What's the story behind Radical History Tour?

A long time ago (1992-94), in a duplex far, far away (the fabled Hotel Lelia), ApologetiX cranked out a series of self-produced cassettes, with increasing measures of quality and quantity. The final studio production in this series was "Radical History Tour," released in August 1994. It was our most popular cassette to date, but when we ran out of 'em, we moved on to bigger and better things … or so we thought.

These days, however, ApologetiX has a lot of listeners who weren't yet "hip" to the band when the "Radical History Tour" cassette was still available. Consequently people were asking us for years to re-release it on CD, and we finally gave in to popular demand in March 1999, four months after releasing "Jesus Christ Morningstar." That's why the product code on "Radical History Tour" comes third in succession after "Ticked" and "Morningstar," even though those projects came out much later than the original "Radical History Tour" cassette. 

Problem is, that cassette was over 90 minutes long, and you can only fit about 76 minutes of music on a CD – and that's pushing it!  So we had to cut four tracks out of the mix. That doesn't mean the remaining 20 are all polished gems (diamonds in the rough, perhaps?), but we're pleased and honored that so many of you wanted to hear them. Listening to "Radical History Tour" makes us appreciate how far God has brought us since then in terms of musicianship and production. Over a decade later, it's still a lot of fun to listen to, and, most importantly, the stories it tells are timeless.

We were tempted to go back and re-record 'em 1999-style, but quite frankly, we had so many new parodies waiting to be recorded, we figured, "Why re-invent the wheel?" We did eventually rewrite and re-record the opening track, "Bethlehemian Rhapsody," in 2001 on our "Keep the Change" CD. There is also a new "live" version (recorded in 2004) of "Jacob's Name is Israel" available on the "New & Used Hits: Best of ApologetiX Vol. 1 & 2" CD. Furthermore, the song "Enter Samson," which appeared on "Biblical Graffiti" CD in 1999, appeared in an earlier form with different lyrics and instrumentation on the "Radical History Tour" cassette, but it was one of the four tracks excluded from the CD.

Special thanks to ApologetiX alumni bass player Andy Sparks and drummer Rick Servocky, who made the original "tour" with us, and to Mark Gulden who played keyboards on "Bethlehemian Rhapsody" and "I Know a Riddle."
 
Most of all, thanks and all glory go to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who has blessed us so much since we founded the band in 1990. We were amazed at how far we'd come in 1994; we're awestruck by all that He's done for us since. As we've said before, if this whole ride stopped right now, it's still gone much further than we ever thought it would … and we are eternally grateful!

As you might expect, the title for "Radical History Tour" is a spoof of the Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour," the title of the first album ApologetiX lead singer/lyricist J. Jackson ever bought for himself (actually he bought "Endless Summer" but exchanged it for "Magical Mystery Tour" after his oldest sister got him the same thing for Christmas) and one of the worst movies he's ever seen. It's also a tribute to one of J.'s favorite movies, "The Rutles: All You Need is Cash," a spoof of the Beatles, which featured an album called "Tragical History Tour." Since the songs on the CD spanned the centuries with radical religious rock, the name "Radical History Tour" seemed perfect, even though neither the original cassette nor the reissue CD contained a single Beatles song!

Although four songs were cut from the original cassette, two of them eventually appeared as bonus tracks on a 10th-anniversary fan-club only CD re-release of the band's 1993 cassette, "Isn't Wasn't Ain't." Those tracks are:

"Love (Ain't Nothin')" ("Long Train Runnin'" by the Doobie Brothers)
"Verynice City" ("Paradise City" by Guns n' Roses)

The two that have never been released on CD are:

"Enter Samson" ("Enter Sandman" by Metallica) NOTE: This is the 1994 version, not the 1999 version, which appears on "Biblical Graffiti")
"Even Though" ("Even Flo" by Pearl Jam)