Leftovers from my chat with Gregory Thornbury about Larry Norman, the Father of Christian Rock

I had the immense privilege of sitting with Dr. Gregory Thornbury and chatting about the life and legacy of Larry Norman, the universally-agreed-upon Father of Christian Rock. The story of Larry Norman is wonderfully and mesmerizingly captured in Thornbury’s new book, Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock, out now via Convergent Books.

The interview was for The Gospel Coalition, and the published piece captures some of the best moments of our conversation. As with most interviews, though, there was plenty from the encounter that didn’t quite fit the feature, or honestly, could have been expanded into its own separate story.

And so, because I find Norman so fascinating and consider Thornbury a righteous storyteller, I want to share a few of my favorite clips from the chat.

On getting to the point of writing the book

There was a period of my life where I was a Larry Norman Deadhead. I listened to him. He was in my playlist, but I kind of forgot about him. 2008 was a rough year, chiefly because I was at Union University with there was an EF4 tornado that hit the campus and did 50 million dollars worth of damage. Three weeks after the tornado, my friend Andrew Hunt here in New York, he called me and said, “I just read The New York Times. Larry Norman died.” There was an obituary in the Times, and it got me thinking about him again. Long story short, a year later, I was presenting at an arts conference at Portland State University and I kind of remembered that Larry Norman lived in Salem, Oregon, so I decided to pay my respects. I called and left a voicemail with his record company and his brother, Charles, called me back. I went down there and I just wound up becoming friends with Charles. And again, I kind of forgot about Larry for a couple of years. We just hung out, we hung out with Courtney Taylor-Taylor from The Dandy Warhols. We’d go to L.A. and hang with his friends in film. Then Fuller Seminary called right before I came to King’s. They said they wanted to do a Jesus Movement exhibition on Larry Norman. They had called Charles and asked him if he knew of anyone who would like to speak at this, and Charles said, “I only know one evangelical scholar.” So he asked me and I spoke at it. Dizzy Reed from Guns N’ Roses was there in the front row. All these people who loved Larry came out to this thing. Afterwards, Larry’s mom told me if I ever wanted to write something on him, he kept everything. I went down into their basement and saw hundreds of boxes. Nobody had ever went through this.

On the appeal of Norman’s music

He had Led Zeppelin’s engineer engineer his records…Andy Johns. Come on, you know, we don’t do that. We don’t go for the best in the business. It cost him to make beautiful records in the ‘70s. His records stand up to anything. Doug Martsch from Built to Spill says In Another Land is one of his Top 5 favorite records … of all time, because it sounds good.

On Norman’s influence of Christian music

When he decided to start his own record label and ABC had bought out Word Records, he wrote these manifestos: if you’re not comfortable with surrealism à la William Blake, if you don’t get metaphor, if you don’t understand something that looks awry, then it’s not art. It’s not going to be straight. Christians always wanted everything to be super straight, and that’s why today all we have is worship music. We don’t have Christian rock anymore. There’s no art in it. It’s just worship music. Maybe at its best it has some sort of compelling lyrical imagery, like classic hymnody, but at its worst, it’s one word, two notes, three hours. Larry failed his experiment. The artists who followed him, Terry Taylor, Daniel Amos, Mark Heard … Mark Heard just threw up his hands and made his way as an independent secular music producer and writer. There is no Christian rock today, even though it did become a billion dollar industry. Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins was asked what he thought about Christian rock and he said it’d be a lot better if you guys stopped listening to U2. Every Christian guitar player tries to sound like The Edge.

On why Norman’s allure couldn’t compete

Larry’s message never got through because the Christian record companies knew they had this huge market. What’s changed is that there used to be suppression. Youth pastors used to have parties where you brought your Beatles records and your Zeppelin records and you’d burn them at the church, and then they gave you Christian music as an alternative. That market doesn’t exist anymore. Nobody’s oppressing kids for listening to whatever they want to listen to. That culture is gone. I think it’s a good thing, but what happened was there was nobody left over in the market. The people who were there were already exiled, like Bill Mallonee from Vigilantes of Love. He’s a great artist, but he’s like Larry — he is outside of the camp, he lives in the desert in New Mexico … There weren’t people waiting there to step in when that culture collapsed.

On money

Unfortunately, if you’ve got a mortgage on your church property … Larry talked about it, we don’t have time to build nice little churches when we actually need to be out in the streets. There are a lot of things that come down to money that shut us all up. He didn’t care about that. There were moments in his life when he didn’t have a dime to his name. But people remember Larry giving them money, people who would be out on tour with him who needed money for gas, for food, for travel, and Larry would hand out money without batting an eye. He was a generous guy. I don’t know too many people like that … There’s a moment in the book where Larry is at the piano at the Royal Albert Hall and he says, “I don’t want it to be said that I made money off of Jesus. I don’t want to be a professional God talker.” I kind of wish he would have just stopped at that point. Part of me kind of wishes that he would’ve become a producer or something. I’m glad he didn’t because Something New Under the Son is my favorite Larry Norman record and that came out in 1981, but eventually, he overheated. It was too much.