I believe that it’s my season.
I believe that it’s my time.
I can feel it…
Anticipating God’s getting ready to move.
God is working a miracle just for me.
And it’s gonna be…
He never intended it to be big. Let alone Big.
Music is therapy for Rev. Mike McClure Jr., Rock City Church’s 36-year-old pastor. Has been since 2014—since a counselor, concerned the young preacher from Birmingham’s west side was constantly besieged with other people’s problems, asked him: How do you detox?
“You’re a trashcan, people keep dumping stuff on you,” the counselor said. “How do you rinse?”
With music. It had been a natural joy since McClure’s childhood, when mom surrounded the toddler with books in their Ensley home so he could “play drums” with the white cardboard he ripped from coat hangers while she played gospel music, usually artist John P. Kee.
McClure’s father, Mike McClure Sr., served as pastor of Revelation Church Ministries and, for a time, was also a Birmingham police officer. His salve from pressures of the duel vocations was Fred Hammond, another popular gospel artist.
McClure Jr. was sitting in the car with his father one day as both listened to Hammond. “Dad was going through a rough season with a lot of pressure on him,” he says. “He was a police officer and a pastor. He’s seeing death and wants to save people.”
The song, the son recalls, was “All Things are Working”:
Falling apart and tearing at the seams
Tribulation lends a hand and squeezes all your hopes, your dreams
You say you retreat, you say you just can't win
Before you let your circumstance tell you how the story ends
His word says you can stand
He'll cover you with His grace
Everything you need is in your hand
So lift up your head and say
All things are working for me even things I can't see
Your ways are so beyond me
But You said that You would let it be for my good
So I'll rest and just believe
“That day I just kinda fell in love with the power music has,” McClure, Jr. says.
The power to heal. The power to soothe. The power to detox. To rinse.
McClure grew into a talented self-taught singer and musician—influenced by gospel artists Kirk Franklin, James Fortune, and Tye Tribbett, as well as secular artists User and Eric Bellinger. As well as Ricky Samuel, praise and worship leader at his father’s church. At times, Samuel allowed McClure to lead songs with him.
“He was the one influence I was able to touch,” he says. “All I wanted to be was him.”
McClure’s gifts were pretty much confined to the church, his father’s or his own—McClure founded Rock City exactly a decade ago. Or home, where he created a small recording room, saving to purchase one piece of equipment at a time.
“I just learned how to record myself,” he says. “I would just go in my room and start recording, writing songs and getting music here and there.”
Big began small exactly a year ago yesterday when during a service McClure, backed by Rock City’s praise team, began waving his arms: "Next time your’re getting down on yourself, I just want you to do this. Cause your bank account may not look like it. Your circle may not believe it. Folks may not believe it. But it’s gonna be big!”
He just didn’t know how big.
God is working a miracle just for me….
I’m running into my destiny
Running into my promise.
Big wasn’t even fully yet a song, just a seed planted among the McClure’s therapeutic recordings at home. A seed nurtured by church leaders and producers Rod Turner and Curtiss Glenn.
“Ya’ll may want to go record Big,” he said. “Make it do something like, I Believe….” McClure hashed out some lyrics on iPhone voice notes.
I’m running into destiny, shouting into my promise.
One evening last January McClure—"PMJ" to Rock City members—invited nationally acclaimed music promoter Kerry Douglas to his home for dinner. (Douglas, a Houston native, had—watch this—met and married a woman who was a member of Rock City.)
“I want you to hear something,” McClure said.
He played Big, saying he wanted to drop it at Rock City on the last Sunday in January. “So the church could hear it, that was it,” McClure says. “At best, I was going to beg [610 WAGG Gospel on the Nightside host] Jay Bryant to play it locally.”
The pastor’s vision, it seems, wasn’t very big. Certainly not as big as Douglas’s.
“When he heard it," McClure recalls, “he looked me in my eyes and said: ‘No, listen to me. This is a No. 1 song in America. It’s the No. 1 song in the world. This may be the No. 1 album in the country. Your life may never be the same. What else do you have?’
“His vision,” McClure adds, “was way bigger.”
It’s yours if you want it.
Anticipating.
God’s getting ready to move.
Did McClure at least receive it at the time? “Nah,” he says with a laugh. “I was like ‘Cool,’ and didn’t think much of it.”
The two men originally agreed McClure would drop four songs on an EP; Douglas later called and asked if the minister had enough for an album.
“I probably have forty-five or fifty songs recorded that nobody’s ever heard. We just pulled four or five of them, added them to the album and the rest is history.”
Though it almost wasn’t—because McClure still didn’t want it to be Big. Not the first single from the album to be released. He thought it should be I Got It.
You made a way, outta no way
You keep in blessing, every day….
That’s why we give You all the glory
Can’t nobody do me like you, Jesus
“Kerry said, ‘No’,” McClure recalls. “I said, ‘No. Everybody will be saying ‘I got It. It’s the best one.’”
“Pastor Mike,” Douglas said. “If I don’t know anything else, I know radio. You have to be in the mood to hear I Got It. If you’re a millionaire, who doesn’t want more money? If you’re poor, who doesn’t want some money? Big speaks to everyone at once. If you trust me, go with Big, but it’s your decision.”
“I laid up and said, ‘Okay God: Why would you put this person in my like who knows, and I don’t listen?’ I called him and said, ‘Kerry I trust you.’”
I can feel it.
Say breakthroughs in the room.
It’s yours if you want it.
Big hit radio in the summer and received steady airplay. But get this: Outside of the initial spontaneous Big at Rock City (the video went viral), McClure never sang the finished song for an audience. That debut happened in June at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, pastored by Rev. Jamaal Bryant, who invited McClure to perform Big.
New Birth is one of the largest Baptist churches on the East coast, and Bryant one of the most influential pastors. In the audience that day was national gospel artist Jonathan Nelson.
“I was terrified,” McClure recalls with a laugh. The whole family was there—wife Jaquetta and their five children (four boys and a girl, the youngest).
“This was make or break,” he says. “If it went horrible, I was not doing it again.”
The performancewas Big’s “God moment.”
“By the time I get done, the church is just… God moved,” he says. “They couldn’t stop singing it.’
Nelson looked at McClure and said: “This is incredible.”
“It was through the roof. That was the moment I turned to my wife: ‘I think we got something.’”
Something, yes, big.
God’s gonna open the windows of heaven
Pour me out a blessing.
Won’t have room to explain it.
Can’t even try to explain it.
But it’s gonna be …
“Live Free” dropped in September; a month later it was the No. 1-selling gospel album in America. “Big” is currently the fifth most-played gospel song in the country.
McClure is currently close to being nominated for nine Stellar Awards, which are elected by public voting.
“If I can thank anybody, it has to be my wife,” he says. “She’s the one person who can stop all this. If she doesn’t hold down the house and kids and push and support me, I can’t be pastor, artist, nothing. She’s the glue that holds all this together.”
Now, McClure’s musical vision is…humongous. And it’s about Birmingham.
“I love my city,” he says. The album was mostly recorded in McClure’s basement studio, the rest at Audiostate 55 in Birmingham. Everyone who appears on “Live Free” is from Birmingham, too. Featured artists include Ray to Great and Skoolie Escabar, prominent hip-hop rappers who grew up here, as well as Amanda Gentry, who sings on Freedom Chant, and Halo Wheeler.
“I wanted the world to see Birmingham’s special,” McClure says. “I wanted the world to see God but also to see Birmingham’s the best-kept secret in the world. I believe that.”
McClure salutes numerous industry success stories with Birmingham roots: Snipe Young, who’s produced songs on Chris Brown; Sabastian Kole, a singer who’s also writing for numerous artists; and Ruben Studdard, “who had the whole world looking at 205,” McClure says.
He’s already attracted national talent to Birmingham. Two-time Grammy-nominated gospel artists James Fortune joined Rock City earlier this year as Creative Pastor. (Fortune’s I Am is currently the most played single in the U.S.)
“Birmingham can sleep on you,” he continues. “It’s this mecca of talent the world has been stealing from. Folks come, get [our talent] then say, ‘Look what’s in New York!’. No, they came from Birmingham.
“I’m gonna do all I can to bring awareness to my city.”
Now, McClure‘s vision, his next dream, is to produce an album comprising one part gospel artists, one part secular—all parts Birmingham.
“I have three dreams,” McClure says. "One, I want my career to be incredible; two I want to release artists who step into their calling; three, one city one sound, an album with some of the brightest gospel and secular artists. Together. We do all we can to push that to the world so they can be heard.”
And they can be big. Just like the song, and the vision McClure almost overlooked.
“I really believe Big is more than a song,” he wrote once on Instagram. “It’s prophetic declarations that will shift your mindset and cause you to expect more even when reality is showing you less.”
Then there’s this: “I feel like Big’s gonna be that song that no matter how old I get,” he says with a laugh, “some dude in the back’s gonna yell: ‘Do Big! BIG!’
“It’s indicative of my life.”
Can’t even try to explain it.
But it’s gonna be…
"Big" - Google News
December 12, 2019 at 08:38PM
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Johnson: From basement to ‘Big’ -- a Pastor’s one-year chart-topping musical journey - AL.com
"Big" - Google News
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