Flashback Friday

Today's Flashback Friday takes us back around 50 years to the beginning of Contemporary Christian Music. Larry Norman was an American musician, singer, songwriter, record label owner, and record producer. He was a groundbreaking rebel rocker with long hair, a principal architect of what came to be known as "Jesus Music", and is considered to be one of the pioneers of Christian rock music. Through his career, he released more than 100 albums.

Larry Norman was born in Corpus Christi, Texas. Norman graduated high school in 1965 and won an academic scholarship to major in English at San Jose State College. After one semester, Norman "flunked out of college and lost his scholarship". Although he was able to play a variety of musical instruments, he never learned to read or write musical notation.

In 1966 Norman opened a concert for People! in Pacific Grove, California. He later became the band's principal songwriter, sharing lead vocals. People! performed about 200 concerts a year. Soon after Norman left People!, he had "a powerful spiritual encounter that threw him into a frenzy of indecision about his life and for the first time in his life, he received what he understood to be the Holy Spirit".

In July 1968, following a job offer to write musicals for Capitol Records, Norman moved to Los Angeles, where he "spent time sharing the gospel on the streets". As he described in 2006: "I walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard several times a day ... witnessing to businessmen and hippies, and to whomever the Spirit led me. I spent all of my Capitol Records' royalties starting a halfway house and buying clothes and food for new converts." He was initially associated with the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, and its Salt Company coffee shop outreach ministry, where he explored and pioneered the rock-gospel genre.

In 1969, Capitol Records released Norman's first solo album, Upon This Rock, which is now considered to be "the first full-blown Christian rock album". Norman was denounced by various television evangelists, and Capitol deemed the album a commercial flop and dropped Norman from the label. However, his music gained a large following in the emerging countercultural movements. Sales of the album rose following its distribution in Christian bookstores.

By the early 1970s, Norman was performing frequently for large audiences, and appeared at several Christian music festivals. In 1971, Norman first visited England, where he lived and worked for several years. During this time he recorded two studio albums. The first, Only Visiting This Planet was released in 1972 and "was meant to reach the flower children disillusioned by the government and the church" with its "abrasive, urban reality of the gospel." It has often been ranked as Norman's best album. The second album, So Long Ago the Garden released in November 1973 was met with controversy in the Christian press, due to the album's cover art and some songs.

Some of his most memorable work came off the Only Visiting This Planet album. Songs like "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus," "Righteous Rocker," "The Outlaw," and one my personal favorites, "Wish We'd All Been Ready"...

In 1974, Norman founded Solid Rock Records to produce records for Christian artists "who didn't want to be consumed by the business of making vinyl pancakes but who wanted to make something 'non-commercial' to the world". Norman produced music on the label for artists including Randy Stonehill, Mark Heard and Tom Howard.

Throughout his career, Norman had a contentious relationship with the wider Christian church and with the Christian music industry. He wrote in September 2007, "I love God and I follow Jesus but I just don't have much affinity for the organized folderol of the churches in the Western World." Norman's music addressed a wide range of social issues, such as politics, free love, the occult, the passive commercialism of wartime journalists, and religious hypocrisy, that were outside the scope of his contemporaries. Defending the confrontational approach of his music, Norman said, "My primary emphasis is not to entertain. But if your art is boring, people will reject your message as well as your art." In the 1980s, he complained that Christian music generally meant "sloppy thinking, dishonest metaphors and bad poetry," and that he had "never been able to get over the shock of how bad the lyrics are."

Norman disapproved of Christian musicians who were unwilling to play in secular venues or to "preach" between songs. He also criticized what he saw as the "commercialization of Christian music in America", including the role of copyrights and licensing.

We could go on and on about all the hits and successes as well as all the trials, tribulations, and controversies of Larry Norman. In 1989, Norman received the Christian Artists' Society Lifetime Achievement Award and his songs have been covered by over 300 artists from DC Talk to Janis Joplin to Geoff Moore to Phil Keaggy. After a lengthy illness, Norman died on February 24, 2008, at the age of 60.

In 2008, Christian rock historian John J. Thompson wrote, "It is certainly no overstatement to say that Larry Norman is to Christian music what John Lennon is to rock & roll or Bob Dylan is to folk music." Thompson credited Norman for his impact on the genre as a musician, a producer, and a businessman. Steve Camp, Carolyn Arends Bob Hartman, TobyMac, Mark Salomon, Martyn Joseph, and Steve Scott have credited Norman as influences. Larry Norman is often considered the "father of Christian rock" and it was once said that if you could combine the onstage magnetism of Mick Jagger, the lyrical brilliance of Bob Dylan and the personal fragility of Brian Wilson, you would only have begun to scratch of the surface of Larry Norman.

Larry Norman wrote and sang too many great songs to mention in this article, but I am going to leave you today with another hit from the Only Visiting This Planet album that seemed to sum up Larry Norman' musical philosophy, "Why Should the Devil Have All The Good Music"...