WHO’S IN THE HOUSE? If you know how to answer that question, you were there. You were part of the millions who experienced the wonderful, ridiculous, thrilling, and sometimes straight-up nightmare-fuel spectacle that was Carman. If you don’t know about Carman, go lose a few hours on YouTube. You will not come back the same.

In 2021, the Christian music world lost one of its true originals just weeks after his 65th birthday. Carman was one of the rare artists in any genre who felt impossible to replace because he was never trying to sound like anyone else. Today is not about mourning him. It’s about celebrating what would have been his 70th birthday, and the wild, fearless, deeply sincere legacy he left behind.

The final years of Carman’s life were defined by medical battles, but that is not the story today. Today is about a Hall of Famer in CCM, whether the industry always knew what to do with him or not.

Carman never hid the mission. Every lyric, every spoken-word sermon, every exploding-stage music video was pointed in one direction. He was here to win you for Jesus. As a kid, there was nothing cooler. Satan, Bite the Dust. The Champion. The Witch’s Invitation. RIOT. These weren’t just songs. They were mini-movies, part gospel tract, part comic book, part Holy Spirit fever dream.

And somehow, they worked.

I won’t pretend we were best friends, but our lives overlapped many times in a way that still feels surreal. My dad spoke at events Carman performed at, and their friendship eventually led to the song “Our Turn Now.” A platinum record from Addicted to Jesus, the album that featured it, still hangs on our wall. As a kid, I got pulled onstage to “march in the infantry” during The Lord’s Army. Years later, when I was hosting a talk show, I invited Carman on every single week until he finally said yes.

Before he came on, he called me to pitch an idea.

Carman was a proud Italian-American and felt equal parts New Jersey and Las Vegas. He loved mob stories, and telling you how close he was to them. His idea was that the entire campaign to get him on my show would be revealed as an FBI sting operation and the segment would end with his arrest. I said yes immediately. We did it. He complained the cuffs were too tight, but he loved it.

That was Carman.

We spent long nights on the phone, sometimes on AOL Instant Messenger, talking about his career, his frustrations, and what he still wanted to do. Some conversations were hopeful. Some were heavy. I won’t share the private parts, but I always felt one thing. He felt that he may be forgotten.

And that fear was not unfounded.

Christian music moves fast. Teenagers grow up. New heroes take the place of old ones. It is still wild to think that Jesus Freak and Carman’s RIOT existed in the same ecosystem, released just weeks apart. The sound of CCM was shifting, and Carman’s genre-bending style didn’t quite fit where it was headed. His friction with award shows and the corporate side of the industry feels strikingly familiar now, not unlike the space Forrest Frank occupies today.

But time has a way of telling the truth.

Nostalgia needs distance. When you take off the ironic goggles and the cultural snobbery, what you see is a man who was pushing creativity far beyond what Christian music, and honestly mainstream music, could grasp. My generation, now in our forties, doesn’t remember Carman as a joke. We remember him as guidepost.

Not long ago, I was walking through the Christian & Gospel Music Museum when I stopped in front of Carman’s boxing robe from The Champion and a copy of his Bible. Inside, in bold marker, he had written:

“NO ONE CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS. EITHER YOU’LL
HATE ONE OR
LOVE THE OTHER.
DEVOTED TO ONE.
DESPISE THE OTHER.
YOU CANNOT SERVE BOTH GOD AND MONEY.”

I don’t think Carman would have ever believed he would be honored that way.

There is now a successful Angel Guild campaign to make a Carman movie, telling his life story, Kelly Clarkson has named him as one of her first concerts, for King & Country has talked about how he inspired their shows. His music videos with Steven Yake were wild, ambitious, and impossible to ignore, but it was the live shows that changed people.

Carman LIVE lived somewhere between a KISS concert and a Broadway musical. It was part stage show, part lounge act, part revival meeting, with no tickets ever sold. He performed the Standard World Tour at Texas Stadium on October 22, 1994, drawing 71,132 people, still the largest headlining show by a Christian artist in history.

He was loved by fans, but had his issues with the industry, and even CCM Magazine had a famously tense relationship with him. John Styll would eventually bury the hatchet with a cover story in 1993.

If Carman were still here when I took over CCM, it would have been my honor to give him another cover.

Who’s to say that still can’t happen?

And so today, on what would have been his 70th birthday, we celebrate a man who turned sermons into raps, concerts into crusades, and turned a generation of kids into believers who never forgot his voice.

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