And this:

I’m actually not sure I prefer the big symphonic too-muchness of the latter version (though that wood-wind descant in the first verse is pretty neat and the brass section is a classy touch), but I don’t think anyone can listen to that earlier clip and think that the Hoppers would have gone on to dominate the 90s and remain strong well into the new century the way they have (of course, as you can also see/hear, Kim’s coming along didn’t hurt either). I mean, honestly, the icky, pitchy, self-conscious straight tones that Hopper slathers down during his verse in that first recording? Eee gad. That’s the kind of uninspired and flat-flooted vocalizing that gets you fired, unless of course you’re the boss’s son, which, in this case, evidently gets you transformative vocal lessons or a throat transplant or something else equally miraculous.

It took awhile, but the Hoppers finally made a lowkey but nonetheless public statement about the situation with Denice in their fairly recent biography. At the end of a fairly long chapter about Dean & Kim, the chapter ends with a brief passage under the subtitle “Difficulties in Life”:

“It’s important to remember that the Hoppers are real people with real problems. In spite of the many blessings, they also experience their share of challenges and heartbreaks.

“Mike met and began dating Denice Bradley during the 1990s when she was still in college. Denice, a native of Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, was attending Belmont University, in Nashville, eventually earning a Bachelor’s Degree in commercial music.

“She and Mike married in 1996. In 1998, when a position came open after Shannon Childress retired from the group, she accepted duties as the pianist for the Hoppers.

“Sadly the marriage didn’t work out and Denice and Mike legally separated in 2005. A terribly heartbreaking event for the family, the situation remains a private and tragic matter where Mike finds solace in Christ, his family and music” (p. 192).

So at least they’re on the record about it now, although I’m pretty sure that is the ONLY place in the book where Denice is mentioned (and she’s not in any of the pictures in the book, either).

Don’t know how current this is, but the page is still active and one would assume it’s still current: http://www.seasharpmusicacademy.com/new_faculty.html

Isn’t there a point when we reach (or perhaps already have reached) nostalgia exhaustion and heritage fatigue? For my part, I wish the Hoppers would put as much effort and time and money into making the kind of music that made them great rather than living off the echoes and memories of that greatness.

I see Hope’s Cal signed with Daywind. Good for them, I guess. The few times I’ve seen them they’ve had their act together mostly, and they clearly know how to sing (even if the vocal histrionics are still a bit too often in play). But I would thought they’d signed with Wayne Haun and Kevin Ward’s new label, especially since Hope’s Call has had such a longstanding relationship with Ward – which is to say, Ward’s engineering and producing work was essential in Hope’s Call early years, helping to keep their sound first-rate while they built a fan base and enough professional credibility to launch into the tier above the middling-to-fair category in which they began. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Hee Haw lately but I keep hearing the lyric from that old skit … “you met another and … [thuhhhhht] you were gone.”

And then Loren Harris left the Perrys. No great sound lasts forever, it just remains embalmed in a thousand chat rooms and discussion-board threads about how superior were the “real” Gold City (Tim, Ivan, Mike, Brian) and the “real” Kingsmen (Hammil, Reese, and whoever was your favorite baritone for Hammel to pick on and your favorite tenor who ruined his voice in all-night screech-a-thons) and the “real” Cathedrals (G, G, Danny, Mark) to everything that came before or after. [Interesting tangent: The Hoppers. The same personnel is intact from their heyday back in the mid to late 90s but they’ve managed to lose Shannon Childress their mojo all the same]. Perhaps it’s a mark of excellence or greatness or at least a sign that you’ve passed some magical point in your career as a group when you find that too-perfect sound that depends on something irreplaceable in each person’s voice and creates a cultlike identification among fans. If so, the Perrys found – and with Harris’s departure, lost – that sound.

I’m not sure what Libbi Perry Stuffle was thinking when she claimed that promoting baritone Joseph Habedank to lead and hiring someone else to fill the baritone spot “will keep our sound basically the same as before.” There’s a world of difference in that “basically” — the sound will be basically the same, much the way the Supremes would have sounded basically the same if Diana Ross had gone off to spend more time with her family. David Bruce Murray has described the Perrys late sound that developed with Habedank and Harris alongside the Stuffles as a “hard singing” style – by which I think he means to describe the considerable strength (not just volume, but control, pitch, blend) equally distributed at each vocal position.

I don’t know for sure why Harris left, but the usual cabal of whisperers in my ear who are usually right about these kinds of things certainly weren’t using phrases like “wants to spend more time family.” And Habedanks promotion to lead – coming as it does on the heels of the Perrys putting two songs written or co-written by Habedank on their latest project, despite the fact that the songs were B-list beginners work at best and despite the other fact that the Perrys are, or ought to be, at a place in their career when only the best songs (and not just the ones written by people you really like) get cut – well, these are the kinds of decisions that presage a decline. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Finally, David Bruce Murray has made sghistory.com a wiki. Go read about why that could be a really BFD.

Of course the real juicy bit in all this is the Hopper’s scheduled appearance at Fanfair- quite a coup for Wilds. It remains to be seen whether Fanfair turns out to be anything remotely like a rival for NQC. But no matter, it’s clear that Fanfair aspires to rivalry, and in that case Claude Hopper’s decision to play the date only solidifies my sense that Hopper is both a shrewd businessman (if not one of the nation’s leading businessman, and his bio rather self-aggrandizingly claims) and no toady for the NQC. For a while now I’ve heard that he and most of the rest of the NQC board differed over the direction of the Great Western Quartet Convention, or whatever it was called back when NQC had a stake in it - the difference being that Hopper thought it was worth investing in and the hardliners on the NQC board didn’t (it’s my understanding that the Western Convention is now jointly controlled by Hopper and Les Beasley). Taken together with outbursts like his “political speech” as NQC this year and his Fanfair appearance, all this stuff makes a pretty persuasive case for Claude Hopper: Not a Pure NQC Partisan. Given the agenda-discipline of NQC and the fortified front it tries to present to the public, Hopper’s independent streak is noteworthy (of course his kind of independence is made alot easier by his considerable financial clout). I suspect Hopper’s participation in Fanfair derives from his own sense that Fanfair isn’t going to undercut NQC in any real way and from his longstanding practice of getting the Hoppers out in front of the best crowds anywhere they are assembled (whether in Louisville, Chattanooga, or Somewhere Out West). Now let’s see if any other groups with ties to NQC sign on to Fainfair. Anybody (except the Baptists of course) wanna bet on who will be in and out among the NQC-board groups?