Larry’s grandmother gave him a toy piano when he was two years old. He remembers noticing sounds and trying to reproduce them: “the wood crackling in the stove, the boiling of water, the dripping of the faucet. [I] was absorbed in the music that noise made.”1
Kids at school teased Larry for singing for his classmates on the playground instead of playing sports. A sensitive youngster, he felt alien, and had a hard time seeing himself as a peer in the midst of other children. One day, in order to bolster his courage against a neighborhood bully nicknamed “Caesar,” he took his mother’s sewing machine and made for himself a Superman costume that he could secretly wear underneath his school clothes. According to Margaret, his mother, “He bought a piece of [blue] fabric, lay down on it, and traced his body onto the pattern.”2 He was ten years old at the time, grasping for strength in his favorite television hero.
But heroes have a way of disappointing their followers’ hopes. On June 16, 1959, a then twelve-year-old Larry woke up at his home just a block from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, ran down the stairs, greeted Mom, Dad, and little sisters, and downed his bowl of cereal. His usual morning routine included going out to deliver newspapers with his grandfather to the convalescing patients at Southern Pacific Hospital, but this particular day proved different. He picked up the morning edition—incredibly, a moment captured by the family’s 8mm camera—and looked down at the headline: SUPERMAN KILLS SELF.3
The article had to do with the mysterious death of George Reeves, who famously played “The Man of Steel” on the 1950s television series. But to a child, all of this seemed quite literal, begging the question: how can Superman die? Larry grew up ten inches from the family television set, and Superman was his favorite show—it was an invitation to believe in “truth, justice, and the American way.” Margaret Norman recalled her son being devastated by the news: “He had to deliver every single paper that day” with Superman’s reported suicide as the headline. But by the afternoon, Larry had rallied. He came down to the kitchen to announce to his parents and grandparents the good news. “I’m not Superman,” he reassured them. “I’m Batman.”
For the rest of his life, Larry Norman would, in fact, play the role of the vigilante pursuing his own notions of justice. In later interviews he would ascribe his productivity to a desire for balance. He wanted to force those who enjoyed a monopoly—be it on an idea, image, or place of grace—to share the space with others, especially if those “others” weren’t exactly their kind of people.
In the meantime, he had to survive a misfit childhood. Another of Larry’s lifelong obsessions began at the age of five, when, in his later recollection, he “accepted Jesus without benefit of clergy.” For a boy who often felt alone both at school and at home, often lost in his thoughts and feelings, Jesus was a solution to loneliness. “My father worked all night at the [Southern Pacific] railroad,” he remembered, “and during the day studied at a small college nearby hoping to pull us out of poverty. My mother stayed home with my two sisters and myself hoping to fill in the hole left by the absence of my father….[So] I liked Jesus immediately.”4 Larry felt the Son of God was the friend he never had, and consequently, “I didn’t feel so alone after that, and I loved him.”
As for the clergy in his life, they just got in the way, or couldn’t appreciate the depth of his enthusiasm. He remembered being spanked for dancing in the aisles in his “hellfire and brimstone” Southern Baptist congregation—First Baptist in Corpus Christi, Texas. Was church the sort of place where Jesus would want to spend time? It did not seem that way to Larry, looking at the stern faces that populated his parents’ church. “I felt that church was boring and the street-corner preachers were no more happy than the people they were preaching to.”5
School was no haven either. Larry experienced intense boredom and loneliness in the classroom. He would take “alternative routes to school…a mile away,” to avoid getting teased or hit. “They would stomp on my sandwiches, break my thermos, and knock my books into the gutter.”6 He was also cheeky, once telling an elementary school teacher that if he ever needed arithmetic to complete his income taxes, he would hire an accountant. The teacher sent him to the principal’s office for the rest of the afternoon.7
So unhappy was he with school, Larry faked illness to stay home to listen to the radio: Red Ryder, The Great Gildersleeve, Mystery Theatre, The Romance of Helen Trent, and others. He used whatever free time he had in the library and participating in whatever musical or theatrical productions would have him. In third grade, his teacher asked him to choose a story for the class play. He selected “The Tragic Story of Doctor Faustus.” When Satan arrived to claim Faustus’s soul, Larry fell backward, and his skull hit the riser—creating a terrible sound in the cavernous school gym. When another child rushed over to see if he was “okay,” Larry hissed at him because the boy had broken character during this momentous scene.
Larry possessed a taste for the theatrical—to put it mildly. He came by it honestly, through both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather, the rumbustious Burl Stout, came from Irish stock and plied his trade as a vaudeville performer. Burl turned to the stage after being honorably discharged from the US Army during World War I, due to asthma, after serving in the European theater. “As an actor,” remembered Larry, “he had ‘trod the boards’ all over America, performing on the same bills with the likes of Buster Keaton, Smith and Dale, and Bert Lahr.”8 But once Hollywood movies became the main form of popular entertainment in America, vaudeville effectively died. Grandpa Burl and his wife, Lena, took up an itinerant life, moving from Missouri via covered wagon to the cold prairie of Minnesota, before finally settling in Nebraska, where Larry’s mother, Margaret, was born in 1925. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt formed Subsistence Homesteading under the provisions of the New Deal in 1933, the Stouts made their way to Baxter County, Arkansas, where they settled—first in a tent, next in a shed, until they built a log cabin of their own.9
Larry’s paternal side of the family was Native American (Choctaw and Pawnee). Their origin story was just as colorful as the Stouts’: as a baby, Larry’s great-great-grandfather was abandoned in a shoebox on a doorstep somewhere in Oklahoma, where a family named Norman took him in and raised him. The next male in the Norman line would grow up to be a circuit-riding evangelist, and the evangelist’s son—Larry’s grandfather Joseph—would settle in Corpus Christi, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico, where he became the town barber, married a hearty, stout woman named Rubie Hendrex, and took to music. Soon, guitar and harmonica lessons would become part of growing up Norman.
Rubie gave birth to “Joe Billy,” a rough-and-tumble boy. “As red and brown as Joseph Porter Norman was, Joe Billy contrasted it by being white-skinned and a ‘towhead’ with a shock of white hair,” Larry wrote, describing his father. He “was a wild, territorial boy by nature, hunting and fishing and gambling for marbles, bottle caps and ‘conkers’ without much supervision—as though he was answerable to no one.” Determined to flee the shame of his father’s reputation as the town drunk, “Joe Billy” left Corpus Christi and joined the US Army Air Force (before it was its own independent branch of the military service) as a private first class. Shortly before his platoon was deployed, Joe injured his leg in a swimming accident, and therefore did not ship out with the rest of his band of brothers. The whole platoon died in battle at D-Day a few weeks later. While Joe was convalescing, his commanding officer noticed he was an excellent typist, and he was summarily assigned to the Communications Office, or as Joe said, he “flew desk” for the remainder of the war.
Meanwhile the Stouts had moved west to California to look for work in the shipyards. It was there that a young Margaret Stout met Joe, now stationed at the Santa Rosa Army Air Field, at a USO dance at the Rio Nido summer resort. That first night, Joe brought two other young women to the event and Margaret danced with two other guys. By the second night, however, Joe asked “Marge” to dance, and the two were smitten. They married on November 1, 1945, at the Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church near Golden Gate Park—a congregation that would become a refuge for hippies and sexual minorities in the ’60s and ’70s. Joe was honorably discharged from the service in 1946, and the couple rented an apartment near Buena Vista Park. Thinking they could better afford Texas, they moved to Joe’s hometown of Corpus Christi. Larry was born, their first child, in 1947. He would later write: “God, thank you that I got [to] be born. Even if it was in Texas.”10
All across America, 1947 was a year of exploration, freedom, and ongoing testimony of resistance to the high tide of evil and tyranny seen in the war. Howard Hughes flew the massive Spruce Goose as a sign of America’s explosion in innovation and industry. Jack Kerouac and his friends set out on their journey across America as free spirits, a trip immortalized a decade later with the publication of On the Road, the manifesto of the coming counterculture and the Beat Generation. Elsewhere, Jackson Pollock made the first of his drip paintings, and The Diary of Anne Frank was published, reminding the world of the courage it had summoned during the horrors of the Second World War.
Joe and Margaret were straightlaced and upstanding Americans. They didn’t talk much about family ties to show business. As Larry would later tell interviewers, their experience of being “born again” led them to stop “competition dancing, going to the movies, drinking, and clubbing.” Like many evangelicals, they channeled postwar, post-Hiroshima anxiety into what critic Harris Franklin Roll called “a new apocalypticism,” meaning of primary concern was not merely when the world would end (soon, it was assumed) but also how one would fare in the brave new afterlife—or as the Rev. Billy Graham put it, “The only question is: Where will you spend eternity?” According to this ethos, it was dangerous to enjoy too much of the things this world had to offer; if indulgence didn’t get you sick, diseased, or broke first, you would certainly go to hell.
After their brief stint in Texas, however, Joe and Marge’s young family was pulled back to San Francisco. At first they moved in with Larry’s grandmother Lena in Haight-Ashbury, but soon Joe’s job at the Southern Pacific Railroad afforded them their own place in Elgin Park, on a street between the Mission District and Hayes Valley, where a combination of working-class whites, immigrants, and minorities lived while trying to get a foothold economically and socially.11 Larry’s cousin and best friend, Bryce, and cousin Tina lived with Larry and his sisters, Nancy (b. 1950) and Kristy Beth (b. 1951) for several years, forming a strong household dynamic for a young boy. Another move broke up this cozy circle, however, when Joe’s desire to raise the family’s standard of living led them to his next job, and their next home, in the quiet suburb of Pacifica. As Larry later put it, “we moved from the ghetto to a slum.”12
Larry had two interests during this time—books and music. He expressed pride that the local librarian had allowed him to check out more than one book at a time. Winning a thirty-volume set of The Encyclopaedia Britannica in a raffle he took, at the age of nine, as some kind of affirmation. With respect to music, he had to be sneakier. Larry got a major revelation when he found, tucked away in his closet, a ukulele that Joe had originally bought but never played. Upon discovering the instrument, Larry began sneaking into his parents’ bedroom (a forbidden zone for the Norman children) and experimenting with sounds and melodies. Joe caught Larry with the ukulele one day—but instead of getting mad, he asked Larry to play him a song. When the young boy walked out of the room that day with the instrument tucked underneath his arm, he felt like a god.13
Despite such brief moments of encouragement, Larry would struggle with his relationship with his father. Larry felt that Joe never understood him on an emotional level. In an essay he wrote during his freshman—and only—year in college, Larry recalled an exemplary exchange between him and his father:
Our conversations are always incongruous. I will ask him a question on one level and he will answer it on another level. We realize that we’re talking about the same thing, but we never understand the other’s point of view.
For example, I will comment, “You know, people are so different,” and he would retort, “That is true. You see, the origin of all races is endemic to the blood lines of three different people: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. As it is written in the Scriptures…”
“No, Dad,” I interrupt. “What I mean is people are different from us. I don’t fit in with the kids at school. I don’t think like they do. None of them seem to care about self-improvement, or about other things that count for so much in life. And you don’t fit in with your colleagues either. You are a complete ascetic, for one thing. You don’t smoke or even drink.”
“Son, every society, no matter how primitive, has had its form of alcoholic beverage, and I don’t care to indulge in what they…”
“I think I hear Mom calling,” I lie, well aware that he is about to enlarge on a theme of constant subculture similarities. I can’t talk to my Dad. He knows all of the rules but none of the reasons. We’re worlds apart.14
For Joe, the world was structured, built upon eternal law and principle. For Larry, the world was fueled by gray areas, intuitions, and analogies, prompting him to say to his more concrete sequential friends over the years: “Metaphors be with you.”
Margaret, on the other hand, could do no wrong in Larry’s sight. In 2002 she wrote down her memories of Larry’s childhood, noting that he was “always a little helper. Even at the age of two he helped momma wash the dishes and taught his momma to sing on tune to ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Finally, little Larry took over the job of washing the breakfast dishes. He had a much better way.”15
Over time, Larry’s personality evolved into a composite of both parents. Like his father, he was driven, righteous, intellectual, and somewhat aloof. Like his mother, he was a dreamer and a poet.
His musical interests, however, bore the stamp of his larger-than-life aunt Nina and uncle Frenchie. Aunt Nina, Marge’s older sister, grew up in Arkansas and hated everything there with the exception of her neighbor’s piano, on which she taught herself to play. She thought she had found her ticket out by getting married and moving to Kansas City, but her deadbeat husband skipped town days before their baby arrived, prompting both Marge and their mother, Lena, to join her in Kansas City and help raise the child. In a surprising turn of events, Nina went straight to work, finding gigs in local nightclubs, and eventually burlesque shows. Nina struck a deal with her mother: take care of my kid while I travel around the country performing, and I’ll send lots of money home.
As Nina’s notoriety grew, she received top billing under the heading “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” picking up the mantle from the internationally famous performer Sophie Tucker. She smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, which gave her a deep, sultry singing voice. Among the stories she later entertained the family with was an account of taking Jayne Mansfield’s place for a gig in New Orleans on the day Jayne died in a car accident. Larry’s sisters remember their aunt escorting them to her bedroom to show them her “dresses” but all that Kristy Beth remembered seeing was her stockings and garters.16
Years later, Nina met her love match in Frenchie Manning, a tightrope-walking clown who dressed as a cowboy and simultaneously performed rope tricks. The couple took a special interest in Larry. By the time Larry was eight, Frenchie had taught him the essential chords on the ukulele. Nina then bought Larry his own ukulele, separate from Joe’s. He was off to the races, writing his first song, “Riding in the Saddle,” at the age of nine. “Barbara’s My Girl” followed soon thereafter. The extended family record collection would be an ongoing inspiration. Although Joe and Margaret favored Big Band crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, Grandpa Burl’s folk and vaudeville collection proved more fascinating to Larry. Among his favorite records were those of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and his grandfather’s collector’s set of “Famous Songs of Bert Williams,” Williams being the Bahamian American singer and comedian who, after establishing himself as a top vaudeville performer, became the first black cast member of Ziegfeld’s Follies in New York City.
Less than a year after coming under Frenchie’s tutelage—in 1956—Larry would write his first truly good, recordable song, “Lonely Boy.” Other songs followed, including “My Feet Are on the Rock” (from 1958, written on the heels of being spanked for dancing in church), and “Country Church, Country People,” written for his grandma Lena, its lyrics narrating a story about the little chapel that the Stout family had attended in Arkansas.
When he was ten, Larry discovered one of the mainstays of midcentury American suburbia—the bookmobile. From the Works Progress Administration to local municipalities, the bookmobile represented access to knowledge for underserved communities, both urban and rural.17 Here, Larry found books that he couldn’t obtain from his elementary school library. He became mesmerized by a hefty volume on basic psychology, which in his mind promised knowledge that the authorities at school had suppressed, and his conspiracy theory deepened further when he tried to check out the book and the librarian told him that he was not old enough. Insatiable for knowledge about the ways of the world, he stole the book: “It took [me] all year to read it. [I] used a dictionary alongside it to look up words [I’d] never seen before.”18
Initially, Larry could not find anyone interested in his ideas about life and his precocious interest in Freud. But then, all of a sudden, he found one: Coretta, his babysitter, who was a college student and his first crush. Describing her as having “long-willowy legs,” and “a passion for horseback riding,” he found that if he could entertain Coretta with his stories and antics, she would let him stay up long past his bedtime. She would only hurry him up to his room when the crunch of the gravel under Joe and Margaret’s car announced itself coming up the driveway. Giggling at the fast one he had pulled over on the adults, Larry learned an invaluable lesson: appearances were power. Still, he had to keep his nascent ambitions under wraps. In 1959 Larry went into San Francisco to audition for the syndicated CBS television show Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, but he knew that even if he passed the audition, his parents would never let him travel to New York to perform on the air.19
In 1960 the family moved again, this time to San Jose, where Joe finally landed a job teaching high school English for the Fremont Union High School District (where he taught Steve Wozniak in class as a pupil). By the time Larry reached Campbell High School, his artistic interests were in full bloom. He played roles in performances of Carousel and Oklahoma!, over Joe’s protestations. He began to take writing poetry very seriously, and did his best to study both free verse as well as rhythm and meter. By 1963, his junior year, he produced several pieces which placed in the 16th Annual Edwin Markham Poetry Society Contest. His poem about growing up in the city took first place in its category; entitled “The Streets,” it earned Norman the distinction of being the youngest person at the time to become a full member of the society:
There is something noble about
the asphalt lawns and the high, wire hedges of a city.
There is something intriguing about
gutters silted with dirt, and
old cracking houses with unswept porches, and
alleys strewn with yellowing newspaper.
I was raised in the slum and the streets taught me to
swear and smoke
and spit elegantly through my teeth, and keep my fists up.
But the street also taught me to look at myself as I really am.
And I feel a bond with the streets because
streets are honest. They’re unassuming and unpretentious.
They don’t try to be anything but streets,
and they’re entirely successful.
While the world is rich with indifference
the streets are aware and resigned.
While people wear masks and try to be what they think
they ought to be,
the streets only try to be streets.20
First place came with a special prize: breakfast with British writer William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. Seated next to Golding at the awards ceremony in Saratoga, California, Larry attempted to make small talk, but Golding, presumably there only for a payday and a brief appearance at the event, didn’t seem interested in humoring his youthful counterpart. When Larry asked him, “Do you find it difficult to come up with your ideas for writing?” Golding stubbed out his cigarette in his plate of scrambled eggs, stood up, started to leave the table, and said, “Actually, I find it more difficult to control my bladder.” A photo of the pair captures the meeting in quintessence.
Meanwhile, Larry’s family started to arrive, Aunt Nina waltzing in wearing a big Hawaiian muumuu dress. When Larry was introduced for his award and the emcee announced that the boy would perform two of his poems set to music, Larry spotted his auntie in the audience and decided to play one of his more recent compositions—a scene from Marge and Nina’s hardscrabble Arkansas childhood. Larry had been told the story of how the family’s copper tub (used for bathing) went missing one day from the porch of their cabin. No one knew where it went or why. One day, Grandma Lena took Old Pete, their mule, up to a little unincorporated town named Three Brothers to “get corn meal and flour with the pension money.” As the sun set, Lena found herself lost, off the beaten path on a hillside, and there it was: their copper bathtub being used for a still, in a moonshine operation run by the local pastor. Seventeen-year-old Larry put the story to music, and played it for the poetry society.
WHEN THE MOON SHINES ON THE MOONSHINE
When the moon shines on the moonshine
on the still upon the hill
Then I smell it drifting down through the pines.
’Cause the night time is the right time
for the stuff to get enough
Of the moonlight to make it taste fine.
You can tell it when you smell it;
It’ll knock you off your feet,
So you might want to be sitting down.
Get your fill at the still
for a wrinkled dollar bill
You can buy it from the good Parson Brown.
Everybody ought to buy it
you ain’t living till you try it
And you’ll drink it again and again.
All the nosy revenuers
want to meet up with the brewers
And redeem them from the bright liquid sin.
High up in the mountaintops
far away from all the cops
Granny’s cranking it out every day.
And Brother Frank is in the holler
selling two jugs for a dollar
Who says that crime doesn’t pay?
At the end of the song, Nina leaped to her feet and shouted, “I taught him everything he knows!” Joe was mortified, as were other family members. But Larry smiled, because the song was for her. The next day Aunt Nina wrote Larry a letter, elaborating on her enthusiasm:
My Dear Nephew:
Congratulations! It was a great honor for me to sit in your audience yesterday! Man, I really dig your poetry. Will you send me a copy of your poem? Also a copy of “Moonshine.” I’m sorry I didn’t have the time to discuss your poem with you, and someday I will tell you why I jumped out of my seat and looked like an idiot…but I was so proud of you.
You will go far with your writing because you know how to write about life as it is. The world needs writers like you who think as you do. You wrote the story of my life in that one little poem.
All my love and best wishes for your future.
Aunt Nina.
P.S. WORDS ARE POWER
Aunt Nina’s letter was precisely the kind of encouragement her nephew needed to keep writing. By now, Larry had noticed that when his poetry was set to music, it produced an entirely different level of reaction. He also discovered that his best song ideas arose from dreams. In one such dream, Larry later explained, he was standing before a class of children and teaching them about poetry:
“For instance,” I said, taking up a piece of chalk. “Let’s just put down a random line and then see what significance we can bring to it which would give it value.
“Doze, he did, among the rocks…” I wrote upon the blackboard and then paused, thinking of a line to follow.
What I was remembering in my sleep was the afternoon—in my real life—when I had felt so full of anguish, as a teenage boy, that I had laid down on the ground outside, quite positive that the emotional pain I was feeling was so intense that it would cause me to die. I saw the scene as though it were being filmed from above me. I could see me curled up, laying on the rocks with flowers around me.
This is the movie I saw in my head, in front of the blackboard…in my sleep…thinking this was really happening in real life.
“Doze, he did, among the rocks…
Poseys [sic], little flowered flocks
Of beauty all around his head.
Death and sleep are nightly wed.”
I sat up in bed, awakened by the image of death and sleep being symbolically related, in a poetic and dreamscape kind of way.
I grabbed a pen and scribbled the poem down on the white sheet I was sleeping on—and fell back asleep. I was surprised to see, in the morning, that the whole thing was not a dream.
From then on, sheets became a writing partner for me. I often wrote lyrics while asleep and would simply write them down and go back to sleep to see if there were any more lyrics to follow. And at one point in the band, I felt so alone that I laid flat down on the sheet and drew a line around my body, kind of like police chalk marks. So every night when I jumped into bed, there I was, waiting for me—like Peter Pan’s shadow.21
Writing on bedsheets instead of notebook paper might suggest someone who was OCD. But Larry was not content to be the only one to lose sleep over his song ideas. After acquiring a reel-to-reel tape recorder, he would wake up his sisters to teach them harmony parts through the floor vents, long after Marge had put them into bed. In exchange, Larry promised to play “house” with his sisters, with only one condition: he refused to play the daddy. (Instead he played the role of the family dog.) It was a bargain worth striking. When morning came, he expected his sisters to have their parts memorized so that they could sing them into the recorder. The results were astonishing. The recordings survived, and have been released by the Norman family. Known as The Living Room Tapes, the collection represents the remarkable extent to which Larry Norman’s powers had developed by age sixteen. The advanced chord progression found on the tapes’ “Face the Wind,” for example, was written in the key of F and played in the fifth position on the fret board. Its elegant fingerpicking style and inventive deployment of major and minor chord melody tradeoffs sound more classically oriented than either blues or rock ’n’ roll.22 Other tunes, such as “Gotta Travel On,” feature Nancy and Kristy singing counterpoint harmonies. One can detect the influence of Brian Wilson, and yet the tapes were recorded in 1963, three years before the compositions heard on Wilson’s masterpiece, Pet Sounds.
Although most of the songs were folk-oriented, written about girls (“Julie” and “Head over Heels”) or about faith (“Moses in the Wilderness” and “Country Church, Country People”), a few touched on Larry’s growing awareness of the civil rights movement. Larry also versed himself in the protest tradition of traditional folk music, thanks to a Henry Clay Work songbook that had been handed down from his great-grandmother to Grandma Lena. In addition to singing temperance songs like “Come Home, Father,” he and his sisters performed their own version of “The Klan”—a terrifying song that would have been unknown or avoided by most white children their age:
The countryside was cold and still
There was a cross upon the hill
This cold cross wore a burning hood
To hide its rotten heart of wood
Father I hear the iron sound
Of hoofbeats on the frozen ground
Down from the hills the riders came
Jesus, it was a crying shame
To see the blood upon their whips
And hear the snarling of their lips
Mother, I feel a stabbing pain
Blood flows down like a summer rain
Now, each one wore a mask of white
To hide his cruel face from sight
and each one sucks a little breath
Out of the empty lungs of death
Sister, lift my bloody head
It’s so lonesome to be dead
He who travels with the Klan
He is a monster, not a man
Underneath that white disguise
I have looked into his eyes
Brother, will you stand with me
it’s not easy to be free
Songs like “The Klan” convinced Larry that the judgment of God was falling upon the United States of America in the age of Jim Crow. He became spellbound by the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in the buildup to the March on Washington in August 1963. He observed in a school essay that the black man has “consistently been denied voting rights, admittance to restaurants, privileges to public dances, movie houses, churches, etc. But he’s expected to pay full bus fare. He’s drafted, sent to war, and expected to die like a man, if need be. He’s taxed. Yes, he’s given all the same consideration offered to a white man when his services are in the balance.”23
Norman began to write his own protest songs, but with a twist. Retribution would come not for his enemies but himself, and “the terrible swift sword” of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was meant for people like him. Instead of the proud, white experience that says, “I am invincible,” when writing about his responsibility to his black brothers and sisters, a youthful Larry Norman wrote a song called “I Am Afraid to Die”:
A man of freedom or a bonded slave
All men are equal in an empty grave
But then I hear those chains of slavery rattling on
I think to myself what has the white man done?
How can a man put another man in a cotton field
For the rest of his life?
Why did slavery have to raise its ugly head
And why in the world did freedom have to die?
I am afraid to die
I am afraid to die24
Larry’s views on these subjects may have owed more to his father than he was able to perceive at the time. Joe had written a fiery paper at Bible college about the white Church’s need to support the nascent civil rights movement, much to the chagrin of his professor and peers. For both Joe and his son, the Church was not living up to the call of Jesus if it didn’t pursue Dr. King’s vision of “The Beloved Community,” a free association of people of faith and goodwill dedicated to the renunciation of, and advancement of justice regarding, three evils: poverty, racism, and militarism.25 As University of Virginia professor Charles Marsh describes the philosophy in his history of King’s movement: “The ‘beloved’ community phrase has been used by social philosophers to describe the culmination of world history in some kind of universal brotherhood. But King believed in original sin, so he didn’t share that understanding of beloved community. He understood beloved community as something that is a gift of God.”26 This was Larry Norman’s world view from the age of sixteen forward. And in his own way, Larry Norman would try to bring these principles to the white Christian community.
Larry’s poetic imagination, developing musical ability, love for Jesus, and growing awareness of the principles of “The Beloved Community” needed the right outlet to be shared with the world. The first inkling of what that outlet might be had come years earlier when, sitting in the back of Joe’s 1948 Chevy, he heard a radio announcer utter the name Elvis Presley. Larry loved new words and strange names, and his interest was further piqued when his father quickly moved to change the radio dial. The very mention of Elvis’s name, Larry recalled, “seemed to be a special magic, an exciting energy.”27 Several weeks later, his thirteen-year-old cousin Bonnie Sue came to the house while the mothers and Larry’s sisters went out for errands. Bonnie Sue brought with her a 45 single of the Elvis song he’d heard just a bit of. He described what happened next: “The most exciting, and puzzling song I ever heard suddenly blasted out of the cheap, portable record player speakers: ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time.’ ” Larry sat mesmerized by the bounce of Elvis’s vocals and the reverb-drenched twang of Scotty Moore’s rockabilly guitar. He looked up. Bonnie Sue took Larry’s hand and told him to stand up. Starting the record again, she told him that until he had learned the dance moves she already knew, he wouldn’t get lunch. She was pushing on an open door: “I needed no threat to apply myself” in those circumstances, Larry remembered.28
Still, the popularity of Elvis did not make being artsy or musical in high school any easier. The alienation Larry felt as a young child had not left him. “I was bullied by jocks because I was a singer. ‘Pansy,’ ‘Queer,’ and other such jeers were common in the changing room as they snapped towels at me and poked me in the ribs. I had also danced a jazz ballet with a professional choreographer named Dina Hubbel and this didn’t help my status among the jocks and wannabes.”29 He found himself delighting in the awkward juxtapositions—how his rehearsal for a Christmas ballet and dance forced the “infuriated” jocks to share the gymnasium. As he told one DJ in Hawaii in 1973, “It was my way of getting equilibrium.”30
If neither his father nor the boys at school would give him “permission” to be an artist, that sanction would have to come from elsewhere. He got that on February 9, 1964—the day that launched countless musical careers. With Joe and Margaret looking on, Larry sat on the floor in front of the television with his sisters to watch the debut of the Beatles in America. John, Paul, George, and Ringo inspired Larry to seek a career as a performer. A 1964 photograph reveals Larry’s band, dressed in convincing Beatles suits, boots, and wigs, playing a gig at the Shriner’s Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. His first proper group was called the Back Country Seven, and included his sister Nancy and high school friend Gene Mason. They played hootenannies and parties throughout the San Jose area.
More important, the Beatles also taught Larry an important lesson about art, one that changed the way he viewed songwriting. As he wrote in 1966, “Before B.C. [the Beatles Came] my lyrics had always been too exacting, too perfect, too definite. I gave the listener no chance to identify with the thoughts because I had already said them completely, totally. I offered no chance for the listener to apply the thought to himself because I over-said everything. I realized that this was the cardinal sin, it said only what I felt, not what others might feel.”31
Then there was the matter of how to survive Superman, achieve balance, and pursue justice in his craft. In his mind, Larry knew that Elvis had taken the music of the black church and turned it into rock ’n’ roll. Now Elvis, the Beatles, and everybody else were getting rich off their own secular version of “gospel.” It would become Larry Norman’s obsession to steal that music back.