I played this album over and over again till I ended up traveling to 100 countries–I know I am just visiting this planet.–kas
ONLY VISITING THIS PLANET
Larry Norman
Prophet…scoundrel…poet…thief…comedian…clown…rock star…fallen star…
A living, breathing contradiction in terms, Larry Norman passed away on February 24th, 2008 at the age of 60. I attended the funeral, arriving late and “listening” to it from outside the doors of a Church near Salem, Or.
* * * * *
Pastor Steve Wilkins spoke of the great Scottish warrior William Wallace several years ago at a conference. In his introductory remarks he noted that we actually know very little historical “facts” about Wallace and that most of what we believe about Wallace comes from an epic poem by an English Minstrel named Blind Harry a century or two after the death of Wallace.
Blind Harry’s poem stretches, twists and turn the truth on many occasions as it was compiled through oral traditions in which “legends” entered and merged, mixed and meshed with historical fact to create the…
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He Was Only Visiting This Planet: Larry Norman 4/8/47 – 2/24/08
HARP Magazine ^ | February 25, 2008 | Fred Mills
Posted on 2/25/2008 4:40:26 PM by Alex Murphy
Larry Norman, the legendary musician and Christian rocker, died early Sunday morning at his home in Corpus Christi, Texas, from heart failure. He was 60.
Though Norman was typically referred to as “the Father of Christian Rock” — he was often associated with the countercultural Jesus People movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s—in some secular quarters he was also affectionately called “the Frank Zappa of Christian Rock” due to his outspokenness about the record industry, his uncompromising approach to making music and his sometimes eccentric ways. His career began in 1966 as frontperson for pop/psychedelic group People!, who had a huge hit single in 1968 with the Chris White-penned “I Love You.” The album of the same name also contained the terrific “What We Need Is a Lot More Jesus and a Lot Less Rock ‘n’ Roll” as well as the aptly-titled 13-minute “The Epic” (which took up all of side two).
Later, as a solo artist, Norman would record for both major labels (Verve, which issued the brilliant Only Visiting This Planet — one song on the album spawned the catch phrase, “Why should the devil have all the good music?”) and indie (Nashville’s Impact; Hollywood’s One Way), although by the mid ‘70s he’d established his own grassroots label, Solid Rock, in order to release his music without outside interference. In the ‘80s he also started the Phydeaux label as a means to counteract the spread of bootleg LPs bearing his name, for by that point he was beginning to be rediscovered by younger fans and musicians who’d heard of his complex, engaging, emotional music but had a hard time tracking down what were often limited edition pressings.
Speaking personally, Norman was a huge inspiration to me. Among his more high profile fans were U2 and the Pixies’ Black Francis—the latter, upon going solo, covered Norman’s “Six-Sixty-Six” on the debut album from Frank Black and the Catholics. In May, the Portland-based Arena Rock label plans to issue a 20-song retrospective of Norman’s work, Larry Norman: The Anthology. You can read more details about it at the Arena Rock website. There’s also a good overview of Norman and his career at his Wikipedia entry.
In 2001 Norman was inducted into the Gospel Music Association’s Hall of Fame as a solo artist, then in 2007 his rock credentials were formally recognized when he was inducted into the San Jose Rock Hall of Fame, both as a member of People! and as a solo artist.
This morning a message was posted by Norman’s brother Charles at the LarryNorman.com website that read, in part:
“Our friend and my wonderful brother Larry passed away at 2:45 Sunday morning. Kristin and I were with him, holding his hands and sitting in bed with him when his heart finally slowed to a stop. We spent this past week laughing, singing, and praying with him, and all the while he had us taking notes on new song ideas and instructions on how to continue his ministry and art.
“Yesterday afternoon he knew he was going to go home to God very soon and he dictated the following message to you while his friend Allen Fleming typed these words into Larry’s computer:
I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up. I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.
My brother Charles is right, I won’t be here much longer. I can’t do anything about it. My heart is too weak. I want to say goodbye to everyone. In the past you have generously supported me with prayer and finance and we will probably still need financial help.
My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with some flowers inside. But still it will be costly because of funeral arrangement, transportation to the gravesite, entombment, coordination, legal papers etc. However money is not really what I need, I want to say I love you.
I’d like to push back the darkness with my bravest effort. There will be a funeral posted here on the website, in case some of you want to attend. We are not sure of the date when I will die. Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.
Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.
—Larry”
Only Visiting This Planet
Mar 4, 2008 • 5:02 pm No Comments
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.