God Created Music

The way I see it, music was created to glorify God. Larry Norman was the first person to realize that rock music could also be used to praise God. What Jimmy Hendrix is to rock, Larry Norman is to gospel.

From In Another Land:

Larry Norman will soon be reaching his 40th year in music. He has been called "the father of Christian rock" because it was he who first combined rock and roll with Christian lyrics back in 1956. He received the C.A.S. Lifetime Achievement Award several y ears ago. Previous to that recognition, Contemporary Christian Music Magazine compiled a vote from a national poll of different critics and writers who named Norman's Only Visiting This Planet record the most significant and influential gospel album ever released in the field of contemporary Christian music.

He started writing songs when he was a child and performing them in public at the age of nine. With the emergence of Elvis Presley, pastors raged from the pulpit that rock music was from the Devil and could never be used by God. Larry felt differently - that rock music had evolved from the black gospel music of American slaves; that God didn't need to use rock or any other kind of music. God had used the cross.

Larry continued to confront the evangelical community with his own personal vision of what best communicated Christ's love to the Sixties generation. He signed with Capitol Records in 1966. Making three records, he left after releasing his landmark album Upon This Rock. He next signed with MGM and released Only Visiting This Planet and So Long Ago The Garden. His style of music had been controversial for almost fifteen years before the Jesus Movement sprang up. Even his own father did not like his son's music, but when others began to write songs which were similar to his - things finally began to change. Time Magazine recognized him as the most significant artist in his field and Billboard Magazine called him the most important writer since Paul Simon. Coincidentally he was written up by Christianity Today at the same time and this finally silenced his father's protestations. Although on stage he often appeared to be daring an audience to like him, this enfant terrible - the "bad boy of Christian music" - began to be perceived differently.

Upon This Rock was banned by the majority of Bible Bookstores for two years. Only Visiting This Planet remained in limbo for over six years. Finally, in 1975, after the explosive success of In Another Land within the Christian community, Larry created The Complete Trilogy, a three-record boxed set of Planet, Garden, and Land which included a book expl aining the work he had been doing. He was told by the "mother company" that the gospel community wasn't ready for his previous two albums and that, frankly, none of the in-house staff or executives "understood" Planet or Garden anyway.

Upon leaving MGM Records in 1974 he had started his own label, Solid Rock Records. His first recording, Orphans From Eden, was never released. His next album, In Another Land, was executorially censored by the "mother company" which insisted on removing any music they felt was "too negative" or "too controversial." When his 1976 album Something New Under The Son, met with similar censorship, he took off on a seven-month world tour and wrote Voyage Of The Vigilant. The idea was to combine live concert performances with on-the-road hotel room recordings and stop-over studio sessions whenever foreign studios were a vailable. This expensive tour was covered by journalist Steve Turner and chronicled by photographer DC Riggot. Larry toured with a rock and roll band and also performed solo sets throughout America, Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and more exotic locales like Israel, Lebanon, India, Hong Kong, and Japan - but with songs like "Three Million Gods," and "Cats Of The Coliseum," discussing the Hindu religion and the early martyrdom of Christians in Rome, this album was not acceptable because it was considered too "avant garde." So Voyage Of The Vigilant was never released. Larry's joyous trash can symphony Le Garage Du Monde, The Young Lions' Spirit And Flesh ensemble work and Steve Scott's Moving Pictures were all considered too far over-the-edge for the American youth gospel market and never released.

So for what proved to be only a very short time, Larry produced other artists he had discovered in obscurity. Each of their album releases had been successful, both artistically and commercially. This "golden age of Solid Rock" was still in full flower, and Larry was getting ready to sign with Warner Brothers when he was involved in the airplane accident of 1978 which injured his spine, neck, and skull - and caused him partial brain damage. This started him down a very di fferent road. His farewell song from Voyage Of The Vigilant proved to be self prophetic in a way other than he had intended and his brain damage silenced his literate voice for the next twelve years. His plan had been to let his contract run out upon his return to America, but now he was unable to carry out his plans to move to Warner's.

In 1978 Larry started Street Level Records as an alternative label to release albums which Word had no interest in distributing. With help from Paul Lindner he distributed Street Level Records to stores in America and Europe. After contractually enduring two more years of musical censorship and u nreleased albums with the "mother company", he started Phydeaux records - as in "Fido." Larry joked that "if Christian music was going to the dogs, then he wanted to remain on the cutting edge." Phydeaux, Inc. was not a counter-measure to, but a step-in-sync with, all the bootleg tapes of his material that had been circulati ng. In response to illegal bootlegs like Leyton's Live At The Mac, Larry decided if collectors wanted "bad-sounding" live recordings he would pick some rarities from his own archives. He chose Roll Away The Stone - And Listen To The Rock and The Israel Tapes. He had many better sounding live recordings but thought kids wanted something more rough for their bootleg collections. He also released several high quality studio compilations but was unwilling to release a "proper record" to the stores. He was standi ng as far away from the industry as possible and was also enjoying the distance. Basically, he was ignoring the American distributors who had for many years ignor ed him. Phydeaux helped distribute Street Level Records on behalf of Street Level Prod., Inc. to stores in Europe and America and also by direct mail. Through the mail he found that he could go directly to the people who well and truly understood music an d his ministry.

When critics attacked his Phydeaux catalogue for not keeping up with the fads and trends of the current gospel industry, Larry laughed. He had been ahead of his time for years and had his music censored and banned because of it. Now he was no longer interested in making his albums available to the stores.

Larry continued to travel extensively through other countries, coming back to America occasionally to report on his adventures. The airplane accident had made him seem friendlier and more accessible than during the intensity of his earlier years. He started inviting his audiences out to restaurants after the concerts - not to continue preaching but to listen to the stories of their lives, and their experiences. Although he remained at odd s with the gospel music industry, avoided Christian television, granted few interviews - and still to this day receives almost no gospel radio air play - he seemed pleasantly resolved to this impasse.

At the beginning of the `90's his father sold Phydeaux, and Street Level Records came under the umbrella of CCPC. After Larry's heart attack in 1992, Larry sold Solid Rock to help pay for his medical bills.

Since 1992, Larry has retired from touring because of his hear t problems. He now spends his days in Oregon. His world tours and rock and roll days are over, he concedes - but he also hopes that if his health permits it, he may in the future attempt a sit-down solo concert now and then.

From Stranded in Babylon:

In 1991 he celebrated his 35th year as a songwriter and performer. He has released over 30 albums in his recording career, including studio and live albums, and retrospective collections. He has produced many albums for other artists over the years. In 1990 he won the C.A.S. Lifetime Achievement Award. His album Only Visiting This Planet was voted the most important album in the last twenty years by CCM Magazine. His songs have been translated into more than a dozen languages and his music has been recorded by more than 200 other artists, including rock singers like Cliff Richard, who ha s recorded several of his songs, and non-rockers like Sammy Davis Jr., Petula Clark, and Jack Jones.

In 1990 he performed seven times at Moscow's 35,000 seat Olympic Stadium and sold out four concerts in Kiev on the weekend of the 4th memorial observance of the Chernobyl nuclear power-reactor explosion.

Always political, Larry spoke out for the impoverished, spoke about abortion, and poli ticized other social conditions in his music during the Sixties and Seventies. His sly stand-up comedy and biting social commentary made him a controversial force in the music industry and a voice of reason in the modern church world. Sometimes it was to th e detriment of his "career" that he spoke about his strong beliefs. Artistically he cam into conflict with Capitol Records and MGM records because of his straightforward message and he has left several other labels in protest to their business treatment o f himself and other artists. Journalists and record executives have prematurely issued his death certificate, commercially, many times in the last twenty five years, but his music remains culturally relative and his commercial popularity continues to grow . Even during the years when his brain damage prevented him from making viable recordings, he continued to travel around the world doing concerts in England, Germany, Scandinavia, and Western European countries where artists traditionally tour and even in p laces where many other artists are rarely invited. He went behind the Iron Curtain and made secret concerts for years before he was officially invited to perform. He still remains one of the top performers in his field. In Europe he sells more records tha n Amy Grant and most American artists, and illegal bootlegs of his concerts and studio recordings circulate on cassette and CD among collectors. His vinyl records from earlier years sell for up to $400.00. He recently opened up a branch of his Solid Rock Re cords label in Moscow with Vladimir Yakovlev, his rock videos have been played on television to an estimated sixty million people, and Larry considers his tours and Russian record releases an important part of his musical outreach.

To understand Larry's music it is helpful to understand his background. He spent his infancy in Texas, but his conscious life began in a black neighborhood in San Francisco. When he was three he moved with his mother and father into an apartment on the corner of Lyon Street and Fulton, one block from Hayes, and directly across from where the Haight-Ashbury sub-culture would one day rise up. There was an upright piano by the front window and Larry would "sit in the living room and compose for hours" while his mother would "sit in t he kitchen and decompose." Larry loved music and spent a lot of time at the piano even though there was not enough money for piano lessons. His grandfather, Burl W. Stout, had been a performer with the Fontnell's troupe touring vaudeville houses before th e talkies changed theater. Larry spent may happy hours at his grandfather's house listening to the 78's which comprised his collection of blues and gospel albums.

"Bert Williams was irreverent and angry," Larry recalls. "Ethel Waters was saucy, Paul Robeso n was majestic and a little frightening, Mahalia Jackson was very dramatic; I listened to it all, and I had so much more of a connection with this music than the white fluff that was played over the radio. I also liked classical music and the hymns. All o f it kind of swirled around in my head and became seamless. I felt that all music had come from God but I knew everyone wasn't using it for Him. I thought that Broadway music was interesting because the scores were clever and the lyrics were playful and u se d inner-rhyme. I was only five years old and probably only appreciated it at that level but inside something deeper was going on because I started to write music when I was four or five and didn't realize I was composing tonally because I was simply using the piano. When I was five I found a little ukulele in my father's closet and then with great concentration learned that if I put my fingers on different strings and at different frets it sounded either bad or good. That's when composition became intenti on al. But music seemed so complete in itself that I didn't need to perform to enjoy it. Except for singing for my parents or for my relatives at Christmas I didn't really think about music as something you do for others. Until I was nine I really did music for my own pleasure. When I was five I wrote a song about the rain because I loved the San Francisco drizzles, and later I wrote about a dog because I couldn't have one, and a clown because my uncle was a circus performer, and when I was eight I wrote a s ong about a cowboy in the desert watching the stars at night and thinking about God because I often looked at the stars and tried to picture Heaven."

When the Norman family moved, they left the piano behind. The apartment where he lived became a church and has remained so ever since. When Larry recorded Something New Under The Son he went back to his old house and photos were made with some of the kids from the neighborhood. The window next to the front doo r was broken and the shattered pane left a hole which was shaped perfectly like a dove in flight. He didn't say anything in case they were embarrassed that the building was in need of a little repair. And Larry didn't ask if his piano was still there, tho ugh he thought about it. He offered to come back someday and so a concert. The church was a high holiness church and at that time they looked at Larry the way the white church had looked at him a decade before. The invitation never came. Larry now goes to Bishop Benjamin Crouch's church when he and Charly are in Los Angeles and he has recently thought of making the offer again, joking that maybe if he came with Andrae and Sandra, Tata Vega, and Sister Rose he would probably be more welcome.

The Norman fam ily next moved to a more racially mixed neighborhood and Larry started school, "walking one mile through no man's land" five days a week and never explaining to his parents where his bruises came from. He thought that getting beat up was just part of life a nd accepted it, even learning to avoid it sometimes through fast talking and humor. If he was one of the only white boys on the block, he was also the whitest boy around. Some of the kids called him an albino, which he didn't mind. He kind of like it although privately he thought he might be an octoroon. There was a rumor of a black relative in the family bloodline but no one was quite sure, or could say with any certainty whether other deceased ancestors like Markitty Stories or Julia Broadhead had been of Indian birth, although it was said that there was both Choctaw and Pawnee blood in the family tree.

In 1956, when Larry was nine, his family moved out past the Golden Gate park and toward the beaches where all the streets were in alphabetical order. He attended fourth grade at Ulloa Annex. His best friend was Alex Nofte, a quiet boy from a nice Greek family who helped him dig an underground fort and start a secret club. The club motto was, of course, "no girls allowed," which was just as well since the un derground "cave" was a little unsafe. After two weeks, both sets of parents ordered the subterranean passage destroyed. This new neighborhood was peaceful in comparison to the inner-city life of previous years. Larry secretly liked a black girl named Barb ara, and wrote a song about her, but he was reluctant to tell her, not because of any racial aspect, but because he was shy. More gregariously, Larry socialized with the kids at school and invited them to church, and although he was rarely allowed to go t o anyone's house at any time he tried not to languish in isolation. His parents were rather protective of him even though there wasn't very much violence in this new neighborhood. He read a lot of books and continued to grow musically. Then something happen ed which greatly changed his personality.

Elvis Presley came onto the music scene singing "rock and roll," described by many as a new style of music. Because of his familiarity with different kinds of black music, Larry perceived that rock and roll was act ually black gospel without Christian lyrics. He thought that Elvis was trying to steal the church's music and thought that somebody should steal it back. While the blacks ignored Elvis as a pale imitation of a singer and the white adults in the church con signed rock and roll to the fires of Hades as an invention of the Devil himself, with its roots planted in the soil of American ignorance and its back beat rhythm ensconced in the mysticism of voodoo drums, Larry felt none of this. He believed that music came from God and that only people's minds could try to make it turn into something which was ungodly.

He began to perform publicly in 1956, polarized by the conflict and open animosity that people held for his music. Ten years later he had become an exper ienced performer and a gifted song writer. He was offered a worldwide recording contract by Capitol Records. Because he was underage his parents had to sign it on his behalf. His father wasn't much in favor of him entering into "show business," but Larry wasn't really interested in commercial success. He wanted to change the way people listed to music which had a gospel message. He wanted to have an effect on the music of the modern church and the religious perceptions of the youth culture. He was a white boy writing black gospel music, only it came out sounding like rock and roll.

So at the age of eighteen Larry ended up on the same record label as The Beatles and The Beach Boys. In concert with his band he opened up for The Dave Clark Five and other bands from the British Invasion, and then for new American bands like The Byrds, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother, and others. Larry was eccentric and outspoken. His music was original and very diversified. He tried to put classical music together with the blues and ended up writing a rock opera. Pete Townshend credited Larry's composition "The Epic," for giving him the idea for The Who's rock opera, Tommy. Larry continued trying to create new hybrids and styles of mu sic to show that God's voice was not limited to the hymns. He didn't want to be commercially restricted as an artist. His music might have seemed to be too rock and roll for the Christians and too religious for the rock and rollers but he stood his ground.

Larry spoke out against drugs, which didn't go over too well with the counter culture. But Larry wasn't trying to be hip. His first album on Capitol Records was titled, We Need A Whole Lot More Of Jesus, And A Lot Less Rock And Roll. The album cover depicted Larry and his band in the recording studio, with Jesus standing in their midst. Without the band's knowledge or approval, Capitol changed the name of the album and reorganized the material included on the album. Ironically, perh aps, the day that the album was released to the stores Larry left the label. It was only when Capitol agreed to let him have total artistic control that he re-signed with the label and recorded Upon This Rock in 1969. It was an impressive debut for religious rock music. Some of the press called it "the Sgt. Peppers of Christianity." Others reviled it without mercy. One writer called Larry a hermaphrodite and his message, "a hunk of hubris."

Larry's performances were uncompromising, sometimes lasting for hours. His finger, broken during the last days with his band People, was a reminder to him of his journey. The scripture, "Lift up your body as a living sacrifice," and Larry's upheld index finger in between songs evolved into an international symbol referred to as "the One Way sign." It became the logo for the burgeoning Jesus Movement of the early Seventies but ten years later when Larry began doing secret concerts behind the Iron Curtain he found that the sign was also a gesture of commitment in cultures outside of his own.

Larry's Street Level and Bootleg albums in 1970 and 1971 were as street-orientated as his public message. In 1972 he recorded Only Visiting This Planet for MGM Records. He flew to London and recorded it at George Martin's Air Studios. It received FM radio air play and critics discussed his artistry in the same context as artists like Bob Dylan. Time Magazine recognized him as "the top solo artist in his field." Billboard Magazine called him "the most important songwriter since Paul Simon." In 1973 Larry recorded the enigmatic So Long Ago The Garden, also at Air Studios, while in the next room Paul McCartney was recording with Wings. Paul and Larry had met earlier, in 1968, during Larry's days at Capitol. Years later McCartney was quoted in an interview as saying that Larry might have been a major a rtist in the Seventies if he hadn't insisted on writing about Jesus. In the years since Larry first began recording Cliff Richard, Van Morrison, John Mellencamp, Depeche Mode, U2 and even Bob Dylan would call themselves fans.

In 1978 Larry was returning from an extensive world tour which had taken him to Europe, Lebanon, Israel, India, Hong Kong, and other countrie s. After he returned to America without incident he was hurt in an airplane accident at Los Angeles International Airport. He suffered an injury to the head which left him with partial brain damage and interrupted his recording career for more than a deca de. Several years ago he released a loose collection of songs written between 1956 and 1989. This album, Home At Last, covered the years of ground between his childhood, career, divorce, and dysfunctional family life. The album ended with "Selah" which contained a minimalist reference to the KGB poisoning he and his brother suffered in 1988 which ended their Russian tou r after one concert. They were sick for over a year and when Larry finally felt recovered he went back to Russia and performed in Moscow's Olympic stadium as well as in Kiev. More dramatically, at the end of his British tour later that year, Larry unexpectedly encountered God in a new way and was physically healed from the brain damage that h ad persistently frustrated his musical efforts and personal life. He flew back to Oregon with new physical strength, peaceful optimism, and a clear mind. This album of songs, Stranded In Babylon, speaks of the new understanding he now has about God as a loving Father and about the struggles each person faces in life. He has recovered from the disabilities which weighed him down and has returned to the musical scene with renewed musical power. And ne w spiritual depth.

As family, friends and fans watched, his life spiraled downward. He was unable to record a bona fide album from the time of his airplane accident in 1978 until, with the help of therapy and chemical treatment to increase electro-neuron b rain activity, he attempted to release the badly produced Home At Last. He never expected to be healed and thought he would have to continue chemical therapy until the day after John Barr came into his life and layed hands on him. He felt like twelve years of his life had been spent at the bottom of a black hole. He tried h ard to climb out of it, watching it engulf and destroy his private life and diminish his personal ministry. Now, after meeting John Barr, he feels like he is back from the dead. He doesn't need medicine. He's been healed. Stranded In Babylon is the beginning.

The Albino Brothers are back from the Russian Front. Revived, focused, and already working on the songs for the next album. Selah.

Discography:

1967 We Need A Whole Lot More Of Jesus And A Lot Less Rock And Roll

1969 Upon This Rock

1970 Street Level

1971 Bootleg

1972 Only Visiting This Planet

1973 So Long Ago The Garden

1975 In Another Land

1977 Streams Of White Light Into Darkened Corners

1980 The Israel Tapes

1980 Roll Away The Stone

1981 The British Invasion/Barking At The Ants

1981 Something New Under The Son

1981Larry Norman and his "Friends On Tour" Featuring: Alwyn Wall & Barrat Band

1983 The Story Of The Tune

1983 Come As A Child

1984 Quiet Night

1985 Back To America

1985 Stop This Flight

1986 Down Under

1986 Rehearsal For Reality

1986 bARCHAEOLOGY

1986 White Blossoms From Black Roots

1988 Down Under

1988 The Best Of The Second Trilogy

1989 Home At Last

1989 Live At Flevo

1990 Confiscated (a.k.a. The Best Of Larry Norman)

1991 Stranded In Babylon

1991 The C.C.P.C. Concert

1994 Omega Europa

1994 A Moment In Time

1994 Totally Unplugged

1994 Children of Sorrow

1994 Footprints In The Sand

1995 One Way - The Songs of Larry Norman

1996 Remixing This Planet