The decision to follow Jesus ended Carman’s music career, and he spent the next five years doing odd jobs around Southern California-until he started performing in churches and then got swept up into the booming contemporary Christian music scene. But when he was singing you could feel the presence of God, and it was a whole new ballgame.” “It wasn’t that he was doing anything musically that hadn’t been done. “I was confronted with the truth and I received it,” Carman said. He wasn’t too proud to accept an invitation to go to a music festival at Disneyland, though, and Carman heard the gospel message again at the Andraé Crouch show. Carman resisted, later recalling that he believed what they were saying but was just too proud. Nancy and her husband, Joe Magliato, pastor of the Son Light Christian Center, were worried about Carman’s salvation and tried to convince him to accept Jesus. He took a break to go visit his sister, also named Nancy, in Orange County, California. In Las Vegas, Carman struggled to break into the music scene or make a name for himself. The young Carman decided to leave town in his green Chevy Vega. In Carman’s heightened version of the story, repeated to reporters numerous times over the years, he was doing so well performing in the New Jersey casinos that a talent agent approached him about “representing my interests and helping my career,” but the agent was linked to the DeCavalcante crime family, which was known for extensive extortion and racketeering in New Jersey. When he turned 20, he decided to try to make it as a lounge act in Las Vegas. “I knew I wanted to,” Carman recalled, “and once I gave it a try, I loved it.”Ĭarman dropped out of high school at 17 and achieved some early success performing Top 40 in Atlantic City. If that’s a little bit egocentric, it’s also pretty fun.” … He saw it all, first and foremost, as something exciting a call to be Clint Eastwood, James Bond and William Wallace all rolled into one. “But let’s give him more credit than that. Even more so than being a Christian pop star is in general, I mean,” wrote Tyler Huckabee, senior editor at Relevant magazine, ranking the singer’s top 10 music videos, which all star Carman. “It’s impossible to look at this body of work and not conclude that being a Christian pop/spoken word star wasn’t a little bit of a vanity project for Carman. They could, like Carman himself, be both incredibly earnest and completely tongue-in-cheek in their appreciation of his art. The singer also had fans who celebrated him as the pinnacle of the weirdness of 1990s youth group culture. “When the enemy attacks you, remember he’s defeated and when we get to heaven you’ll have the grand opportunity to kick the devil’s fat butt back into hell.” I thank God for blessing Carman with the gift of music,” wrote one Christian on Carman’s Facebook wall.Īnother described how much his song “Satan, Bite the Dust” meant to her.
The singer had many fans who loved him effusively and described how much he had strengthened their faith. “This world has lost a light in the darkness, but today Carman saw firsthand the fruit of his labors.” A little bit of a vanity project Every night fans packed out venues, and his ministry was as powerful as it ever was,” Matt Felts, Carman’s manager, said in tribute. “When Carman resumed touring again a few years ago, he was concerned that no one would care that he was back. In 2013, 30 years after his first hit and on the heels of his cancer diagnosis, his fans raised $280,000 for him to go on a 60-city tour. He was nominated for four Grammys, named Billboard’s Contemporary Christian Artist of the Year in 19, and sold more than 10 million albums. It lets people know there is joy in being Christian.”Ĭarman, born Carmelo Domenic Licciardello and raised the youngest of three children in an Italian American family in Trenton, New Jersey, won seven Dove Awards. “I think an artist owes it to his audience to thrill them and impress them. “The music is the best means I have of reaching the most people in the quickest way to win them to Christ,” Carman said.
Carman? But if Carman’s star never quite secured its place at the zenith of American fame, he never let that dim his belief in his own celebrity, the awesome power of the concert-show-crusade-event, and his commitment to producing a pop spectacle for Jesus. Carman.įor those who didn’t know him, the single name was repeated as a question. He was a one-name celebrity, and for those who knew him, the Christian singer and showman ranked in the highest echelons of American stardom, up there with the other mononymous divas: Madonna. After a 40-year career in Christian music, Carman died in Las Vegas Tuesday night due to complications from surgery.
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