If a rock star rocks in a forest and no one hears, is he still a rock star?  And did he rock? At World Magazine, Warren Cole Smith discovered a first-class rock star that no one knows about.

He calls Bill Mallonee, a Catholic revert, a “No-Hit Wonder.”

According to the story, in the 1980s Bill Mallonee “was beating around the same Athens, Ga., music scene that produced REM and the B-52s. And while Mallonee’s music has some of the same red clay in it, his vision pointed in a different direction. REM was losing its religion, but Mallonee was singing about God in the bars by night and was an elder at a funky, L’Abri-style nondenominational church by day.”

Luck, or something, did not shine on Mallonee, however. “In 1990, as the front man of Vigilantes of Love (VOL), Mallonee signed with Fingerprint, a label [his friend Mark] Heard had formed, and it looked as if a new kind of Christian music might be a-birthing.” But Heard died two years later.

“It didn’t take long, though, for VOL to sign with Capricorn, the storied Macon, Ga., label that had been home to the Allman Brothers before it went out of business in 1979.” It was, said Mallonee, “our big break.” But neither he, nor Capricorn, knew that digital music was a tsunami wiping record labels off the face of the earth.

He produced three critically acclaimed albums before the label dissolved in 2001.

Then, “Nashville’s Compass Records quickly picked them up, but the album that was supposed to be their breakthrough project, 2001’s Summershine, was released just weeks before Sept. 11 — yet another monumentally bad break.”

Says Mallonee: “We did 150 to 200 shows a year for 10 years, before finally saying ‘uncle.’”

He ended up with glowing reviews from Rolling Stone and CCM and the prize of being one of the “100 Greatest Living Songwriters” according to Paste magazine—and financially broken, divorced, and with no natural home in either the Christian or mainstream markets.

“His lyrics were often too dark and raw for the Christian market, and too religious for the mainstream market.”

He kept writing songs, converted to Catholicism, remarried ... and then “a funny thing happened: Vigilantes of Love got back together for what was supposed to be a one-time reunion. But that show, in 2008, evolved into another, and then another. In late 2008 and early 2009, the band sold out small venues in Athens, Atlanta, and Charlotte.”

Asks the piece:

“Will Bill Mallonee, now past 50, finally become the rock star almost everyone who has seen him perform wonders why he’s not? ‘I have no interest in being a star,’ Mallonee said. ‘I just want to make an honest living with my music. I still haven’t given up on that.’”