By 1977, Larry Norman was enjoying a hard-earned reputation as Christian rock’s most charismatic performer. With Phil Mangano on board to handle the details, Larry decided to do what all great rock stars do when they reach their prime: embark on a massive world tour. By this point, Larry’s carefully honed stage act was a known quantity around the world, and with several acclaimed records under his belt, he felt at the height of his powers. He decided to hire Steve Turner, his longtime friend and Rolling Stone writer, to document the trip and write a tour biography. It was a risky venture, not the least because Turner, despite getting paid for his efforts, made it clear he still wasn’t interested in writing publicity puff pieces for Larry, ground they had covered numerous times.1 The “friend-as-hired-gun” routine would put a strain on their relationship when the finished product did not meet the artist’s expectations.
Still, at the outset, “World Tour ’77” promised something never before seen in Christian rock: several configurations of a crack touring band, fronted by Larry, performing at large venues frequented by major rock acts. Mangano took it upon himself to organize the whole affair. A suitably epic concert poster was printed in black and blue, with a photograph silhouette of Larry with a guitar and his back to the camera as he faced the crowd. Above his head hung the “big blue marble” of Earth with a lightning bolt from above striking through space onto a single point on the globe. Translation: Come see Larry Norman and maybe the Holy Spirit will smite you with a prophetic word from the Lord.
The tour began in South America and took Norman and his entourage through Australia, New Zealand, the mainland United States, Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the British Isles, France, Italy, Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, and lastly, Hawaii. For seven months, Larry performed an average of five shows per week. He came out and played an acoustic set first, and sometimes played the second half of each show with a full band, fronted by the guitarist Norman Barrett. Alwyn Wall came on the tour to serve as Larry’s opening act.2 By the time he was through, Larry had traversed more than 40,000 miles aboard forty-five different planes.
Pamela joined Larry for the entire duration, and the couple caused a sensation in each city they visited. Upon arriving in Sydney, the Daily Telegraph ran a half-page photo of the two holding hands, and pumped the World Tour with the following notice:
DUET FOR A SOLO SINGER
American rock guitarist, singer and composer Larry Norman arrived in Sydney yesterday at the start of a six-month concert tour of six continents.
With him was his wife Pamela, who will model for an Australian fashion magazine.
The couple will be in Australia for a month.
Norman’s first Sydney Concert has been sold out, and his second, at the Hordern Pavilion on September 24, is heavily booked. News of Norman’s concerts spread by word of mouth. When he was last here, he built up a cult following, mostly of university students.
Norman is billed as a rock star, although he usually performs alone. America’s influential Billboard magazine described him as the “most important songwriter since Paul Simon.”3
Meanwhile, Larry hired a full-time photographer, not only to chronicle his exploits, but to keep Pam occupied on the road by setting up “shoots.” The photographer scouted good locations, and juxtaposed Pam against the exotic backdrop of whatever city the World Tour had found itself in. The strategy didn’t always work, as Pam sometimes escaped Larry’s not-so-subtle minder. Waking up in their hotel room in Sydney one day, for example, Larry was surprised to find a note from Pam saying that she was already out and about for the day. When she returned late that night, he asked her how her day went, to which she breezily replied that she had been out shopping. The next morning, however, he uncovered the whole truth. There in the Daily Mirror was a bikini-clad Pam, posing as the “Page Three” model for Thursday, September 22, 1977.4 Larry hoped his Australian fans weren’t reading the tabloids like he was.
The crowds for the World Tour shows were a curious mix of churchgoers and serious music fans. For some, it was their first major concert experience, given that rock was still verboten at the time for many Christian teenagers. As Steve Turner observed, for many present, “it was possibly the first rock concert, in the electric rock-’n’-roll sense, that they’d been to within the confines of their culture. The first concert to minister to body, mind, and spirit all in their turn. As such it marked a breakthrough.”5 Eager crowds turned out in large numbers and snapped up the merchandise on offer, one of Larry’s best sources of revenue. The 1977 World Tour was the place for Christian rock fans to be. Photographs of tour posters reveal that the show at the Sydney Opera House sold out two months in advance, but as Phil Mangano would note in a press release, the smaller shows packed more punch. For example, the Larry Norman Band played in Broken Hill, a remote town in Wales, to an enthusiastic crowd.6 Larry Norman played for his fans in out-of-the-way places other stars didn’t go.
The album Snapshots from the ’77 World Tour captured something of the energy, humor, and emotional appeal of the show. The band was tight, and brought fresh interpretations to Larry’s most beloved songs. During “If God Is My Father” Larry improvised in rhymed verse over the main guitar riff. Finishing the verse that appears on the record, “We’ve got to learn to love, love is the only thing,” he freestyled:
You’ve got to learn to love yourself…because if you don’t love yourself
You won’t love anyone else…the way they should be loved.
And sometimes we want to reach out to someone,
but something holds us back inside.
Maybe our father and our mother didn’t love us like we wish they would
And we’d like to reach out and love our wife or our husband
or our children
…if we only could.
For his most obsessive fans, a Larry Norman show was a psychotherapy session set to music. Because he talked a lot between songs, and allowed for awkward pauses and silence, a fan was encouraged to become more pensive, more introspective about his or her life. At most other Christian music concerts, fans left “encouraged.” At a Randy Stonehill concert, there were belly laughs and goofy songs like “American Fast Food,” and “Shut De Do’, Keep Out De Devil.” At a Larry Norman concert, the content was designed to make you uncomfortable, to stir up emotion, and the only outlet was for fans to try to find Larry afterward and open up to him.
In the tons of fan mail he received, person after person poured out their heart and told their life stories to him. Fans (mostly girls) came to expect long post-concert prayer sessions, and extemporaneous one-on-one counseling. Larry took this task very seriously, and even kept a detailed notebook on tour of the different people he talked to after each show, with commentary on the details of their conversations. For instance, regarding one girl he met in Finland, he wrote: “Anne is the girl who said that God never answered her prayers. It turned out that she had never accepted Jesus. And she said she didn’t want to, need to, etc. Very argumentative! But something kept me discussing everything. And finally she broke. We went outside when they kicked us out. And she prayed to become a Christian.”7 He copiously wrote down mailing addresses with notes to remind himself: “Send Christmas card and be true friend,” “Send her Planet/Garden,” and so on.
This approach clearly meant a lot to fans fortunate enough to secure time with Larry, but it also had a downside. Larry Norman expected his fans to be as serious as he was. He refused to simply sign autographs or take pictures with fans. Having chronicled these episodes on the British Isles portion of the tour, Steve Turner turned in a tour diary manuscript that portrayed Larry as one part artist, one part spiritual empath, and one part sadist. In other words, Larry was a control freak who—for reasons obscure even perhaps to himself but certainly to his loved ones—needed to know he could move people emotionally and intellectually. Describing the aftermath of a show in Cardiff, Turner writes:
Then came the familiar straggle of autograph hunters and people who just wanted to say hello. “I’d like some people to meet you,” said one young boy who’d obviously battled his own fears approaching Larry in order to impress his girlfriends. “This is Melanie, and this is Diane.” Larry gave the minimum required response, and looked at them, smiling, to see if there was any deeper purpose in their wanting to meet him. There was a sense of embarrassment, the feeling that their teenage adulation had been exposed for what it was….“And I’d like to meet you myself,” said the designated leader by way of breaking the silence. “Nice to meet you,” said Larry, maintaining the friendly smile.
It was a scene I was to see occur many times on the tour. At first I felt pangs of embarrassment for the fans, knowing that it wouldn’t take much for Larry to reach out a hand and make their meeting easy and memorable….The impression he gives onstage is understanding, loving, lighthearted—are they wrong to expect to find the same backstage?8
But Larry’s tour also gave back to concertgoers in unexpected ways. At the height of “The Troubles,” Larry Norman played in Belfast, Ireland, at Wellington Hall. It was during the violent times of the United Unionist Action Council strike, led by Ian Paisley, and 1977 was the year in which the Shankill Butchers, an Ulster Loyalist group, terrorized the city in a gruesome spate of violence.9 In May of that year, the Butchers, posing as policemen, forced a young man named Gerard McLaverty into their car, where he was transported to an abandoned surgery center, beaten with sticks, slashed across the wrists, and left in an alleyway for dead.10 It was not safe for Americans, let alone rock-’n’-rollers sporting a quasi-effeminate rock look, to be in Belfast.
Still, Larry was modest enough to know that he was an interloper, and he didn’t pretend to have “answers” to their sorrows. As Turner observed, Larry performed in Belfast with a song he had not yet played much in concert, “If I Were a Singer,” a song he had co-written with Steve Camp. Although not overtly political, the piece, performed solo on guitar, built with intensity until the following payoff:
If I were a singer, I’d sing my song for you
And my pen would point out all the things you’re made of
And the only thing that I could sing would be love.
I would sing till the faithless ones received it,
Until the children of your wayward church believed it.
I would sing it to the governments and leaders
And to the writers who have misled all the readers.
I would sing it though they jailed me and they killed me.
Let them empty me of life, for you have filled me.
These are troubled days, I want to live my life in a special way.
These are troubled days, and
I want to live my life for you and show the way.
Larry Norman was a master at casting a spell upon an audience. He could pivot between comedy and profundity on a dime, and at times, a mystical air of importance hung in the room. It was, for some audience members, the only spiritual moment they had felt in years, even after all their years of church services, sermons, and Bible studies attended. At a Larry Norman concert, you felt an intimacy with the artist, despite his mercurial behavior—sometimes tender, sometimes harsh, and at other moments condescending. But he was always entertaining, even when veering toward being “preachy.” Still, for someone like Steve Turner, whose task it was to put all of this into perspective, the antinomies were a little too pronounced. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the problem. Norman’s music wasn’t exactly groundbreaking; it stayed pretty squarely in the rhythm-and-blues vein, time-bound, or so Turner thought, to the 1960s: “Having criticized Christians for being behind the times [Larry] finds that he’s very much of another decade trying to communicate in sixties musical forms created back then. He’s outspoken in condemning Christians for playing to Christians and yet, there he is, a Christian playing to Christians.” Turner had a point. Perhaps by the time of the World Tour, Larry Norman was becoming the very thing he despised: the father of a mediocre Christian music industry.
Larry certainly had a mystique, Turner thought, but most of that inspiration he had borrowed from influences such as the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and Bob Dylan. Where Larry excelled, Turner observed, was in image management and branding, and in a backhanded compliment he compared Larry to another British rock star: “One artist I’d met and enjoyed on the same level as Larry had been David Bowie. Here was someone else who knew exactly who he was and how he could use what he was to say what he wanted. Not one Bowie strand of hair, photograph, album titling, packaging or poster is without its significance in the scheme of things.” Stated differently, Larry’s talent lay not in his song craft or even performances. Through marketing, he could trick you into thinking more was going on than actually was, in fact, going on. Embarrassingly for Turner, however, he concluded his comparison of Norman and the Thin White Duke by writing: “I can’t see us humming Bowie tunes in twenty years or even five years’ time.”11
Somehow, Turner hinted, there was something sub-Christian about being so concerned about one’s image. “At home he doesn’t like Pam to display pictures of him and yet at the office he has file after file of photographic material of him.” He pointed out how Larry paid for a photographer to accompany him on the World Tour, and that said photographer took 2,675 rolls of film of Larry—“something that might be fitting for an artist on the scale of Bowie but which raises the intention [sic] for someone whose albums, on average, only sell 20,000 copies.” And yet, here was Turner himself, following Larry for a portion of a mostly sold-out world tour in which he routinely played to thousands.
Turner also cringed at the Dylan-esque way in which Larry dealt with the press, many of whom were amateurs working on behalf of some local gospel radio program. After a particularly electrifying show in Belfast, Larry found himself seated across from a young, earnest Christian reporter. “I want you to know I don’t do religious interviews,” Larry explained. “You don’t do religious interviews?” the young man inquired. Larry: “No. I don’t answer questions like ‘What do you think God is doing in the churches these days?’ and ‘When did you become a Christian?’…I don’t do propaganda radio.” The reporter sat there, mouth, no doubt, agape. No, Larry wouldn’t discuss “Jesus music,” or the meaning of songs like “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?,” stating: “I don’t explain my songs…I don’t think Picasso explained his paintings or Francis Schaeffer explains his books. They should be self-explanatory.” Instead, Larry wanted to be asked general questions about the tour, and about his work as an artist. So when the young man asked, “How would you describe your music?” Larry replied:
It’s thoughtful music, you know. There are a lot of questions that aren’t easily answered and I try to ask those questions so we can all think about it together. There are big issues in life—God being one of the biggest. Is there a God? Is Jesus really so important that we must go through Jesus to get to God? Things like that really need to be thought about for a long time.12
Turner admired Larry’s strategy but found his behavior baffling. In Belfast, for example, why did he seem to be so uninterested in the theological differences between Protestant and Catholics? Why did he ask his hosts such basic questions about the violence in Northern Ireland when he had been to the country several times before? Why wasn’t he more culturally curious? But when he pressed Larry later about his approach, he began to see a hermeneutic at work in Larry’s reply: “I always ask questions right from the beginning again. I like the ritual…Everyone I talk to usually gives me a different story so I pretend I’m totally uninitiated and then [they think], ‘Here’s my chance to give my philosophy to this person.’ So I just ask, ‘Who’s causing the trouble?’ ”
Still, Turner seemed uncertain why people, both fans and friends, seemed to be enraptured by the “mystery” of Larry Norman: “When his close friends meet together it’s inevitable they’ll start talking about Larry because so little of his behavior fits conventional patterns or expectations.”13 Turner reveled at drawing attention to the contradictions embodied in Larry: the man who criticized the Church for being too materialistic was the same man who expected fine hotels on tour and complained about substandard service at restaurants.
When Steve Turner contacted Triumvirate—the production team of Miller, Edwards, and Hand who were behind Only Visiting This Planet and So Long Ago the Garden—they groused that though they admired Larry, they perceived him as being too controlling in the studio.14 When Steve Scott, a British poet who was working with Larry for a potential Solid Rock release, was interviewed for his opinion, he concluded, “He’s hard to get to know because he does bury himself in his work….Sometimes you really want to love him and be with him; at other times you’re wondering what you’re doing anywhere near him, how he could be bringing this weird stuff down on your head.”15
Turner went on to conclude that, in sum, Larry Norman was a control freak. He smothered those around him with an admixture of love, gifts, attention and criticism—as the occasion warranted—as a means of keeping people close: “He encourages his artists to be independent…and yet is rarely able to cope with those who learn the lesson. Nearly all of his closest friends are somehow dependent on him for their living, and whether he recognizes this or not, he needs them to stay dependent on him. If his friends gain too much independence, it becomes a threat.”16
In the end, Turner seemed to have the same problem that other Christians seemed to have with Larry: In evangelical Christianity, there can be no rock stars. No believer should be heralded above any other, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the “priesthood of the believer.” There is a flattening effect, a radical egalitarianism, particularly in the Protestant version of the faith. And whenever a pastor or Christian leader becomes prominent, popular, or controversial, a pious litany of detractors will decry that such a thing should not be.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw this feature as being at the very core of Christianity—in which the “sheep” demand conformity and reciprocity from those who desire to be strong, to compete, to lead. In his critique of “slave morality,” Nietzsche lamented that the true philosopher is always victimized by Christianity, because the perverse master-slave dynamic upon which the faith relies bars any notion of the “free spirit.”17 Christianity enervates free spirits through an endless string of pronouncements of resentment and regret, by controlling them, editing them, and endlessly critiquing them. After all, the very meaning of the Latin root religio means “to bind.”
Eventually, Turner concluded that Larry Norman’s career sat uncomfortably in-between. Larry never veered from his childhood vision of trying to explain his beliefs to the kids on the playground. The best way he could find to do this was through music. And along the way, he found himself at the vanguard of how Christians thought about culture, and how to deploy art in helping reach those like himself: young people confused about the message and ways of the Church in the modern world. He wanted to show what music “can be and what it must be if it’s ever going to reach people like us.”
Turner turned the manuscript in and registered a grievance about his contract. He had received $5,000 as an advance, plus all expenses paid for airfare, hotel, meals, and incidentals while on tour with Larry. But he had apparently seen reference to the fact that Word was willing to offer Larry $15,000 for the book, at least at one point. Shouldn’t he be cut into that, if that indeed was the number? His contract with Larry didn’t specify these terms, but he didn’t feel like he was in a good negotiating position to ask for more. All told, however, “I hope the book works,” he wrote coolly in his sign-off.18
It did not. When Larry received Turner’s manuscript, he was gob-smacked. It was not what he was looking for at all. The book failed in Larry’s estimation to capture the essence of his ten years as an artist, let alone the World Tour. Most of the manuscript was merely a travelogue of the British leg of the tour, which meant, in Larry’s mind, that it would have very limited appeal in America and elsewhere. Furthermore, it seemed as though the second half of the book was an endless series of quotes strung together, mostly from business associates whom Larry hadn’t spoken to in years, and most of which had mostly negative things to say about him. As such, the book wasn’t marketable to Larry Norman fans who were looking more for a collector’s item, not true music journalism. They would want something more commercial, with lots of photographs. But the final straw was this: the book effected a “veiled animosity” toward its subject. “I am not paying you to write an exposé,” Larry shot back.19
Is it possible that Turner had second thoughts after saying yes to Larry? Whatever the case, it was another episode in friendship gone awry. Co-opting the relationship for the purposes of brand-making turned out to be a bad idea. The two remained cordial, but there had no doubt been a rupture. Unlike other people with whom Larry fell out of fellowship, however, Turner retained a degree of loyalty, even dedicating his book on the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Write, to Larry, for all of their many conversations about the Fab Four.20
Larry had planned for the Turner book to be the summation of an artistic life at its zenith. Instead it proved what he feared: no one understood what he was doing. He wondered if all the work in creating Christian rock had been a fool’s errand. The frustration had come out earlier on the tour during a seminar on Christianity and the Arts in Auckland, New Zealand. Speaking before a group of Christian musicians wanting to follow in his footsteps, Larry cast aspersions upon the entire enterprise of Jesus rock. “Here’s how it goes,” he explained. A bunch of Christians get together and make a record and they sing about salvation, and how to be born again, whereupon said album, made for a Christian record company, is distributed to Christian bookstores. Surely, Larry mocked, “that’s where all the non-Christians go to buy their records. Am I getting this right so far?” Pursuing the joke, he continued, “Yes, so all of the non-Christians go and ask, ‘Do you have any records by bands I’ve never heard of? Because I’d like to learn about salvation.”21 No, Larry said. Christian records are not primarily for nonbelievers, but for the already believing community. So their purpose must be to make those people think hard about their faith. To talk about salvation to the already “saved” was a missed opportunity. Echoing the writer to the Hebrews who exhorted his audience to “move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity,” Larry stated: “I believe that clichés are a sin. Maybe not to God, but to the muse of art.”22
Such thoughts left open the question of precisely what “maturity” looked like for an artist who wanted to follow Jesus. In Larry’s mind, the Church once held a place as the prophetic conscience of culture, but no more. Today, he concluded, the world does this for itself, by itself. Christians used to be at the vanguard of environmental reform, for instance, but now their secular peers do a better job of talking like Jesus than the Christians do. Larry feared that evangelical churches were afraid to go deeper, to confront the tough questions being posed by contemporary society.
So I think we need to dig in. We’re not going to catch up to the world now….We’ve already turned over our birthright to the world, and now the world says striking things. So let’s go off in a different direction. Let’s not go backwards and talk about the basics of Christianity. But let’s tear ourselves from the direction of the world now, and talk about real issues. [For example], is homosexuality a real issue? Well, you can’t talk about it on the grounds that the gay [community] wants to discuss it [in today’s Church]. They say, “We were born this way.” But we “know” that it’s not natural, that they’re not born that way. But do we know that? Have you thought about it?…So you’re going to have to struggle with what you’re going to write about, won’t you?23
Larry Norman wanted to restructure the Christian cultural consciousness, moving it away from theologizing and position-taking and into deeper engagement with contemporary daily life. As Larry later remarked to fan biographer Alan Gibson, “God gave me a gift, not to be popular, but to be invasive.”24 He had made it his mission to force his fellow believers to think of life in grittier, more realistic terms. It was an ambitious agenda, and one that never came to be, because everything around him started to collapse.