Feeling isolated and bereft of encouragement—personally, artistically, and commercially—Larry reached out to Francis Schaeffer, whom he and Pam had visited at L’Abri, during their honeymoon. It is almost impossible to overstate the influence that Schaeffer had on young Christian intellectuals in the wake of the Jesus movement. Clad in Alpine hiking pants and sporting a goatee, the man whom Christianity Today would later eulogize as “our St. Francis” was one of the few respected voices in establishment evangelical circles that had some awareness and appreciation for the arts.1 According to Schaeffer’s son, Frank, Eric Clapton once gave Jimmy Page a copy of Escape from Reason, saying that it was the best book he was reading at the moment.2
Schaeffer and Larry had shared billing at a festival for Christians and the arts, and when Schaeffer went backstage to tell Larry how much he enjoyed the performance, the singer told him of his struggles to be an artist in the evangelical Christian community. As Larry saw it, his fellow believers could not handle anything that wasn’t straight, direct, message-oriented evangelism, leaving him feeling “caught in between” the world and Christ. “It’s true…I never mention ‘the blood of the lamb’ in my songs,” he wrote, “a definite sign of apostasy I am told.”
Schaeffer encouraged Larry to pursue his artistic vision. Larry sent Schaeffer a copy of Only Visiting This Planet and So Long Ago the Garden, and asked for his reaction. Schaeffer appreciated the reference to L’Abri in “Fly, Fly, Fly,” but he also wanted Larry to know that he liked what he heard in the music itself. More important, he expressed sympathy for the tightrope walk Norman had been attempting:
I am sorry that you have had a hard time with the Christian music world. I understand the walls that have to be smashed and that sometimes it is a lonely walk. I have a son who is an artist and he was trying to do something in the area of art as you are doing in music. He is a Christian and in the art world and very often people wonder why his painting is not “religious.” I feel we have a double responsibility. We must say that Christ is the Lord of the whole life and therefore we do not have to make everything into a tract, and yet looking at the wounded world we do have a responsibility that each of us is a “teller” in our own place.3
Schaeffer twice invited Larry to come spend time with him in Switzerland. Schaeffer took note of Larry’s feeling of isolation as an artist, and admired his ability to reach non-Christians in the entertainment industry. Their correspondence was characterized by warmth and mutual admiration. (Larry would include Schaeffer in his pantheon of inspirations in the ensuing years in his liner notes.)
Writing to Schaeffer in 1975, Larry recounted how he had befriended the actor Dudley Moore in London. Asking for absolute confidentiality about the relationship, he recounted the tension of trying to share Christ with someone over time, and their need to receive Christ, without offending and driving them away. He expressed the profound ambivalence that many Christians feel about the imperative to share their faith: where does my role merely as a friend end, and my responsibilities as an evangelist begin? To the point: Larry told Schaeffer that he had been haunted by a dinner he and Pam had with Moore and the “diminutive actor” Michael Dunn, a Tony-nominated performer who had appeared in everything from Edward Albee plays on Broadway to episodes of Get Smart. An erstwhile convert to Catholicism, Dunn was swept under in a sea of doubt, complicated by severe physical issues that resulted from his dwarfism. Then Michael’s story came to an abrupt end: “[Michael] seemed open to listening [about Jesus] but resistant to making a decision so we didn’t press him. We all planned to meet again for dinner in a week, but three days later he was dead.”4
Larry was in a league of people who had everything but nothing, in Christian terms. That Larry was even having conversations about Jesus Christ with celebrities and influencers was seemingly evidence of some divine sanction, if not exactly grace. Yet religion never seemed to “stick” with these people, so what was the problem? Closer to home, the people closest to Larry professed closeness to God, but it was getting harder to discern any difference between the “saved” and the lost, at least in terms of the choices they were making.
Larry took Michael Dunn’s sudden death as a prompt to really reach into Dudley Moore’s life to address his spiritual condition that eight “years in analysis” hadn’t been able to solve:
One night at 3:00 in the lobby of our hotel, the Holy Spirit really confronted Dudley. We had been talking to him for an hour and suddenly it seemed his moment of salvation. We could all feel it. It was the definite presence of a very loving and very consuming spirit. It pressed on us all so heavily. Dudley felt it and expressed his anguish, trying to say yes to God but not willing to give up his problems—some of which have been lifelong companions—and then the moment passed. Its departure was as definite as the three or four minutes of its presence had been.5
Larry was optimistic that Moore would eventually be converted, but the experience rattled him. Moore’s interest was eclipsed by confusion as to “who Jesus really is.” Would Schaeffer have any books to recommend on this question? he asked.
More deeply, Larry was bothered by the outcome of the Holy Spirit’s “intervention” into his friend’s life—an overture that was rejected and inefficacious. Dudley Moore never professed Jesus. How could he come so close to God, and yet just walk away? What did it mean for Moore, or any of us for that matter, to “resist the Spirit”?
That feeling of ambivalence characterized how Larry Norman was feeling about pretty much everything in his life in 1974–75. He was in the “perfect Christian marriage,” which he was trying to make work, but the reality was really difficult behind the curtain. He had pioneered Jesus rock, but was regarded by a large part of the Christian community as a traitor to the cause and a dangerous influence on “the kids.” Some youth pastors considered Larry’s mission from God to be the devil’s trick. Then there was the problem that none of his albums seemed to sell.
Amidst these setbacks, Larry Norman was coming up with both a theory about his life and career, and a perceived way forward. The theory was that true artists were never commercial—only the imitators who followed, popularizing their concepts for the masses, sold well. So, for example, the Velvet Underground never sold that many records, but they successfully launched 1,000 bands. Larry’s proposal was that perhaps with his “musical L’Abri,” he could become the Lou Reed for a new Christian community.
He wanted to pioneer a vision for Christianity and the arts, with a new commune of creatives in the music industry devoted to following Jesus. He decided to put his thoughts down on paper in a manifesto of sorts, and sent it to Schaeffer. He wanted to know, didn’t Schaeffer experience the same sense of disconnect with his own readers? Did people really understand the profound depths of his books, or did they misconstrue his meanings and come up with loose and poor paraphrases of their own? Could Larry stop by L’Abri for a while on his upcoming European tour to learn more about how Schaeffer created such a legendary Christian community?
Whatever else it accomplished, the letter to Schaeffer became the vision document for what would become Solid Rock Records and the Street Level Artists Agency. Larry’s hope was to reverse the trend of tasteless and “cheesy” Christian records by creating infrastructure to launch talented Christian recording artists into the recording industry. In this way, he would drag the Church kicking and screaming into the present. “For whatever reason,” he complained in his manifesto, “Christianity seems to wade in irrelevant waters and remain ten or fifteen years behind the times. Almost none of the Christian music succeeds as art…it is merely propaganda masquerading as art…Not only is it misconceived as a musical project…but it fails to deliver its message…[their records] are sold only by Christian bookstores or direct mail. Non Christians do not frequent religious bookstores.” Also: “There is such a low credibility factor recommending Christianity; my non-Christian associates have a difficult time understanding why I am a Christian. If only I could erase their knowledge of the Church and Church history for a few minutes and let them see Jesus…they might still reject Christianity in the end but at least they would understand the substance of the offer God has made them.”
Unlike his previous foray into underground independent LP making—One Way Records—this time he intended to make records for himself and other artists that sounded every bit as good and possessed as much artistic merit as anything coming out of Hollywood. The offices of Solid Rock would be just a stone’s throw away from Capitol Records—his former employer—at 7046 Hollywood Boulevard, suite 707. In order to get into the offices, one had to make one’s way past the store entrance for the International Love Boutique and Sex Museum, which was on the ground floor of the building. Frederick’s of Hollywood, the infamous naughty lingerie store, was a few doors down. Solid Rock’s location signaled to the record industry and to the Christian community more broadly that these artists were willing to compete in the “devil’s backyard,” so to speak, that they were fomenting something beyond some ersatz rock. To Larry, situating Solid Rock in the line of sight of Capitol Records was a way of saying, “We are in the game. We’re going to the center of cultural influence in the entertainment industry and demanding that people take Jesus and faith seriously.”
Before he could reposition himself as the head of a new art collective, however, Larry had some reputation repair to do with the broader Christian public. Even if he refused to apologize for appearing nude on his last record cover, or for writing “difficult” songs that seemed to intimate suicide (to wit: “I pulled out my Thornton Special, I shot me in the head, I threw me in the alleyway, and I left me for dead” on “Be Careful What You Sign”), maybe he could convince them that the mission motivating all of this was a sincere wish to build bridges to the modern world for Jesus.
The first priority was to take a couple of interviews from Christian reporters: something he had not done for the better part of two years. The first journalist was Robert Thoreaux, who led off with the question, “Where have you been for the last two years? No one seems to know.” Larry explained that he had been in England, and that he was building a new record label for Christian musicians. Thoreaux gave Larry the chance to clear his name with respect to rumors that he had abandoned Christianity. When it came to the controversy over the Garden album cover, Thoreaux said: “People…feel it is too revealing…that you can see things.” Norman’s reply did not help his cause: “You’re kidding. Well, the art department would sure be flattered.” Although the point of the interview was to rehabilitate his reputation, Larry couldn’t help but skewer the whole conceit that Christian rock music was supposed to “witness” to the “unsaved”:
THOREAUX: Well, don’t you think that it reaches the unsaved now? I know that mostly it finds its way into the hands of Christians but don’t you think that Christians need Jesus music too?
LARRY: Oh, sure. They do. But the irony, and try to understand this because it might get complicated…the sad irony of almost all Christian music is that it preaches salvation to people that already have it…while the people who need the message don’t usually hear it….Christian music needs to do what Paul suggested in Hebrews 6:1…stop going over and over the same ground and move on to weightier matters. Christians don’t need musical milk year after year…there needs to be more new ground broken…more food for thought…meat that requires a lot of chewing…
THOREAUX: I see what you mean. Christian music really doesn’t reach that many non-Christians, but it certainly is an encouragement to the ears of Christians.
LARRY: The sound of splashing milk is pleasant, you mean? Sure it is.6
For the Canadian Christian publication Lodestone, Larry responded once again to the charge that, in the words of interviewer Michael Leo Gossett, he took So Long Ago the Garden in “a secular direction”: “It wasn’t a secular album at all. I suppose [people who say that] didn’t understand [Jesus’s] parables. ‘Be Careful What You Sign’ is about a man rejecting Jesus and following after riches…and the lusts of the flesh and at the end of his life finding out that he rejected Jesus and was no different than Judas and that he killed himself when he rejected Jesus. ‘Christmas Time’ is about the hypocrisy of Christmas as celebrated in America…That’s definitely not a ‘secular’ song.”
For someone on a rehabilitation campaign, Larry didn’t really seem apologetic. When Gossett asked about how Larry felt about other Christian artists covering his records, he stiff-armed the query: “I’m not really into the Gospel music scene, I’m outside of it. I don’t identify with any of it. I’m not really part of the Jesus Movement.” Gossett replied, somewhat taken aback: “That’s ironic because a lot of people considered you to be one of the main leaders, if there were any, other than the Lord…” The question provided the perfect opportunity for Larry to deconstruct the entire Jesus movement in a single breath:
I was trying to explain the Movement from the beginning that it was not really a street movement like most people wanted it to be and advertised it. The press picked up on the fact that heroin addicts come off of heroin painlessly with 30 second withdrawal cures because of Jesus, but I don’t think that was the typical person’s testimony….The truth was that most of the kids were middle class who had exposure to Jesus in their early years through their churches, walked away from it, and discovered it later in their teenage years. So most of them were short haired, middle class, non-street freaks who just came to Jesus. I can’t help it that the press misinterpreted and misreported what was going on. It just wouldn’t sell that many newspapers to say, “Hey, guess what’s happening in America? A bunch of nice kids are getting nicer!”7
Having thrown the Jesus movement and the gospel music industry under the bus, Larry stopped taking interviews and turned his attention to the mission of cultivating artists. But the problem, he soon found, was that the bench of available talent was short. Andraé Crouch was already a legend, but there was only one of him. Phil Keaggy—a virtuoso guitarist and songwriter who had become a Christian during his stint with the band Glass Harp on Decca Records—had, like Larry, gone underground after releasing one religious record.8 Larry would’ve signed Phil in a heartbeat, but he already had an offer in hand, and didn’t need Larry Norman to make him a star.
Larry’s best bet was to reconnect with Randy Stonehill, for whom he had produced the hastily assembled independent release Born Twice. Back when Randy joined Pam and Larry in London to record at AIR Studios, he had in fact laid down tracks for an album called Get Me Out of Hollywood. But the venture had not been entirely successful. The production team of Rod Edwards, Jon Miller, and Roger Hand had produced it, and though the album was planned for release on the Philips label—a Dutch electronics company that pressed records in the UK from the ’50s throughout the ’70s—they never did release it.9 Randy’s talents were not in doubt, but at the time, the album was regarded as uneven, bordering on terrible. In Randy’s own words, the LP simply became a tax write-off for the company in 1973.10 It was also barely Christian rock. The album was so devoid of faith content that when British A&R rep Norman Miller, from Chapel Lane Productions, inquired of Jon Miller (no relation to Norman Miller) about possible material taken from Randy’s time with him for an upcoming Christian release, the producer drily replied, “As you will see, there is well over two hours’ worth of material, so you should have no problem finding an album’s worth, if not more. Your only problem might be that there is very little Christian content, and some of the songs are, shall we say, a bit cheeky.”11
Randy’s bid to go secular had fizzled. Throughout his recording career, he would continue seeking a secular recording contract, but for the meantime, he was out of work with no record label prospects on the horizon. Triumvirate had passed on taking up the first of two one-year options that Stonehill owed them.12
One obstacle to getting Stonehill over to Solid Rock was the estrangement that resulted from Randy’s inappropriate relationship with one of the young women on his UK tour in 1972. Stonehill still shared Larry and Gary Anderson’s rebranded “New Generation Artists” booking agency (Anderson wanted his own agency, separate from Larry’s), but aside from business dealings, Larry’s interest in Randy had largely become a matter of keeping up with the latest happenings in Stonehill’s life from a distance. Occasionally, some hints came in the mail, such as one letter from a young woman living on Magnolia Boulevard in North Hollywood written on a notecard addressed to Randy’s attention at New Generation/Solid Rock’s address in Hollywood. In her missive dated January 7, 1974, she wrote:
You’re selfish, hypocritical, and fucked. If you want to get laid, call someone else. If you call me, I’ll hang up in your face, and if I ever see you, I’ll punch you out.
I’ll really hate you, Stonehill. Before, I didn’t care, but now you’ve gone too far. Fuck up someone else’s head, but leave me alone.13
While the context of the note is unclear, it highlights the challenge Larry faced with Stonehill. Should he be a part of Larry’s new label, and join him as the new face of Christian rock? Stonehill seemed to be drifting spiritually, so that was a risk. Furthermore, he hadn’t been successful getting a good record out, with Get Me Out of Hollywood having imploded on the launching pad. Still, Stonehill could write songs, and he was a great performer. The decision came fast. Yes, Larry would take another chance on Randy, who came promising that he had changed his ways and was really following the Lord now. After all, no one Larry was working with who self-identified as a Christian came close to Randy’s ability as a writer.
Larry set about to pick up Stonehill when Randy’s obligation to Triumvirate Production concluded in March of 1975. It came at a particularly good time for Randy, who had effectively been out of work during the time he was with Triumvirate. As manager, Gary Anderson explained in letters to prospective labels at the time, Stonehill had canceled trips to England in support of the album that never appeared, “which resulted in him being left without sufficient funds to support himself,” and being forced to live at both Anderson’s and Larry’s houses because of it.14 Whose fault it was that Stonehill had been reduced to couch surfing was debated by lawyers, but the upshot was that Randy was now free to play Paul McCartney to Larry’s John Lennon.15
Until he had a full roster of acts, however, Larry would have to bluff his way into convincing a record company to underwrite his dream. But in 1975 he was unlikely to find a willing partner. He had been struck by lightning twice at Capitol, and then MGM/Verve doubled down twice, even absent much evidence of commercial viability. Now that MGM had folded into Polygram, he was in essence starting over.
Then, just when Larry was trying to put together his own record label, he got an unexpected surprise: ABC/Dunhill Records approached him in 1974 and signed him to a new deal. ABC had a solid stable of artists that included Ray Charles, Dusty Springfield, and the James Gang. It would be his fourth record contract with a major music industry conglomerate. Larry submitted recordings done with his sister Kristy in 1969 entitled Orphans from Eden, but the album never appeared. Soon thereafter, ABC bought Word Records in Waco, Texas, a Christian record label imprint.16 Larry saw the opportunity before him; he could get the power of both a secular and gospel company to help get his records to market. He dashed off a manifesto to make his pitch that Word should invest in the records Solid Rock was preparing to produce. Writing to Jarrell McCracken, the founder of Word (1951), he made the case that the gospel music industry needed him. He laid out his grudge against the lack of artistic viability of the Christian music industry, which, in his view, boded ill for the product’s ultimate appeal. By contrast, Larry Norman would recruit legitimate artists: “In essence, I look for artists who are professional and have already learned their way around the music business, secularly and Christian-wise.” Only such a collective of artists could have an impact on the larger culture. “For example,” he argued, “the value of one Andraé Crouch exceeds fifteen Young Life–Campus Crusade type groups (i.e., the type of group that breaks up after a two-year tour of high schools).”17 Sensing an opportunity, he pressed his argument further:
If “Jesus Music” was better produced, the songs more carefully chosen, and the artists were authentic and competent as writers, vocalists, musicians, etc., then this allergy that secular radio has to Christian artists would lessen considerably. I know that this is true because I receive radio play on all of my albums, and though I sell to Christian consumers, my sales to non-Christians is always greater.18
Was Christian music really as bad as Larry was making it out to be? The answer was: sort of. Mylon LeFevre had put out a Christian rock record shortly after Larry’s Upon This Rock in 1970. The album single “Gospel Ship” was an old Stamps Quartet gospel number set to twelve-bar blues, but the whole project was still straight-up “I love my Church, love my Lord, and love my mama.” Nancy Honeytree was another Christian artist, whose albums featured a light, breezy sound with flutes and strings and song titles such as “Clean Before My Lord” and “Heaven’s Gonna Be a Blast!” Other groups like Second Chapter of Acts performed songs with slow tempos, measured vocals, and uplifting messages about their deep and ever-growing “love for the Lord.” Petra, a group put together by guitarist Bob Hartman, was more rock-oriented and listenable to open-minded rock fans. Nevertheless, their self-titled 1974 debut record still relied on Christian clichés, with song titles such as “Gonna Fly Away,” and “Get Back to the Bible.” Despite using some devices heard in regular pop music, most Christian albums from the period were unimaginative, musically, and preached to the choir in their content. And this was as true of the best records put out by Christian record labels as it was for the countless poorly conceived and produced LPs they pumped out.19
Larry wanted Solid Rock to change that story with studio excellence, artistic merit, and artistic quality control. He proposed to deliver to ABC/Word four records per year, to be distributed through their channels on the Solid Rock label, at $15,000 per record—not exorbitant by any means for the mid-1970s, but far beyond anything Word would have outlaid for a record at the time. In exchange, Norman promised a turnkey operation for an all-inclusive price, including producer’s fees, studio costs, and artwork, plus the rights to the material for the lifetime of the renewable three-year contract with Solid Rock. He signed off underscoring the importance of developing a roster of respected “cultural artists” in the Christian music industry. “It is upon this concept that I have built my career, and upon which all my artists’ careers have been hinged.”20 In the vision statement for Solid Rock Records that would be printed in the liner notes on early releases, he cited the year 1690 and the example of Isaac Watts, a teenager at the time, complaining to his father of how boring church music was, and who would go on to pen the hymns “We’re Marching to Zion,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” “Joy to the World,” and more than three hundred others. Norman went on to argue that Jesus rock was a part of a continuum that stretched from Martin Luther to William Booth’s use of brass band instruments for the Salvation Army Band—a shocking deployment for traditional hymns at that time. But, Larry continued: “William Booth took his band on the street and reached thousands of [people] that had been overlooked by the religious community.”21 Larry got the green light from Word Records executive vice president Stan Moser, and the contracts were signed in 1974.
With ABC/Word signed on, Larry Norman had the best of both worlds: more creative control but a mainstream distribution deal that would help Solid Rock’s records break out nationally. In his notebook on the creation of the company, he writes: “Made a deal with WORD to distribute Solid Rock and manufacture it and in exchange for 20% of net wholesale (after manufacturing and jackets have been paid), I pay publishing and everything (up to 50% is still a good agreement).”22 After working for years on the passenger’s side of the record business, Larry was ready to sit behind the wheel.
Every musician who hopes to make a living knows that there’s more to the job than recording albums—you have to sell them, and the best way to do that is to build a fan base. The best way to build a fan base is to tour as much as possible. Being on the road means revenue, and potentially more than could be obtained through so-called mechanical royalties of records and tapes being sold. To accomplish his goals, Larry knew that a two-headed beast would be needed. The Street Level Artists Agency would perform management duties, including arranging tours while Solid Rock Records saw to record producing. Although Larry had used the name of Street Level Artists Agency years before at the height of the Jesus movement, he relaunched the concept with his new manager, Philip Mangano, who had replaced Gary Anderson and the New Generation Artists Agency in 1974. Mangano would book shows and tours, and Larry would provide management, production, and artistic direction services to a stable of artists. The enterprise was supposed to be a ministry, and therefore “much more free of financial motives and goals.”23 But all of it was a fiction that existed at this point solely in the mind of Larry David Norman. He really had no idea who this “stable” of artists would be yet.
To solve that problem, he started a development program. If an up-and-coming artist wanted to get a record deal with Larry Norman and be produced by him, they’d have to sign up for a full, uninterrupted year of musical boot camp. Larry would help them hone their songwriting craft, understand recording techniques, and mature into their “sound” before committing anything to vinyl. Originally, he identified two recruits: Steve Camp and Scott Wesley Brown. Camp was in high school at the time, and Brown had recorded a self-titled solo record in 1973. Both artists signed deals. Larry teased Steve Camp with the promise of a double whammy: both secular and Christian deals through ABC. “I did it, Steve,” he wrote on July 21, 1975. “I got $15,000 for your albums and that’s just your religious albums. How much of a budget ABC Dunhill will give for your commercial albums will be up to how excited you can get them about your music….Everything’s really cooking.”24 Both Camp and Brown, however, eventually found “the one-year wait” too long to endure, and opted for other labels with fewer requirements. Larry was crestfallen:
…even though I’ve spent months putting them through the Solid Rock University, letting them live in the artists’ house, paying for their meals, new instruments, their plane flights and phone calls, they ask me to tear up their agreements so they can sign with other labels. I know what they are in for working with these labels and producers, because I know them all too well so sadly I let them go. They begin working with the old guard who use old ideas, corny production values and archaic mixing techniques. The artists use none of the great songs we planned to use on their first album, probably due in part because the old guard doesn’t “get it.” Doesn’t recognize the future of music, so entrenched are they in traditional gospel music and creaking studio concepts….I feel like an orphan with a small, isolated voice crying out in a cultural wilderness.25
Camp, for his part, was apologetic and seemed to know that he was not quite ready for prime time, writing to Larry that he had just written a batch of songs—“you can imagine how that turned out.”26 But the setback didn’t stop Larry from forging ahead with his ambitions.
The dream was enough to keep him going, but the reality was that he still needed to deliver some product to ABC/Word. Realistically, In Another Land, the third volume of his trilogy, was still a year away from delivery. On a lark, he sent them Streams of White Light in Darkened Corners, a cover record satirizing the spate of “spiritual” songs released by secular rock heroes from the early 1970s. The LP featured “Spirit in the Sky” by Norman Greenbaum, “Presence of the Lord” by Blind Faith (Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood), and “He Gives Us All His Love” by Randy Newman, among others. Word was not amused, and Norman released the record independently years later, in 1977.
Secular artists seemed to understand that spiritual messages could sell records while simultaneously denying the true teaching about Christ. In a blistering late entry in the Hollywood Free Paper, Larry reflected upon the phenomenon of cashing in on Jesus in the mainstream record industry. From Paul Simon’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, there was money to be made from religion. Larry related conversations he had with Leon Russell, who had taken to “preach[ing] during his concerts about ‘the need for Jesus, the need for love, I’m talking about the power of love.’ ” But when Larry talked with Russell about what he meant about Jesus, the soul singer quickly explained that he didn’t really have an interest in God. What interested him was “the energy level and communication prowess he had observed in black gospel churches, where the preachers seemed to be able to control the response of their congregations with voice inflections and gesticulations.”27
Norman persisted in his meditation on the fascination that rock stars had with the power of religion. He recalled being invited with Pam to a Saturday barbecue at Denny Cordell’s beach house in Malibu. Cordell, the English record producer who launched not only Leon Russell’s career but also those of J. J. Cale and Tom Petty, among others, explained philosophically to Larry (while flipping steaks on the grill) that what most people regarded as “true religion” was really just the power of suggestion. Cordell recounted the story of a time when he saw a girl having a bad LSD trip at a party at his house in Tulsa, whereupon Russell came up to her and said, “I heal you in the name of Leon Russell.” The girl revived, Cordell recounted. There you have it, Larry concluded in his “As I See It” column. It was the same message he had preached in “Nightmare #71”: “Fadeout. Hollywood be thy name.”28
For Solid Rock Records to fulfill its true mission, Larry surmised, he and his new cadre of artists would need to avoid the pitfall of, in the words of St. Paul, “having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” As a way of proving to himself that he was going to stay on mission, Larry created a logo for Solid Rock. It featured an open mouth, reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’ tongue logo, but with a depiction of Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, inside.
Larry’s conviction about “discipling” his own artists’ commune was underscored by his young friend Steve Turner’s interview of Eric Clapton in the July 18, 1974, edition of Rolling Stone.29 While the full interview reveals the guitar god’s spiritual longing and initial attraction to Jesus, Clapton jettisoned his nascent faith during his romantic pursuit of Patti Harrison (George Harrison’s wife).30 Writing to Turner days after the interview appeared, Larry said, “Poor Eric—it sounds like he gave up Jesus for a woman he never had,” adding that Turner had “done a small service to the Christian habit of speculation.” It also gave him an idea: perhaps Turner could help build Team Larry. “I’ll pay you a salary, plus hotel and food expenses as you travel on the road with me,” he wrote the reporter. “You only need to be on the road for two or three weeks at most out of a possible three months—all of the other work can be done from your home.”
As he worked to reestablish his credibility with the Christian public, the fan mail started pouring back in. Typically, Larry didn’t directly engage with fan correspondence in the early years, though he made exceptions. During 1974, for example, he replied to at least one fan letter—from one Carl Adkins, writing from the Stanislaus County Jail in Modesto, California. He also responded to accusations that he had no local church affiliation. When a friend/fan from Minnesota wrote saying that Larry’s spotty record of church attendance was a barrier to booking future shows, particularly in the mind of one Christian promoter in the Minneapolis area, Larry shot back:
When I asked you to explain my album to people who you happened to hear discussing it, I was just asking you personally, as a friend, to remove the stumbling block of misunderstanding from the feet of troubled brothers and sisters. I didn’t know that my request would take on any embellishments. Suddenly, it seems I have to write Dave Klug about the album, and explain where I go to church….I can’t understand people’s interest in it—I’ve never thought of asking Billy Graham where he goes to church or even what denomination he is….In fact, I can only think of one reason that anyone would be interested at all, and since my request has suddenly taken on more official tones, instead of personal, I will give an official answer.
I worship regularly at one location and feel that the communion and fellowship is a blessing to me, but I refuse to be inveigled by people who ask questions as the Pharisees asked questions. I am answerable only to God because he is the perfect judge.31
Every time he reached out for support, friends and acquaintances requested reassurances that Larry Norman was “safe” for Christian consumption—a concept very foreign, to say the least, to the world of rock ’n’ roll. He thought it ironic that people whom he didn’t know would demand to know intimate details about his personal life as a Christian. Unfortunately, he would need these people if he was going to make a living again, so he was going to have to figure out a way to make nice. After all, he needed to get out of the house.
With few concerts on the schedule, and no recording session to occupy his attention, he was going stir-crazy staying home with Pam. L.A. itself had started to feel like home—the beautifully painted rock-’n’-roll billboards sprinkled along the Sunset Strip served as reminders that rock-’n’-roll stardom is the best kind of fame. But the confines of their tiny apartment in “Beverly Hills Adjacent” started to grate on his nerves. He and Pam were almost famous. Rodeo Drive and Century City were mere minutes away. David Bowie lived in the neighborhood, during his period when he was freaking out on coke, and to be certain there were enough B-list celebrities riding the elevator and on the street to make things feel fabulous. Larry and Pam were on the social scene as well, a super-photogenic couple who made quite an impression. In one Hollywood social magazine, a photograph taken from behind the couple ran the caption, “Can you tell which ‘twin’ is a man under that hair?” Reversing the photo revealed Larry in a tux and Pam in a white chiffon dress. They were attending a celebrity dinner honoring Audrey Hepburn.32 Larry’s growing fame and Pam’s budding modeling career made them an attractive ask for parties—gatherings where they rubbed elbows with record producers like Denny Cordell and rock stars like Leon Russell. Living in Beverly Hills Adjacent, however, didn’t seem to help Pam’s level of contentedness, at least according to Larry.
In a handwritten letter addressed to Pam on So Long Ago the Garden stationery, Larry vented about what he perceived as her desire for a more glamorous life—to dine at the best restaurants, and to leave the apartment on South Doheny and “live up in the Hills.” All of this he regarded as the selfish demands of a shallow person. His tastes were simpler. He loved strolling down Melrose Avenue to Pink’s, the legendary hot-dog stand that had been in operation since 1939.
When they were in public, Larry complained, she wanted to be the center of attention. In a letter, he referenced a fight that he and Pam had one night at the movies. Larry had left his seat before the film started to “wash the butter off [his] hands from the popcorn” and catch up with his friends in the band Oingo Boingo about their new sound. Pam fumed back in the theater, hating being left alone, and took Larry’s chat with the boys in Oingo Boingo as evidence he had lost interest in her. In Pam’s mind, here she was: a pretty model and aspiring actress with a winning personality whose husband seemed easily distracted from her charms.
In Larry’s mind, Pam wanted fame, wealth, and success—an attitude he saw as being unspiritual. He felt smothered and pressured to be someone he was not. “We don’t have much of anything in common, and that is the obstacle,” he wrote to her. He couldn’t understand why “everything is so serious and taken on a literal basis with us…it shouldn’t be….People are not literal.” Their problems could be overcome, he promised, but he said, “If we can’t resolve [our problems], then I’d rather be alone. No, I never think about anyone else. The only one you’re in competition with is yourself. You don’t need to ever fear an outside woman coming between us. You are the only one I want to be with, but if that becomes impossible or unbearable, then I will leave you and live by myself. It might take a lot of pressure off….Let’s see if we can become friends again.”33
It was a reckoning that had been developing for some time. For years, Pam’s profligate spending had been a problem. Correspondence between her and Gary Anderson, Larry’s former manager from the New Generation Artist Agency days, reveals the extent to which Anderson worried about turning over Larry’s paychecks to her. Instead of paying the rent and other fixed expenses while her husband was on tour, she shopped. On January 12, 1974, Anderson wrote her a panicked letter asking what had happened to $1,471.00 that was mysteriously spent before the rent was paid. He told her that he knew she had been having a “grand time” while her husband was out of town, but there’s nothing he could do to help her this time when Larry found out.
So imagine Larry’s surprise when he read a letter from a sales representative for Rainy Day Advertising, telling Pam how good it was to see her on the cover of Playgirl, exclaiming, “You’re more beautiful in person!” and going on to say that he looked forward to seeing her the next time he was in Los Angeles.34 Sure enough, the March 1974 issue featured Pam snuggling up to male model Dennis Newell on the front, with accompanying racy article titles.35 Pam also posed more than once for the pornographic True Secrets magazine, published by Martin Goodman, which ran fantasy rape and sexual-encounter stories with accompanying nude and otherwise titillating photos.36
Realistically, how was Larry Norman to fend off rumors that he had backslidden from Christ when his wife was posing for porn magazines? A photo from this period reveals much of the singer’s state of mind at the time. Larry is sitting on a leather sofa, facing the camera with a forlorn expression, as though he had just graduated from the fetal position. He is clutching a Snoopy stuffed animal. Over his right shoulder, perched on the back of the couch, was Raggedy Andy, and over his left shoulder hung a picture of Marlene Dietrich, the Golden Age Hollywood star. It was a fitting metaphor for Larry and Pam’s marriage: arrested development. On the table next to him in the photo was a copy of True Secrets porn magazine with Pam on the cover. A copy of Harper’s Bazaar was situated next to Pam’s cover shoot, with one of the visible headlines being, “The Problems of Sexual Freedom.” Problems, indeed.
Meanwhile, letters also started to emerge from various paramours, pledging their love to Pam, including a string of letters from a Christian suitor who cited references from Oxford University’s Inklings one minute, and then breathlessly alluded to a tryst on “February 18th…an amazing day in our lives” that seemed to “have been too good to be true, but wonderfully I know that this is not so.” In another letter, he wrote a poem that promised, “I will come in the morning and wake you with a kiss.”37 Apparently Pamela was also indiscreet, since these letters all eventually wound up in her husband’s possession.
Pages written in Pam’s hand for a proposed memoir of her life in the 1970s reveal that not only had she posed for the cover of Playgirl, she was on a first-name basis with Hugh Hefner, a regular visitor to parties at the Playboy Mansion, and friends with numerous Playmates, including October 1978 centerfold Marcy Hanson.38 Writing about her friendship with Marcy, Pam speaks of the tension between Marcy’s desire to be a television star, and the lucrative offer from Playboy to be their centerfold.39 When she realized a centerfold might jeopardize her chances at an upcoming television series, Pam recalls Hefner offering a compromise: wait until the series comes out and is established, and then afterward release the photos. When the series failed after just a few episodes, Hugh went forward with Marcy’s nude debut. During this time, Marcy called Pam to ask her to help her pray about the decision, and Pam agreed to do so. (Wouldn’t the standard Christian response be “Just Say No to Posing for Playboy”?)
Hugh Hefner subsequently approached Pamela herself to do a centerfold. But this was to be no ordinary issue of Playboy. Rather, as Pam would point out to Larry, the offer was to pose for a special shoot entitled “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” The gig came with a paycheck worthy of such a distinguished headline: a $50,000 payout, as compared to the normal $12,000 for a centerfold model. Pam immediately went to Larry to tell him the “good news” about the offer and to seek his counsel about what to do. Larry’s response was to put his arms around her, give her a hug, and tell her, “Baby, you’re the centerfold of my life and that’s all that matters.” She recalled asking him for $25 for an upcoming doctor’s visit as he tucked her into bed that night. The subtext was that if she posed for Hefner, their short-term money problems would be over. As Pam went on to argue, it’s difficult to say no to the prestige of the “Playboy image.” Playboy was, after all, “the Rolls-Royce of men’s girlie magazines.”40 She argued Playboy’s legitimacy to Larry; they had interviewed Ernest Hemingway, and had run pieces by “distinguished writers” like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.
Larry, on the other hand, was unimpressed, being a devotee of William F. Buckley Jr., and National Review. Larry jotted down the following notebook entry in response to Pam’s request on a page with the caption “Proverbs”: “It is better to live in the corner of the rooftop than in a house with a contentious woman” (Prov. 25:24).
Meanwhile, back at Solid Rock, Larry nurtured increasingly grandiose ambitions. In addition to promoting artists, and producing records for them, what he really wanted was a whole media group alternative to the Christian mainstream. It would conduct real investigative journalism to help bring the system down. He brought up the idea to Steve Turner, who immediately caught on. Why stop at an alternative Christian record label? Turner amplified the idea: “Could you imagine carrying investigative features into such topics as the Billy Graham Organization (money, role of statistics, crowd manipulation, computer written letters, follow-up, etc.), Christian publishers (what are their criteria, what sort of people run them), Christian record companies (same questions) as well as into Christian personalities (Wilkerson, Oral Roberts, etc.).”41
Turner also wanted to investigate the practice of evangelists who asked for money in return for prayer, envisioning the same sort of “cleansing” pieces that Hunter Thompson had written for Rolling Stone. Critiques would originate from a specifically Christian world view, not from a standpoint of presuppositional hostility to the claims of religion. But one thing that Larry wanted Turner to do was a bridge too far: Larry wanted him to write promotional profiles of him and other forthcoming Solid Rock artists. The Rolling Stone writer flatly refused. Why would he jeopardize his blossoming career as a journalist in order to do publicity puff pieces on Larry Norman? It would become a point of tension between the two, but the conversation would eventually result in Turner writing a biography of Norman as an observer on the 1977 World Tour, in exchange for a reasonably generous advance.42 Still, if he could keep his journalistic integrity intact, sure, Turner had no problem helping Larry build his brand.
The Turner relationship would become an exemplar of a mistake that Larry Norman would make repeatedly: not separating business from friendship. On the one hand, he would speak dreamily of an artists’ colony whose output would make the Christian community sit up and take notice. On the other hand, he didn’t seem to understand that his setup made him “the boss,” with employees who pinned their career hopes on his leadership and organizational execution. It was a role that Larry was particularly ill suited to fulfill. It also put him in the uncomfortable position of being “breadwinner” not only for Pam, whose expensive tastes were a drain on the bank account, but also for the emerging Solid Rock “family.”
Despite the fact that Larry’s own personal life was increasingly painful and uncertain, he relished the role of big brother, both to his artists and to his actual siblings. Although Larry seemed to drift in and out of contact with members of his immediate family, he checked in on them to see how they were doing. Of special concern was his sister Nancy, with whom he had shared street witnessing experiences in the early, heady days of the Jesus movement in Los Angeles. Larry knew that Nancy and her husband had become associated with one of the more charismatic duos of that period: Tony and Susan Alamo, both of whom had kept their stage names after failing in their respective entertainment careers. Susan was a fiery Pentecostal preacher with bleached blond hair. Tony ran operations. Together they formed a nonprofit organization, the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. The couple recruited youngsters to come with them to Hollywood Boulevard, where the group handed out tracts that threatened fire and brimstone to anyone who didn’t believe in Jesus.43 They developed quite a following, which continues to the present day, despite the deaths of Susan (d. 1982), and the more recent passing of Tony Alamo (d. 2017).44
Few of the Alamos’ followers at the time could have predicted the crazy cult the Alamo family would eventually become, though the Alamos had a habit of claiming to receive special revelations and visions from God. When the sect moved to Alma, Arkansas, in the late 1970s, the environment they fostered got even weirder, and ultimately dangerous. The Alamos hid much of their abusive behavior from the public for years, but Larry had intuited something was “off” for some time. In the early years, the group exhibited typical fundamentalist tendencies and barred members from partaking not only in the usual suspects of dancing and alcohol, but also any pop-culture products of the outside world, including movies, television, and, of course, rock music. In their place, the Alamos provided their own versions of popular music, featured on a cable access television show that Tony and Susan hosted.
Larry sometimes visited the Alamo compound when he was on tour in the South. He relished his role of “interrupting” the cultish bubble. Since he was a famous singer, and most of the members would have remembered him from their days in L.A. during the Jesus movement, the Alamos let Larry in. Larry would appear on the scene in his Chevy Citation rental car, and on more than one occasion mesmerized his bookish and quiet nephew with his rock-star looks and his cool, detached confidence. Larry was a figure exempt from the rule of the Alamos. Tony and Susan, uncharacteristically, bit their tongue when Larry Norman was on the scene. One of his nieces would eventually appear on TV with Oprah Winfrey to talk about her harrowing experiences living in the Alamo compound.
Still, Larry’s visits were too few and far between. Although Larry’s family members fled the cult before things took an even darker and more abusive turn, things kept getting crazier at the Alamo compound with each passing year. Tony Alamo kept roofs over everyone’s head through several businesses: everything from gas stations to a hog farm.45 Most notably, he gained fame by manufacturing a line of bedazzled denim jackets, and had famous customers such as Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, and Michael Jackson.46 Another source of revenue were his parishioners, and he required church members to surrender their assets to him. In a freakish turn of events, when Susan Alamo died in 1982, Tony and other church leaders mandated that the children in the cult lie down next to Susan’s corpse—dressed in a wedding gown, no less—to pray for her to rise from the dead. For months, daily beatings were administered to the children because “the bride of God” didn’t revive.47 Eventually, Tony Alamo was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison for sexual abuse of girls within his congregation, whom he considered to be his wives. A nightmare decades in the making, the Alamo cult was a reminder that unspeakable evil can happen when a couple of con artists convince you God is on their side.