Larry Norman

I only read this last weekend about the death the previous Sunday (24th February) of Christian music pioneer Larry Norman. He was 60. He had suffered from heart problems and other health difficulties for years. Sales of his CDs went to help pay his medical bills.

Norman was the man who opened up the Christian rock music field. You might think, encountering the Mammon-infested wilderness of much ‘CCM’ (Contemporary Christian Music) that this was nothing to be proud of. But Norman was so different from many who succeeded him. Yes, as other bloggers have pointed out, his song ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’ held to a crude eschatology based on a simplistic reading of Scripture. But he was as far from the ‘Left Behind’ nonsense and its associations with the Religious Right as it were possible to be – absolitely remarkable, given his upbringing in the Assemblies Of God. There was nothing other-worldly about his faith. A common thread in his music and concerts could be summed up in the title of another song of his: ‘Feed The Poor’. Another song, ‘The Great American Novel’, from his landmark 1972 recording ‘Only Visiting This Planet’, contains these lines:

You say we beat the Russians to the moon
And I say you starved your children to do it.

The same song berates racist murder and sexual abuse. It’s not exactly Pat Robertson territory, is it?

The only surprise about ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’ being so literalist about the ‘Rapture’ is that Norman was a man skilled in using evocative imagery. The fact that he did got him into trouble with Christian bookstores, who wouldn’t sell his LPs. ‘Nightmare #71’ on 1973’s ‘So Long Ago The Garden’ bears comparison with the best of Bob Dylan’s incendiary 1960s’ material. In the context of a nightmare, Larry describes a vapid entertainment industry, environmental pollution, murder, adultery and soulless town planning as signs of human fallenness:

Man does not live
He just survives
(We sleep till he arrives)

Love is a corpse
We sit and watch it harden
We left it oh so long ago the garden.

Like the prophets, Norman was a strange, if not downright eccentric character. I once stayed with a family in Plymouth who had hosted him when he played a concert in the town. They had many anecdotes of his bizarre behaviour – not least in the realm of disappearing at night and not returning. But then, there is plenty of ‘eccentric’ precedent in the habits of Old Testament prophets, and to some extent Norman might be compared with them.

But, like all of us, Norman was a flawed individual. Counter-cultural as he was (both to society and a complacent church), he also aped the culture. His second wife, Sarah, had been his friend and convert Randy Stonehill‘s first wife. No wonder Norman and Stonehill endured a rift of twenty years. One of the tragedies about the timing of his death is that the two of them were planning to write and record together again.

Larry Norman, conflicted individual, blazed a trail for Christian music in a contemporary vein. So many have followed into Christian rock, so few have had his prophetic edge. For he didn’t give us the bland prophecy of ‘Thus says the Lord, I love you O my children’. He gave it straight, no chaser. He dissected church and society with clarity and precision. May God raise up many more to do this in music and the arts, as well as in the pulpit and on the political hustings.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I think I’ll spend some of my birthday money replacing some of my lost vinyl Larry albums with some CDs. His music was a treasure. Enjoy your eternal reward, Larry.

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