Remembering Christian rock maverick Larry Norman
Feb 26, 2008, 06:00 AM | by Chris Willman
Categories: In Memoriam, Music
Larry Norman, the singer/songwriter often referred to as “the father of Christian rock,” died Sunday at age 60 after years of declining health. His first two solo albums, Upon This Rock (originally released on Capitol in 1969) and Only Visiting This Planet (issued by Verve in 1972), are widely considered the first Christian rock albums of any real significance. All these decades later, they’re probably still the two best. Fans of contemporary Christian music (or CCM, as it’s come to be known) often claim that their heroes could be mainstream stars if only they didn’t sing about Jesus. Usually, that’s a lot of malarkey, but in Norman’s case, it happened to be true: A lot of his early work wouldn’t sound at all out of place between Wings and the Stones on a classic rock station, if not for his (usually) righteous lyrical concerns. How far his influence really extended is up for debate, given the relatively few records he sold — although as unlikely an acolyte as Frank Black of the Pixies has cited him as a hero and even recorded his songs. "Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met," Black said in a statement Monday.
For quite a few years, the sum total of the Christian rock genre was pretty much Larry Norman. It may be difficult now — at a time when bands like Paramore find wide acceptance in both the Christian and mainstream worlds (and almost a quarter-century on from the advent of Stryper) — to remember a time when there was no such thing as CCM, and when, if any such thing did pop up, it was greeted with distrust and scorn on either side of the evangelical/pop divide. The Beatles were about to break up, yet the cutting edge of Christian music was still represented by the folksy/choral records made by Ralph Carmichael, better known as Billy Graham’s musical director. Then along came an unsmiling, almost sneering guy who, like Johnny Cash, usually dressed all in black, though, unlike Cash, he had whiteish blond hair down past his chest. And he was singing about salvation and the rapture, with humor and sass, in a voice that clearly owed a lot to Mick Jagger’s cocky intonation. In the church vs. counterculture world of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, this officially counted as cognitive dissonance, and maybe it still does.
Norman initially appeared on the rock scene as part of the San Jose-based group People, which had a No. 7 hit on the Billboard chart in 1968 with “I Love You,” a remake of a Zombies tune. Though he was the principal songwriter, he quit the band about the time their first album came out. (Reportedly, the other members wanted to convert him to Scientology; also they and/or Capitol had managed to override Norman’s choice for the debut album’s title, which was originally set to be We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock ‘N’ Roll.) Capitol kept him on for one solo album, Upon This Rock, which introduced a venerable end-times anthem, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” He moved over to Verve for a follow-up, Only Visiting This Planet, which has been voted the best Christian album of all time by CCM magazine, the longtime bible — if you will — of the business. It didn’t sell much, but whatever born-again kids there were out there with Fender guitars all had a copy and wore out the grooves. Beatles producer George Martin got a credit for production assistance (it was recorded at Martin’s London studio), and you can feel Martin’s influence, if not his direct touch, in some of the LP’s fully orchestrated rockers. Here, Norman was taking a more holistic approach, lyrically: The album opener and first single, “I’ve Got to Learn to Live Without You,” was a lost-love lament that used the word “baby,” which didn’t necessarily endear him to rock-hating fundamentalists. Social commentary tracks like the Vietnam-themed “Six O’Clock News” confounded some of the faithful, too. Even signature God-rock tunes like “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus” didn’t quite make it onto the folk-mass circuit; maybe it was lines like “Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day/And you’re still looking for the perfect lay.”
Norman made one last album for a secular label, So Long Ago the Garden (on Verve’s sister imprint, MGM), in 1973. It marked the only time he recorded an entire album free of explicit Christian content, and besides some love-and-loneliness tracks, it included novel standouts like “Christmas Time,” a rocking condemnation of Xmas commercialism, and the tune I’d consider his masterpiece, “Nightmare #71,” a funny, rambling, overtly Dylan-influenced dreamscape that wittily invoked the names of deceased silent-screen stars amid allusions to the Book of Revelation. But even a less Jesus-y Norman couldn’t sell records.
From that point on, he tended to preach to the converted, despite declared intentions otherwise, and the songs he wrote in the later parts of his career tended to be explicitly evangelical, if not evangelistic, often to their needlessly preachy detriment. He made one more terrific-sounding LP, 1976’s In Another Land, which sounded like it had a major-label budget, even though he released it on his own imprint through Word, the Christian conglomerate. Soon after, at the height of his popularity in the evangelical world, Norman sang at the White House at the invitation of President Carter. But from 1980 on, his discography becomes difficult to track, as he self-released literally dozens of projects, mostly live albums and outtakes collections. His shot at making it in the mainstream had passed, but Norman was too much of a maverick to really make nice with the burgeoning Christian music community, still paranoid over the rejection he suffered when he was the lone long-haired born-again on the landscape. Norman built a confusing mythology around himself, laid out in copious liner notes that accompanied most of the LPs — with claims that Pete Townshend had been inspired by one of Norman's early rock operas to write Tommy, or that he was somehow indirectly responsible for Dylan’s conversion or baptism, or that he’d influenced or even become pals with U2. Was it all true? Which of his myriad records were official releases and which were bootlegs? Norman’s weirdnesses finally got too tiring to sort out, even for most fans, and his profile shrank. (Eventually, the singer blamed his erratic later output on a head injury suffered in a plane mishap in 1978.)
But though he remained the eternal misfit in and out of Christian music, there were acknowledgments, as well, in the later part of his life. Norman was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2001, along with his first hero, Elvis Presley. A tribute album with acts like DC Talk was produced in the ‘90s. And support came from unlikely quarters. Frank Black recorded one of his apocalyptic ballads, “Six-Sixty-Six,” on his first solo album, and a biography reported that Black and producer Steve Albini bonded over their Larry Norman fandom in the studio while making the first Pixies album, which was named after a Norman lyric. When the ailing Norman did his “farewell concert” in Oregon a few years ago, Black even showed up to duet with him on “Watch What You’re Doing” — the song that was the source of the “Come on, pilgrim!” line that became the title of the Pixies’ debut.
A press release issued by Norman’s brother says that “at the time of his death, he was working on an album with Frank Black and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, which will be released later this year.” A message the singer dictated from his hospital bed the day before his death, posted on his website, reads in part: “I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God's hand reaching down to pick me up... My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home... Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.”
Personal aside: I grew up in a suburban environment where parents were thrusting nascent Christian rock albums on their kids, hoping to provide a theologically sound or wholesome alternative to Bowie, Alice Cooper, the Stones, et al. Most of the records were mediocre and a chore to sit through, but Larry Norman’s were the ones you actually looked forward to — not just because the finest ones were of the same quality as anything on FM radio, but because he was just strange enough that you felt like he might be capable of throwing your parents as well as you for a loop. One of my favorite memories of Norman involves attending a concert in the ‘70s in Akron, Ohio. I was sitting next to a youth pastor who was glowing with the thought that the boys he’d brought along were being exposed to positive religious values in songs like “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” Then, somebody shouted out a request for one of Norman’s least explicable songs, “Pardon Me,” a haunting ballad about an attempted seduction that happens to be entirely free of recognizable Christian content but has its share of worldly sensuality and loneliness. I remember looking over and watching the grin on the youth leader’s face turn into a puzzled grimace as Norman sang lines like “Pardon me, kissing you like I'm afraid/But I feel I'm being played…/Close your eyes, and pretend that you are me/See how empty it can be/Making love if love's not really there/Watch me go, watch me walk away alone/As your clothing comes undone/And you pull the ribbon from your hair.” Of course, I got a big smile on my face as the youth pastor’s disappeared, because, as a rock kid, I lived for status quo-breaking moments like that one, when a "Christian concert" could turn into something altogether less predictable. He didn’t always follow through on his early promise, but that’s the Larry Norman I’ll remember — the maverick who never deviated from his chosen mission in search of any big brass ring, but who didn’t give many second thoughts to subverting the expectations of fellow believers, either.
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