Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 24, 1993 TAG: 9303240022
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FROM FALL, A STAR IS BORN AGAIN
Michael Brown has one of those faces that just never seems to be without a smile.Even when he's being his most serious, it's as if he can hardly contain some hidden joy that you know is going to force its way to the surface the next time you blink.
Then there is his, singing. Brown has hardly any more success suppressing the music inside him than he does the smile. A scrap of lyric and melody are liable to pop out any time, any place.
They are qualities that serve him well as director of music for Church of the Holy Spirit, an Episcopal congregation that meets at North Cross School.
That's a job that lacks some of the glamour of releasing your own R&B singles on CBS Records, as Brown did in 1978 and '81. It doesn't provide the fame that comes from playing keyboards with folks like Billy Preston, Al Green, Jose Feliciano. It doesn't pay like writing commercial jingles for Kentucky Fried Chicken or Miller High Life.
But since January, Brown says, he's found "real joy" leading the music ministry of the 200-member parish. "I love the Holy Spirit. I love Roanoke. I love the mountains."
And he's a long way from the hopelessness he felt four years ago when he decided he needed help to break addictions to cocaine and heroin that had derailed his career and eaten up the big bucks he once had earned.
Music came naturally to Brown, a 37-year-old Connecticut native.
"When I was 5 years old, I just woke up one morning and started playing the piano," he says.
The son of a "strongly religious" mother, Brown said he was reared a Christian and played piano and organ in church.
By 1980, he was making a living as a musician and that year "someone introduced me to this white powdery substance."
"I didn't like it," Brown said of his first experience with cocaine.
But, "at that time, cocaine was very glamorous. I was touring in Europe, making pretty good money. . . . A month later, I tried it again, and this time I thought, `This is interesting.' "
Over the next decade, "I wasted myself," Brown said, with cocaine, crack and heroin.
It was on the third Sunday of August 1989 that "I knew I had to turn around that particular day" or never escape, he said.
A friend referred him to the Youth Challenge drug-treatment program at Newport News. By the time he left it at the first of this year, Brown was the director of the men's facility and - perhaps more importantly to him - had been "clean" of drug use for 3 1/2 years.
"All of my life, I've been a Christian," Brown said. "I really never stopped going to church, even during" the darkest period of his addictions.
Four years ago, however, he made a new commitment to his faith as he realized he had to be free from drugs.
"I have come to an understanding of what a relationship with Jesus Christ really means," he said: 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"I'm not saying life is easy, but I have this joy that is inside . . . I really do feel like I have been born again."
Now he feels "challenged to aspire to my purpose in life - to make a difference through song."
That is part of what drew him to Roanoke after he met the Rev. Quigg Lawrence at a Chistian men's retreat a couple of years ago.
Though they had become friends, Lawrence said he really didn't hold out much hope that someone with Brown's credentials would be willing to take the music director's position at his church when it came open.
But after prayer, both men decided "the Lord had opened a door" and Brown moved to Roanoke.
Though technically it isn't, the music director's position is "like a full-time job," said Brown, and one that makes him essentially an assistant minister. "We're looking for God to help us grow this year."
One way they hope to do that is through a special program the church is calling "Music Explosion."
The free concert will be held Friday at 7:30 p.m. at North Cross School. It will feature Brown and some other musicians in the congregation.
"This is an outreach vehicle," Brown said, but the music will be a mix of jazz, pop, contemporary and gospel.
"It's just good music," Brown says, not heavy-handed attempts to drive home the religious message, which he and Lawrence say they believe turn off nonbelievers.
That means using pop songs, such as "Lean on Me," whose secular meaning might be expanded into a religious one. Or adjusting the lyrics of a pop song to describe "No Tears in Heaven."
After the Music Explosion, Brown will be going to Europe for a five-week tour of schools, churches and clubs.
He continues to write for other artists and works with a New York music publishing company.
As he works to restore his music career, though, he expects to be able to avoid the hazards that tripped him up before.
He's looking at life from a different perspective. "I have new eyes. A new purpose."
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