They were, in fact, Christian rockers, which was something relatively new in those days -- the back-to-Jesus movement, as an offshoot of the counterculture, had just gotten rolling a couple of years earlier. The members were Bill (Billie) Hughes on guitar, violin, and backing vocals; Carl Keesee on bass and vocals; and Gary Dye on keyboards and vocals. Their sound was basically acoustic rock with minimal amplification and lots of harmony vocals -- think of Crosby, Stills Nash or a low-wattage answer to the Doobie Brothers from the time of their second or third album. And in a way, it's ironic that Peter Yarrow, of the PPM lineup, ended up producing them, as Noel Paul Stookey was the trio's most overtly religious practitioner (and a devout born-again Christian as well), and ended up performing Bill Hughes' Blessed, a song off of Lazarus' self-titled debut album, at his Carnegie Hall concert, released by Warner Bros. as One Night Stand.
In any case, neither of Lazarus' two albums sold in any serious numbers, but the group was still working in the mid-'70s. One report has them doing a Life Savers jingle during this period. Hughes, who passed away in Los Angeles in 1998, went solo in 1978, cutting his first album for Epic that year. He also worked with Keesee in Canada, cutting records into the early '90s. Keesee played a lot of sessions, including recordings with Jane Siberry, and -- with Hughes -- recorded with David Bradstreet. The second Lazarus album, Fool's Paradise, was released by Pony Canyon in Japan on CD, but otherwise the group's main exposure in recent decades was the 2000 reissue of Ladyfriends 2 from their second album on Bearsville Anthology. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi