Christian rocker Larry Norman moves on.

By S. Brent Plate

The first album I ever bought was Larry Norman’s Only Visiting this Planet (1972). I was probably about ten, and the album had already been out for a couple years, but I remember it all so well. (To this day, I could quote you pretty much the entire album’s lyrics.) The allure certainly had to do with this being my “first,” and the ways we all remember our firsts. But it also had to do with the somewhat radical stance the album’s imagery, lyrics, and melodies carried for me, a young Christian, firmly embedded in the evangelical tradition.

Others have posted their comments, eulogies, and curiosities on Norman since his death on February 24th at age 60. Christianity Today gave him a sober sending off, and GetReligion offered a take on Norman’s life by Biola University’s Michael Longinow. I’m not sure what choir, save my own, I’m speaking to here or why I’m writing, but I feel a bit of a personal tug/loss that I can’t let go. As Entertainment Weekly‘s online blog put it in relation to the album, “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.” Indeed. In the late 1970s, my friend David and I spent many late night sleepovers listening to Norman, and the then early voices in the Christian rock scene, including Randy Stonehill (Welcome to Paradise was thealbum to listen to), Daniel Amos (Shotgun Angel), and Pat Terry Group (Songs of the South). A decade later in college, Norman’s influence was still felt as my buddy Patrick and I would sing some late-night wild renditions of “Why don’t you look into Jesus?” (even after we’d sipped some whiskey from a paper cup).

But back to the 1970s: I buy this thing (you know, in the days when there were 12″ photos for the covers in order to fit the LP format), and there, staring at me, was a long-haired blond hippie in ragged denim with the promise that he actually was a Christian. Curiously, thirty-some years later, this is the same image that bedecks the Larry Norman website. The album included the lyrics in the liner notes and I remember clearly how my mother couldn’t get past the phrase in “Pardon Me”: “Making love if love’s not really there.” She didn’t get, nor did I at the time, that he was criticizing sex without love, something robustly affirmed by many conservative Christians who could have, would have, embraced him at the time if they didn’t think he was too up front with it all.

It wasn’t just the lyrics; the iconography of his presentation struck me, and remains in my mind today: He’s confused, lost in a bustling cityscape, out of place, not belonging here. And that was the key to all his lyrics: he’s only visiting. As his voice trails off on the track “Reader’s Digest,” (from Only Visiting…): “This world is not my home/ I’m just…. passin’…. through….”)

Indeed, he understood himself to be just that: not from here, passing through. And yet while he’s around, he’s going to tell us all a thing or two. The thing about Norman was that he was unafraid to critique both secular and Christian cultures alike. Deborah Evans Price, writing forReuters, rightly suggested, “He was never one to preach to the choir, and his brazen passion sometimes irked religious conservatives.” His lyrics were stridently conservative, believing in a rapture for certain Christians (“I Wish We’d all Been Ready“), but he was also imaginatively otherworldly in that presentation (“Nightmare #97” and “U.F.O.“): Jesus’ second coming was not unlike an alien abduction. Norman was probably as close to Fox Mulder (David Duchovny’s character in X Files) as to Hal Lindsey (author of the 1970, Late Great Planet Earth). And he had as much disdain for US government administrations as contemporary evangelicals might praise them.

Like those old prophets of the scriptures who spoke of apocalyptic things, Norman might be read as a recluse who perhaps disliked everyone (see his “friend” Randy Stonehill on his relation with Norman). Reading about prophets like Amos and Isaiah, you’ve got to wonder whether they had any friends, and the same might be wondered of Larry Norman. I never knew him to know whether that’s true, but its a conclusion that can easily be drawn through others’ accounts. Yet I also think this puts him squarely in the realm of the biblical prophets, men who lived rough lives because they chose to and didn’t seem to care about much worldly life; critiquing from afar, because they never really fit. And then, how much this world needs such misfits, especially as evangelicals become the norm.
S. Brent Plate is associate professor of religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University, and a contributing editor to The Revealer. His books include Blasphemy: Art that Offends andThe Religion and Film Reader.