Excerpt: Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock
— -- One of the funny things about being a rock journalist is that you quickly find out that the most restricted areas of venues are usually dumps. Dressing rooms, tour buses, and the wings of a stage are all stark exceptions to the glamour we assume cossets our rock stars. Switchfoot's trailer at Cornerstone was no exception. The stairs swayed ominously as you entered, and the interior was a spartan, wood-paneled reminder that this room would be someone else's home tomorrow. Some of the band members sat on aluminum chairs talking on their cell phones; others perused the card table piled high with snacks courtesy of well-wishers from earlier days: JON, TIM, CHAD & JEROME, WE'RE SO PROUD OF YOU! GOD BLESS YOU! read a note affixed to a cellophane-wrapped plate of cookies.
The group's manager introduced me to the fellows in the band, and I had a few moments of amusing banter with guitarist Andrew Shirley, who offered to tell me "the truth about these guys." And then, suddenly, I was whisked into an adjoining room where Foreman was sitting in a folding chair.
Immediately, I sensed this interview wasn't going to go well. Foreman was anything but hostile, but he was maddeningly vague about his relationship with the festival and Christian music. Keyboardist/guitarist Jerome Fontamillas had told me he'd been to Cornerstone thirteen times, but Foreman kept trying to steer away from questions about his own history at the festival with nonanswers like, "I dunno. It's a unique experience." Then, I asked if this was the only Christian event Switchfoot played.He lowered his eyes. "You have to be—the thing is, when you're talking about Switchfoot, you're talking about music that we've fought really hard to keep out of boxes," he said."I'm not interested in 'proving' you guys are a Christian rock band," I told him. "But this is a Christian festival.""That's the thing," he replied. "If we're gonna stay out of the box, we're gonna have to be very conscientious of what everything is saying. Even opening up for Kid Rock [which they had done earlier that year] says something. Like everything in life, any relationship is a compromise. But where we're at right now, we're fortunate enough to pick the shots, and this is one of the festivals that, for the most part, it's a lot of people that are, you know, searching spiritually. It's actually a bunch of people that want to see the world change for the better. I don't know, that's important to me."
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