Oden Fong grew up the son of an actor, raised inside the flamboyance of the Hollywood industry his father worked in, which makes it a genuinely strange detail that he ended up one of the founding voices of Christian rock. In 1970, as a teenager caught up in the Jesus movement gathering at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, Fong formed Mustard Seed Faith alongside Pedro Buford and Lewis McVay, part of the same wave of church-grown bands that produced Daniel Amos and Sweet Comfort Band. The group's one album for the Maranatha label, Sail On Sailor, carried artwork by the psychedelic poster artist Rick Griffin. They split in 1977, worn out by the road.
Fong didn't stop.
By 1986 he had a solo deal and a very specific idea of what he wanted to make. He'd been listening to KROQ out of Los Angeles, where the Eurythmics were in heavy rotation, and he'd read that Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had built their records on an eight-track recorder synced to MIDI keyboards. Fong decided to try the same trick himself. With a Linn 9000 drum machine, a Rockman guitar preamp, and a $5,000 budget from his label, he recorded Invisible Man largely alone in a home studio, playing every vocal, guitar and saxophone part himself and programming the rest.
The result doesn't sound like a devotional record trying to disguise itself as pop. It sounds like pop that happens to be devotional. The title track's chorus and the guitar hook on Joker In An Age Of Fools could sit on any KROQ playlist from the period; it's the lyrics underneath — salvation, the confusion of a life without faith, the pull toward something larger — that mark it as Fong's own. Child Of Confusion and Culture Shock read less like sermons than like a young father of the Jesus movement working out, in real time, what all that certainty looks like a decade on.
The label folded not long after the record came out, and Invisible Man never got the push its craft deserved.
Fong settled into pastoring a small church in Costa Mesa, not far from where Mustard Seed Faith started, and these days performs only when someone asks him to.
