A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Andrew Hickey
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? Resources My main source for this…
https://i0.wp.com/500songs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cropped-cropped-Logo-1.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ?

Resources

My main source for this episode is the biography of Larry Norman Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music? by Gregory Alan Thornbury. I also quote here a blog post by Fred “Slacktivist” Clark which can be found at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2016/02/05/pray-that-you-will-be-among-those-left-behind/ , and an interview with Geoff Levin at https://www.crossrhythms.co.uk/articles/music/People_The_60s_rock_hitmakers_with_the_Larry_Norman_connection_/64361/p1/

Transcript

While we’re covering the mainstream of rock music in the main podcast, and also to a large extent in these bonuses, there are a lot of subgenres and subcultures in the music which will get little or no mention in the main series, but which have still had an impact.

Probably the single most culturally and commercially important of these, but also the least aesthetically interesting, is the genre known as “contemporary Christian music”, the majority of which can be summed up by this short clip from South Park:

[Excerpt: Cartman writes a Christian rock song]

Now, before we go any further, I need to say something. If any of you are evangelical Christians, particularly of the kind who believe in the Rapture, you may not want to listen to this episode, as it may cause some offence. In order to discuss the record we’re talking about today, which featured one of the few artists in this genre to be worthy of any kind of analysis at all, I have to explain some things about white American evangelical culture to people who might not be aware of it. I have no intention at all of causing offence by doing this, but at the same time I can’t be dishonest in these episodes, I am not an evangelical Christian (I expect never to talk about my own actual religious views if any in this podcast at all) and if I want to explain concepts as I see them, to an audience who like me are largely not familiar with evangelicalism but who are also less familiar with it than I am, and to do so honestly, I will have to do so in ways which you may find offensive.

That said, it’s not my *intention* to cause offence with any of what follows.

This episode, you see, looks at a band who were a one-hit wonder, but whose lead singer went on to inspire a book series that sold sixty-five million copies, the debut EP by the most influential alternative band of the eighties, and a genre which by the late nineties made up according to some estimates five percent of all record sales in the US, as well as inspiring a controversial religious organisation.

We’re going to look at “I Love You” by People!, and the career of Larry Norman:

[Excerpt: People!, “I Love You”]

And here’s where we get to the bit that some people might find offensive.

The term “Christian”, as it’s used in the phrase “Christian rock music”, does not precisely mean what it means in more general language. For most people talking casually, the word “Christian” means roughly anyone who believes in the Nicene Creed — belief in God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost as a three-in-one trinity, that Jesus was God incarnated as a man, that he died and was resurrected three days later, and that he will one day return to judge everyone, alive and dead alike. It would include Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox churches, the mainline Protestant denominations like Anglicanism and Lutheranism, and the nonconformist churches like the Methodists and the Baptists. Most people would also include the Quakers, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Unitarians, though some would disagree. That’s what Christian means to most people.

But in the context of “Christian rock music”, it refers to a particular subculture of Evangelical Christianity, rooted in American religious movements of the 19th century — a time when many, many, new religions were forming in the US.

But one of the things that happened at that time was the split of the Southern Baptist Convention from the Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery. Fundamentally, the Northern Baptists believed that slavery was wrong, and that the Bible, read as a whole, told them so, that read as a full work, it seemed to say things about how you treat other human beings that are not compatible with holding them in slavery.

The Southern Baptists disagreed, and they came up with a novel strategy to explain their disagreement while still claiming to hold the Bible as sacred as the Northern Baptists — both sides said that they took the Bible to be literally true and the literal word of God.

The Northern Baptists’ theology, like that of most Christians of every denomination throughout history, was created by taking the Bible as a whole book and trying to figure out the worldview it advocated, and they came to the conclusion that as a whole, the Bible told people not to mistreat others, and that any pieces where it appeared to be saying otherwise would need to be explained in some other way and made consistent with the whole.

The Southern Baptists’ strategy, on the other hand, was to take isolated passages which read to them as supporting slavery, and to use them as what get termed “proof-texts”, in isolation, without considering whether or not they fit with any greater message of the book as a whole. In essence they assumed the conclusion that slavery was a good thing, went looking for the proof, and of course they found what they were looking for.

But that technique — of stitching together unrelated passages with little recognition of the broader context they were in — created a wider theology that is distinct and very different from other Christian denominations of the time, though it has increasingly influenced other churches since, especially in America and some developing countries. That has persisted even though the Southern Baptist Convention officially renounced racism and white supremacy in 1995, because the whole approach to the Bible they take, while motivated by slavery, has continued and persisted.

This has led to ideas like “the Rapture” — a supposed point that will happen when all true believers in that particular strain of Christianity will be taken up bodily into Heaven, while the rest of us suffer under the rule of the Antichrist on Earth:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “I Wish We’d all Been Ready”]

That’s an idea that had never occurred to anyone before the late nineteenth century, because it has to be read into the Bible by proof-texts, but it’s central to the faith of a lot of people who consider themselves Biblical literalists.

And “Christian”, in the context of “Christian music”, means specifically people who are not only followers of that theology, but speak about it in their music. We have talked about many Christian musicians in the broader sense — the vast majority of musicians we’ve looked at so far have been Christian believers, whether a Northern Baptist like Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, Catholics like The Searchers, Anglicans like Cliff Richard, Seventh-Day Adventists like Little Richard, or even people who share some of the theology that originally comes from the Southern Baptists, like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, or who were brought up Southern Baptist themselves, like Johnny Cash.

Many of those people would not be regarded by believers in the particular evangelical strain of Christianity that we’re talking about as real Christians, and none of them, with the exception of Cliff Richard at points, have made music that would be considered “Christian music”, even when, as some of them did, they recorded some of the greatest gospel music ever recorded.

And at first, while Larry Norman, who we’re going to talk about today was a devoted believer in the evangelical branch of Christianity that descended from “proof-texting”, he seemed more likely to become another of those secular artists who happened to be a believer. Indeed, Larry Norman literally grew up on Haight-Ashbury, where his family moved from Texas when he was a small child, and his first major piece of musical excitement was when his cousin Bonnie came over to babysit and played him a record he’d heard a brief snatch of on the radio before his father turned it off:

[Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Hound Dog”]

That was one way in which his upbringing was slightly different from most people’s — his family were very strictly religious and followed the theology I talked about earlier. And while Norman’s father disapproved of the explicit racism of the Southern Baptist churches the family initially went to, as did Norman himself — who would later be very publicly outspoken about the racism of many of his fellow believers — Norman’s father still believed the church’s teaching that rock and roll was the Devil’s music — a teaching that mostly came from the fact that it was inspired by Black musicians.

Still, Larry was still exposed to popular culture, and other than his strict religious views he still had the same sort of upbringing as many of the other musicians we’ve discussed in the podcast. He was bullied at school and called homophobic slurs, he loved rock and roll music, and his life changed when he saw the Beatles on TV and he immediately joined a band that wore Beatle wigs and played electric guitars.

The Beatles also had a profound effect on his songwriting. He wrote in 1966, before his own fame, “Before B.C. [the Beatles Came] my lyrics had always been too exacting, too perfect, too definite. I gave the listener no chance to identify with the thoughts because I had already said them completely, totally. I offered no chance for the listener to apply the thought to himself because I over-said everything. I realized that this was the cardinal sin, it said only what I felt, not what others might feel.”

After dropping out of university, Norman started playing solo gigs around the Bay Area, much to the disapproval of his parents. As an example of the kind of gig that was popular in the Bay Area counterculture at the time, one of the shows he did in 1966 had him at the bottom of the bill, a rock band named People!, led by Geoff Levin who had formerly played with Jerry Garcia in the Black Mountain Boys second on the bill, and as the headliner… Buckminster Fuller, the architect and thinker.

The original drummer for People!, said of Norman’s performance at that show “He was the hardest act the group ever had to follow. He was such a great entertainer and he looked wonderful, was animated, made the audience laugh, told clever stories, clowned around etc., and most of all sang very well. Larry and his beautiful singing could melt your tender heart one moment and burn down the barn the next. His comedy, acting pranks, and obvious show biz wizardry were irresistible to all present.”

Soon the group asked Larry to join them, and he brought in his high-school friend Gene Mason, as the two of them had always wanted to be a duo act like the Righteous Brothers. The group put together a complex stage-show, including a thirteen-minute piece inspired by the Lord of the Rings called The Epic, which involved staged sword-fights and a dragon model:

[Excerpt: People!, “The Epic”]

The group became a solid mid-tier Bay Area band. Norman became close friends with Skip Spence while Spence was still drumming for Jefferson Airplane, he’d hang around with Neil Young and Steve Stills when they were in town with Buffalo Springfield — Young would be a major influence on Norman’s songwriting — and they played the Human Be-In, the major San Francisco show that featured the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had brought the San Francisco scene to national attention, though People! were near the bottom of the bill.

But when it came to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, for Larry Norman one out of three wasn’t bad. He loved the music, but he always had sexual hangups, partly but not solely because of his religious views (though there’s some evidence that later in life he may have fathered a child while married to another woman, so he could be tempted), and his religion meant that even drinking and smoking were not options for him, let alone any of the other drugs that were common on the scene.

This meant that the biggest memory Norman took away from the Human Be-In was of fear and worry for Janis Joplin after seeing her drinking Jack Daniels between songs, which later inspired one of his most popular songs, “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus?”:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus?”]

Norman’s objection to sex and drugs also lost him his first big opportunity. While People! were building up their audience, he was talent-scouted by the producers of a new Broadway musical about the burgeoning counterculture, as was his good friend Jennifer Warnes, who went on to have a big career after her starring role in the show. Norman was going to be a star, and flew to Texas, where his family now lived, to celebrate the good news with his family. It was only on the plane back that he finished reading the script to Hair:

[Excerpt: Cast from Hair, “Hashish”]

He turned down the role and concentrated on his band instead.

People! soon got signed to Capitol Records, after signing a management contract with a popular local DJ known as Captain Mikey.

Captain Mikey told Norman to write something more commercial than the songs about religion and spirituality he was writing at the time. As Norman told the story:

“I had no interest in the kind of music that was on the radio. In fact, I had not listened to the radio since 1956 when my Dad forbade me to. I never listened to it…until Captain Mikey told me, in the nicest way, that essentially my songs weren’t commercial. So I went home to write something and the next day Gene and I presented the song to him.

His response? “That’s exactly what I meant. That’s going to be the first single.” Well, that only frustrated me more because I had set out to write the most worthless, shallow song I could think of, and I was shocked when Captain Mikey liked it better than all of my carefully crafted songs.”

That song, “Organ Grinder”, did become People!’s first single:

[Excerpt: People!, “Organ Grinder”]

The single flopped, and Mikey insisted that the group do something even more commercial for their second single. The group had already started work on an album, which according to some sources was going to be titled “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus, and a Lot Less Rock and Roll”, after a fifties country song which had become popular as an ironic cover version for hippies to perform, and which People! were performing *semi*-ironically:

[Excerpt: People!, “We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus, and a Lot Less Rock and Roll”]

But that was obviously not the kind of thing that was likely to become a pop hit, and Captain Mikey had another idea for what they could do.

In their live show they were doing a version of a song by the Zombies. Now, the Zombies are a band that I covered in one of these Patreon bonus episodes back when they really were only ten minutes, and I’m still hoping to find a way to cover them in more detail, because they were one of the most interesting bands of the sixties, and had two great songwriters in Rod Argent and Chris White, who produced more great songs between them than many much more successful bands did in the same time.

But while they were together originally, they only had two hits, “She’s Not There”, which was a hit in the US and UK, and “Tell Her No”, which was only successful in the US:

[Excerpt: The Zombies, “Tell Her No”]

After “Tell Her No”, they had a run of eleven singles in a row that flopped badly, before finally having another hit with “Time of the Season” after they’d already split up, and the third of those eleven flops was “Whenever You’re Ready”, a song that was influenced by the Impressions and written by Rod Argent, the group’s keyboardist, who had written their two hits:

[Excerpt: The Zombies, “Whenever You’re Ready”]

The B-side to that song, though, was by Chris White, the bass player, who wrote many of their best songs though none of their hits:

[Excerpt: The Zombies, “I Love You”]

The Zombies had expected “Whenever You’re Ready” to be their return to the big time, and were hugely disappointed when it flopped. But oddly the B-side took on a life of its own, even though the Zombies’ own version never became a hit. First the Japanese group the Carnabeats covered it in 1967, going to number two in Japan:

[Excerpt: The Carnabeats, “Sukisa (I Love You)”]

And then People! had a hit with it in the US, after Captain Mikey insisted on it being their next single after he heard them perform it live. Their version starts with a heavy intro in the style of Vanilla Fudge’s cover version of “You Keep Me Hanging On”:

[Excerpt: People!, “I Love You”]

But soon it becomes a direct soundalike copy of the Zombies’ version:

[Excerpt: People!, “I Love You”]

That became one of the biggest hits of 1968, though it only made number twelve on the Hot One Hundred — it made number one in a lot of regional markets, but different markets at different times, so even though it sold millions it didn’t chart as high nationally as lower-selling singles.

These days, when the Zombies perform it live, Colin Blunstone jokes “They did what we never thought of – they put it on the *A* side!”

The album People! were working on was quickly retitled “I Love You”, and the group looked forward to much more success, but then religious differences finished them off.

All the instrumentalists in People! had been converted to the Church of Scientology, which always makes a special effort to get celebrities on side and was having a lot of luck in the mid-sixties as people were interested in alternative spiritual practices. The rest of the group declared Norman, who refused to convert to Scientology because of his own religious beliefs, a “suppressive person” — a term in Scientology for someone extremely opposed to Scientology who must be avoided at all costs because their presence will cause harm.

As Norman told the story “The band started to become interested in transcendental meditation and other philosophies—and finally Scientology. Most of them seem to disdain my Christian beliefs and felt quite proud that they believe in nothing, and therefore were more “evolved” than I was. And it seemed to be the band’s opinion that I had no personality, no physical, animal magnetism. It was true, or at least I tried to project that lack of “it.” I wanted nothing to do with girls and certainly didn’t put out any vibe that encourage[s] girls to be attracted to me.”

The group were also annoyed that Norman had more songs on the album than the rest of them did and would thus have higher royalties, and they sacked Captain Mikey to replace him with someone more Scientology-friendly. Eventually, the night before the album’s release, the pressure got to Norman, and during a performance of “The Epic” a stage accident caused him to fall into a hole and damage his finger:

[Excerpt: People!, “The Epic”]

He took that as a sign, saying that when he fell he was “baptised into the holy spirit” and had to quit secular music and start making Christian music. He quit the band that night — at least according to the biography of Norman I used as a main source for this. According to Geoff Levin, the founder of the group, who disputes much of that biography’s accuracy but doesn’t go into much detail himself “When we kicked Larry out of the band it had nothing to do with anything but the fact we’d turned into Scientology zealots and we started applying things that we really didn’t know what we were doing. It was more about Larry’s personality, what we perceived and our youth, our stupidity and inability to work with various types of personalities and understand them. I had maybe three classes in psychology; I was clueless. As the leader of the group I should’ve jumped into some better textbooks and writers about this whole psychological, self-help thing but I didn’t know that, so I was a perfect candidate for a cult.”

He went on to say “The thing that was really important to me now is gaining the compassion of each member, how each member related to what happened to our group. That includes Larry and the injustice that was done to him. We’ve speculated on what would have happened to the group, what would have happened to Larry, what would have happened to all of us if we hadn’t made that mistake. That needed to be cleared up. Larry did not quit. I understand why he might have said that. He was unceremoniously and unjustly kicked out of the band. Mike followed because Mike stood up and said you kick him out of the band and I’m out, I’m done with you guys. We were that stupid we had not taken in that we not only got rid of one of the very talented people in the group, we had alienated our manager who had directed the group and managed our career.”

The rest of the band struggled on without him — the cover of their second album is apparently festooned with Scientology imagery — but they had no success and soon split up.

Norman remained signed to Capitol as a performer and songwriter, and at first he worked for their publishing subsidiary Beechwood Music writing a planned rock musical that was intended to go to Broadway but never made it. in his spare time he’d walk the streets of LA trying to evangelise to people. Surprisingly, he had some success in just going up to people on the street and talking to them about Jesus, and one of his successes, Susan Perlman, was so influenced by him that she co-founded the organisation Jews For Jesus, an extremely controversial group that exists to this day, more than fifty years later, and spends tens of millions of dollars a year trying to convert Jewish people to fundamentalist Christianity.

In 1969, Norman recorded his first solo album, Upon This Rock, with a backing band made up of members of the Wrecking Crew. Norman later disliked the mix, which was done by the producer while Norman was ill, but the album is a very listenable collection of Neil Young-influenced late-sixties singer-songwriter material, which just happens to have religious themes:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “The Last Supper”]

Though on occasion Young’s influence would be a little too blatant, as on “Ha Ha World”, which is *very* closely modelled on “Mr. Soul”:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Ha Ha World”]

The album also contained his most influential song, and one of his best, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”, about the rapture:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”]

That song was so popular that Norman actually included it on his second studio album as well, and it did more to popularise the idea of the rapture within the evangelical subculture than anything else. That idea was to gain prominence in the seventies with the bestselling work of fiction disguised as fact, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, and even more so in the nineties with the book series Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, whose very title came from Norman’s song.

Norman’s song is much kinder than those grotesquely cruel books, and is based in empathy and a sincere wish to prevent hurt rather than their glorying in the torment of people who didn’t listen to Tim LaHaye, but it’s still based in that hermeneutic which comes from proof-texting and jamming unrelated bits of the Bible together. I’m going to quote a bit here from a blog post about the song by the evangelical blogger Fred Clark, one of the best writers on that subculture and one who understands it far better than I do:

“Theologically, though, Larry Norman’s song is an irredeemable mess.

The first two verses above illustrate how Norman had absorbed the cut-and-paste hermeneutics of the Scofield Reference Bible and the premillennial dispensationalist scheme beloved by End Times enthusiasts and “Bible prophecy” scholars. Thus we get the first verse, which is Norman’s version of Revelation 6 and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, followed immediately by that verse disastrously paraphrasing — and inverting — an apocalyptic passage from Matthew 24.

For Norman, and for generations of white evangelicals steeped in this Scofield/Darbyite End Times tradition, this sequence makes perfect sense. In their view, those paragraphs from the ending of Matthew 24 naturally and properly follow the opening verses of Revelation 6. How else would one read the Bible?

The arbitrary decision to insert a chunk of Matthew into the middle of Revelation is not an auspicious starting point for those seeking a clearer understanding of either passage.”

I’ll link that blog post at the top of this post, because it’s well worth reading, as is Clark’s blog in general if you’re interested in this topic:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”]

The album was a flop and Capitol dropped Norman only two months after it was released, and quickly relicensed the record to a small Christian label. Norman’s aim had been to make a record that happened to be about Christianity but could be listened to by nonbelievers — one that would hopefully actually lead them to religion. But that didn’t work out.

Instead, Norman became a massive star within the evangelical subculture, and especially in the small group who were known as either the Jesus People or the Jesus Freaks, depending on who you asked — people who lived the hippie lifestyle, and didn’t trust traditional churches, but *did* hold traditional religious views. These have generally been portrayed in the media as being dropouts who “found Jesus” after experimenting with other spiritual traditions, and there were certainly some of those, but for the most part they were people like Norman — people who had been brought up as strict Christians but disliked some of the attitudes of the churches they’d grown up in, mostly on race and rock music, and had found a community where they could think of themselves as rebels against both the church establishment and the secular world.

Norman was seen as a leader — or *the* leader — of this movement, though he would always turn that into a joke, with one of his regular bits of concert patter being to say “A reporter came up to me and asked me if I was the leader of the Jesus movement, and I said, ‘No. Jesus is.’ Then they said, ‘Well, someone said that the Jesus movement started in your living room.’ To which I responded, ‘Well, if it did, I wasn’t home at the time.’ ”

And Norman really *was* controversial among the older generation of evangelicals, for whom rock and roll really was the Devil’s music. He would often find his shows picketed by people accusing him of witchcraft or of being a Catholic — the two being essentially the same in the minds of many fundamentalists. Jimmy Swaggart accused his music of being “spiritual fornication”, and posters for his shows were defaced with phrases like “Forked tongue Jesuit lackey in disguise”

Norman used a loan from Pat Boone to start up his own record label, the first of a few he would start up, to put out records by other Christian artists, like Randy Stonehill, with whom he would have a complicated love/hate relationship for the rest of his life:

[Excerpt: Randy Stonehill, “Norman’s Kitchen”]

Norman wanted to build up a roster of other talents in the Christian music world, though he never really managed to find many other talents. The problem he saw was that most of the artists were literally preaching to the converted. As he said “Almost none of the Christian music succeeds as art…it is merely propaganda masquerading as art…Not only is it misconceived as a musical project…but it fails to deliver its message…[their records] are sold only by Christian bookstores or direct mail. Non Christians do not frequent religious bookstores.”

Of course, there’s still a place for art that is aimed at a particular segment of society, but Norman felt that if you were going to be making art aimed just at other believers, there was no point in pretending you were writing songs aimed at converting people, and so there was no reason to just write about how happy you were to be saved or similar. His aim was that if he had to stick with singing to other evangelicals, he could at least move on to more advanced topics. There’s a phrase in that subculture — milk before meat — people need to have the easy stuff before having something more difficult to chew on, and he saw all the other artists as just keeping giving people milk. He saw his models as being people like the apologists G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, who attempted to write about intellectually complex questions of theology and the spiritual life in everyday language.

After putting out a live album and a demo collection on his own label, he had a chance to put out studio albums on a major label again, and maybe break out of the evangelical subculture. Mike Curb, the head of MGM records, is someone we’ve talked about before, but he was an extremely right-wing Christian who had tried to purge the label of anything drug-related. He signed Norman to the label, and soon Norman was in the UK, working on a new album at George Martin’s AIR studio, with a minor production company, Triumvirate, who George Martin had recommended to him — they were members of a band, Edwards Hand, that Martin had produced.

While in the UK, Norman made one of the several odd celebrity friendships he would make over the years. He and his wife went to see Behind the Fridge, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s latest comedy show:

[Excerpt: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, “The Gospel Truth”]

While this was in the period when Cook and Moore were creating their Derek and Clive tapes, some of the most obscene and offensive comedy ever created, Dudley Moore ended up becoming close friends with Norman, and the two would be close for years, with Norman almost managing to convert him.

The album Norman was working on, Only Visiting This Planet, was the first part of a trilogy — an album about the present, to be followed by albums about the past and the future. Some of the music was on themes that could almost be considered secular, like “Pardon Me”, which on its face is about not wanting sex without love, but is also about purity culture:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Pardon Me”]

Norman’s biographer Gregory Alan Thornbury has also pointed out that this could have been as much about his fear of the marriage he had just entered into, about his self-acknowledged fear of sex itself, which he talked about often, and has also pointed out that around this time Norman made a diary note — “People are born with a sex, but must acquire a gender” — which Thornbury thinks is relevant to interpreting the song.

But there’s plenty of straightforwardly religious music on the album too. There’s a remade version of “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”, “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus?”, the song inspired by Janis Joplin, and “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”, a 50s rock pastiche that sounds very like the music that Roy Wood was making around the same time with Wizzard:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”]

But the album was not a success — Norman’s belief was that the people looking for his albums were still looking in the Christian bookshops, while nobody shopping in the normal record shops knew who he was. But MGM were committed to him, and they agreed to put out the second album of the trilogy.

That album, So Long Ago The Garden, was one that was specifically designed to play down the Christian elements of his music and appeal to a more general public. This was on the advice both of the evangelist Billy Graham and of the British pop star Cliff Richard, who by this point was very publicly religious himself, but who pointed out to Norman that it was better to get as big an audience as possible so he could reach more people with his message.

By most standards, it was still an extremely religious album, with a majority of the songs still having religious themes. There’s no way to listen to a song like “Christmastime” without being hit over the head with the message:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Christmastime”]

But Norman was trying to do something a bit different. As he would later write “Music is a powerful language, but most Christian music is not art. It is merely propaganda. It never relies on—in fact it seems to be ignorant of—allegory, symbolism, metaphor, inner-rhyme, play-on-word, surrealism, and many of the other poetry born elements of music that have made it the highly celebrated art form it has become. Propaganda and pamphleteering is boring, and even offensive unless you already subscribe to the message being pushed…which is why Christian records only sell to Christians.”

So most of the album, which Norman considered his favourite, was more indirect than his previous work. As he described it “So Long Ago The Garden was as definitive a statement as I could make about the emptiness of our lives without Christ, just how lonely and wretched we truly are. I alternated songs. One song would talk about a man trying to find satisfaction and true love, and expecting a woman to somehow fill all of his needs and be his whole world. The next song would be Lonely By Myself. Strictly about a man looking for something, and he doesn’t know what it is. We know it’s God, and he knows it’s something like great universal love, but he can’t find it, and it causes him Ecclesiastical despair.”

It contained some of his best writing, and at least a few songs that work in the way he described:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “She’s a Dancer”]

But he hadn’t brought his evangelical audience with him, and what’s more they were *scandalised* by the cover — a picture of him in the Garden of Eden, from the waist up but clearly naked and with what looked to some people like a tiny bit of his pubic hair visible at the very bottom.

The conclusion was inescapable to the white evangelical subculture, most of which had always been suspicious of this new Christian Rock music, which Norman had pioneered but which was now becoming big business in its own right — Larry Norman had obviously become a Satanist.

Norman vociferously disagreed, saying “So Long Ago the Garden is not a gospel album. But it is a Christian album. All of the songs I write are Christian songs, because I am a Christian. Whether it mentions Christ or not is no stipulation….Is a man any less a Christian because he is a car mechanic instead of an evangelist?…When you give a report in school on American history, is it a non-Christian report?…Some people are so conditioned that if a song doesn’t have some religious clues like ‘blood of the lamb’ or ‘the cross,’ they are unsure of its spiritual qualification.”

The album was another commercial failure, and MGM was in the process of being bought up by Polydor, who didn’t have the same interest in building Norman’s career, and so he was back to releasing albums on his own label. The final part of the trilogy, In Another Land, became Norman’s most popular album by a long way, though he always considered it one of his blandest, saying “The Church finally accepted me in 1976, I think it was, and that’s just because I had so many songs people knew that the records stores said, “Okay, I’ll take a chance.” I did In Another Land, which was such a mellow album. It’s really for Christians (none of the other albums were), but what do you say when the concept of the album is eternal life with God in heaven? … Of course they liked that album and the record stores sold it and it was Album of the Month for Word Record Club and it was the #1 seller for a long time.”

In Another Land contained a celebrity guest appearance, with Dudley Moore contributing piano on the track “The Sun Began to Rain”:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman,”The Sun Began to Rain”]

From that point on, Norman resigned himself to not breaking out of the Christian-record market, but that market had become huge. Norman was invited to perform at the White House in 1979, and over the next few decades he would make many millions of dollars.

He wouldn’t, though, make much more good music. In 1978, just after he had recorded the follow up to In Another Land, a blues-rock album called Something New Under the Son, a ceiling panel on a plane he was on came detached and hit him hard on the head. In the short term he appeared to be more or less fine, but he later claimed he had suffered some brain damage that left him unable to concentrate the way he had previously, and that: “I have forgotten how to produce music. I can’t decide if a song needs more guitars, a different bass line, vocal harmonies, or if it’s already finished and just needs to be mixed down. But then, should the guitar be louder, placed in the center or on the side in the stereo spread? Is there enough reverb on the voice? Is the voice loud enough?”

Other than one 1991 return-to-form album, most of his listeners agreed with his assessment — while he continued making music for nearly thirty more years, his artistic reputation rests on the five studio albums he’d recorded before his accident.

But he’d had a massive impact on the culture, rather more than one might imagine. For a start, he’d started a small Bible study group in his home, only for musicians and other artists. That had later merged with another similar group and become known as the Vineyard Church, which is now a church movement with over 2000 congregations. Norman lost control of the organisation early on, but it was not long after Norman’s Bible study was taken over by Kenn Gulliksen and renamed the Vineyard that Bob Dylan started attending its Bible studies and became a born-again Christian:

[Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody”]

Dylan has apparently stated a couple of times that he admires Norman’s music, as well. He’s not the only one. Dizzy Reed, Guns ‘n’ Roses’ keyboard player, is a massive Larry Norman fan, played on some of Norman’s nineties music, and got Norman’s brother, who performs as Charles Normal, to join Guns ‘n’ Roses on bass for a while in the nineties.

Someone who *definitely* admired Norman is Bono, and you can see a lot of Norman’s style in his lyrics. And it would be Bono who would introduce Norman to one of the most influential musicians of the last forty years, who in turn was hugely influenced by Norman. One of the songs on Something New Under the Son is a track called “Watch What You’re Doing”:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman, “Watch What You’re Doing”]

That line “C’mon pilgrim, you know He loves you” would be used by the Pixies, the single most influential alternative rock band of the eighties, in the song “Levitate Me”, on their first EP, which was titled… “C’mon Pilgrim”:

[Excerpt: The Pixies, “Levitate Me”]

Indeed, on their first demo tape, the Purple Tape, the Pixies actually covered “Watch What You’re Doing”, though that recording was left off the version that circulates. Black Francis, the Pixies’ frontman, has often credited Norman with being one of his biggest inspirations, and in the nineties he covered Norman’s song “Six, Sixty, Six” with his band Frank Black and the Catholics:

[Excerpt: Frank Black and the Catholics, “Six, Sixty, Six”]

Norman and Black Francis became close friends after Bono introduced them, and as Norman’s health declined in the last decade of his life Francis would often come and visit him.

Norman had multiple health issues in his last years, and could only perform very rarely. After 2005 he only made a handful of live performances. His final ever performance was at a Baptist Church, but the few before that were special. in 2005 he did what everyone thought would be his last ever show, and Black Francis joined him for a performance of “Watch What You’re Doing”:

[Excerpt: Larry Norman and Black Francis, “Watch What You’re Doing”]

And there was a one-off reunion of People!, who hadn’t played together as a full band since 1968. The Scientologists in the band had turned away from the religion, and the group put their differences aside for a reunion show in 2006, and in 2007 they were inducted into the San Jose Hall of Fame and played “I Love You” together one last time:

[Excerpt: People!, “I Love You (live 2007)”]

People! reformed properly in 2017, though without Norman, and actually released an album *this year*, their first studio album together in decades, The Return of People:

[Excerpt: People!, “Wake the Monkey”]

Sadly, the reason it’s without Norman is because he died in 2008. Black Francis visited him in hospital on his deathbed and said of him later “The Christian church makes a big deal out of the fallibility of man and that the ideal course is to be ‘Christ-like.’ In my humble opinion Larry was the most Christ-like person I ever met.”

Bono sent flowers to the funeral.

Since his death, Norman’s music has kept turning up in all sorts of places. “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” has been used in the TV show The Leftovers. Rian Johnson, a big fan of Norman’s, used “Righteous Rocker #1” in the soundtrack to his film Knives Out. And just this week, the godmother of German punk, Nina Hagen, released a single “Nina Hagen Sings Larry Norman”, with two of Norman’s songs:

[Excerpt: Nina Hagen, “Rock the Flock”]

Larry Norman was a figure who never quite realised his ambition. He wanted to make great art that would appeal to audiences in the evangelical subculture *and* to people who just wanted to hear a good rock and roll record, to artistically elevate his subculture and spiritually elevate the wider population. That was something that was not achievable, and which those of us who don’t share his very particular brand of Christianity are probably grateful he couldn’t achieve. But he came closer to both than perhaps was likely, and he is quite possibly the most influential rock musician most people have never heard of.