AUDIO ADRENALINE
Audio Adrenaline is a Christian rock band that formed in the late 1980s at Kentucky Christian University in Grayson,Kentucky. The band has received two Grammy Awards and multiple Dove Awards. They were regular performers at the annual Creation Festival, Spirit West Coast festival, Agape Music Festival, and Alive Festival.
The band was formed as A-180 in 1986 by Mark Stuart, Barry Blair, Will McGinniss, David Stuart, and Phil Vaughan, who all attended Kentucky Christian University. The band went on hiatus the following year when Mark traveled to Haiti for a semester. Upon Mark's return to Kentucky, the band reformed with Ron Gibson on drums. They became a popular local band, booked by the school nearly every weekend and traveling as far west as Texas, north to Chicago, and south to Florida. The band did over 100 shows during this time and recorded two independent releases under the name A-180. The first was You Turn in 1989 and Reaper's Train in 1990. Reaper's Train featured the original version of the song "DC-10", which is also found on the first Audio Adrenaline release.
The band's big break would come in the form of Bob Herdman. Herdman approached A-180 with two songs he had written, one of them called "My God", and asked A-180 to record it. After "My God" was recorded at Landmark Recording Studio, in Ohio, A-180 asked Herdman to join them as their songwriter. The demo tape was sent to radio stations and quickly scaled the charts. Following this, the song caught the attention of Toby McKeehan (from dc Talk), who brought it to the executives at ForeFront Records. The label decided to offer a record deal to A-180 but had them change their name to Audio Adrenaline a name that Herdman had come up with previously.
After signing their deal with Forefront, the band started writing and recording demo songs with some similar to "My God" for the first album. Meanwhile, Stuart left the band to focus more on his family and Gibson left at about the same time. However, the edgy demo songs were not what Forefront was looking for. What resulted was a debut album of drum machine driven hip-hop. Their first album under Forefront, the self-titled Audio Adrenaline, was released in 1992. It included "DC-10", the only track from the original A-180 recordings and was well received selling 75,000 copies.[2] The follow-up album, Don't Censor Me, came the next year and featured what is considered the biggest hit of the band, "Big House". The album sold 250,000 copies and launched the band into stardom. The album also includes the song "We're a Band", which remained one of their live staples.
In 2006, the group disbanded due to lead singer Mark Stuart's "ongoing vocal challenges." After a six year hiatus, the band reformed in 2012 with Kevin Max, formerly of DC Talk, as the new lead vocalist.
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