Christian," Whinna says. "It's OK if you know, but they would never want you to see them as Christian. They just want to be seen as a band. They're just dudes who play music, and they're singing about God. But how would you know if you don't really pay attention to the lyrics? You might want to start rethinking those Dashboard Confessional albums you cry to."

"There are some bands that are Christian and it's a really important part of their faith," says Hunter, "but generally, they just want to be a band. I don't think on an individual level it's as conspiracy-oriented as it seems, like they just want to convert a bunch of people or something. They're just people in a band that want to do well and want to be popular. But, they love God too, and they want you to know it."

But why can an unabashedly Christian film, such as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," gross unimaginable amounts of cash while Christian music stays hidden under blankets? The documentary scratches the surface. Various bands speak openly about the second-rate nature of Christian music, and how it continuously disappoints. Hunter says that the some bands "are crap copying off of popular crap, only it's more ridiculous because it's a copy."

Steve Albini perhaps gives the most illuminating quote in the film when he states, "People have a problem with Christian bands because people have a problem with Christians." Both Whinna and Hunter express that they personally had difficulty with some of the beliefs being professed by the masses at Cornerstone. Perhaps the most shocking scene in the film is on the field at Cornerstone, where a graveyard is built with forty-four white crosses and an elevated sign that reads "44 Crosses Represent 4,400 aborted children each day in America." Hoodies sold at Cornerstone concession stands boast "Abortion Is Homicide" messages and, while commenting on the scene, The Detholz!'s Jim Cooper remembers witnessing a bumper sticker that compared abortion to the Holocaust. But Whinna says this extreme rhetoric is not endorsed by all Christian rock fans and creators. In one of the most moving scenes in the film, Jay Bakker, Tammy Faye's son, delivers a speech to a crowd about acceptance, how they shouldn't exclude a certain group of people, but rather accept them with open arms.

After their first trip to Cornerstone, attention heated up. That summer, Newsweek ran a cover story on Christian rock. After 9/11, everyone dropped negative music, preferring the positive. "It [Christian rock] was just starting to cross over, after it had been a huge moneymaker in the separate market," Whinna states. "It was shocking to me. The insular nature of the scene was really cool, how they could exist outside the mainstream. It's funny because it's almost sort of how punk rock happened as well."

Whinna and Hunter returned to camp to sort through the footage. Michael Dahlquist, drummer for Silkworm, volunteered to edit, though he'd never done such a thing. On his computer, from an Internet-downloaded AVID editing system, the three sifted through the countless DV tapes, compiling footage and making bit-films. A five-minute trailer was made and sent to rock-star-turned-movie-producer Michael Stipe, but he didn't respond. "We would make a five-minute movie, and then a ten-minute movie, then a forty-five-minute movie," says Hunter. "And then when we hit forty-five minutes, and it seemed like a good chunk, we realized that we didn't have enough stuff."

After filming various shows at Chicago venues like Fireside and Abbey Pub, with bands like Pedro the Lion and The Detholz!, they headed back to Bushnell. This was summer 2003. Gone were the shy days of interrogation, as Whinna and Hunter were now pros, documentary filmmakers with a purpose. When they returned to Chicago, they had enormous volumes of footage, and the real editing began. They just recently finished.

Whinna estimates that they spent nearly $12,000 on the project, with money pitched in by those involved and raised by rock concerts she promoted. The result is a ninety-minute glance at a music subculture that holds its own amongst other ultra-low budget docs. It may have been an accident, but Whinna and Hunter made a movie.

Now it's a matter of deciding what to do with the finished project. They're awaiting word from various film festivals across North America, including Seattle and Toronto. "I'm crossing my fucking fingers that they feel good about it," says Whinna.

The two have considered a tour with the film, in small, independent theaters where bands can play and they can screen the film, but Whinna might have to hit that alone, as Hunter expects a baby in October. And as much as they're relieved that the film is finished, they are just as confident. "I don't think this is a fuck-up," says Whinna. "I don't think this is just a bunch of scenes stuck together. I think we did a pretty good job. For Vickie and I, it's just about whether or not you could do something, and if you could finish it, and if you could do things in an honest way. Documentaries are becoming--anybody can make one."

"I'm sure that makes a lot of people cringe," Hunter adds.

"Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music" screens on August 22, 8:30pm, and August 23, 7:30pm, at the Three Penny, 2424 North Lincoln, (773)525-3449.

(2004-08-10)

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