God's Jukebox: A Fourth Testament (1991)

The following piece and its accompanying graphics appeared in the July/August 1991 issue of the Door.

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In his book A Third Testament, the late British curmudgeon and one-time Door interviewee Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, and Dostoevsky as “God’s spies”--men “in search of God” whose “special role” it was “to relate their time to eternity.” While they were, he wrote, “quintessentially men of their time” (men who, like actual spies, merged “into the social and political scene … echoing the current consensus”), they nevertheless provided a “bridge … between the darkness of the will and the light of the imagination … and a prophetic voice calling on us to cross it.”

Now, Augustine, Blake, Pascal, et. al may have been God’s spies at one time, but mention their names to a Baby Boomer and watch his jaw go slack. It’s clear that God needs new spies, and at the risk of blowing their covers, I propose, from the field of rock ’n’ roll (common ground between the literate and the il-) the following canon: T Bone Burnett, Bob Dylan, Al Green, Little Richard, the Mercy Seat, Van Morrison, Maria Muldaur, and Sam Phillips. Consider the evidence …

T Bone Burnett: Truth Decay (Takoma ’80). Another Door interviewee, Burnett has seen it all, done most of it, and written about it with the goofy abandon you’d expect from a guy christened after a steak. By the time he made this record, he’d already made three country-rock, gospel-inflected LPs with his fellow crazies Steven Soles and David Mansfield as the Alpha Band, toured with Dylan, and returned to the church of his youth. Truth Decay bridged the carnal-spiritual divide by marrying Tom Waits-ian piss-factory narratives to Sun Studio rockabilly and leavening its preacher talk with seaminess and wisecracks. It’s true that later albums found naked women occupying more and more of his attention, but better babes than an obsession with the Rapture or some other Evangelical black hole.

Bob Dylan: Shot of Love (Columbia ’81). Born-agains know all about Slow Train Coming and Saved, but this album has always smelled of bad faith. The problem was the middle of side one, where the world’s most famous “completed Jew” followed the right-on “Property of Jesus” with a hymn to Lenny Bruce. Born-agains didn’t know who Lenny Bruce was, so they went out and bought How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and maybe Albert Goldman’s exhaustive bio. When they found out that Bruce had been an unregenerate drug addict, a sex fiend, and a foul-mouthed comic whose jokes didn’t strike them as all that funny, they were sure Bob had lost his Christian marbles. In a sense they were right. But in another sense he was reconnecting with a world in which the unregenerate call the shots. Further proof of Shot of Love’s greatness: Rolling Stone hated it.

Al Green: Live in Tokyo (Motown’81). For the complete scoop on Green, one of the greatest soul men ever, rent The Gospel According to Al Green from your local video store. Meanwhile, this recording, made in ’78 but unreleased for three years, captures plenty of Green’s legendary transition from sexual healer to Pentecostal pulpiteer. There are strong versions of “Belle” (“It’s you I want, but it’s Him [sic] that I need”), “Love and Happiness” (in which Jesus gets a name check before the fur starts to fly), and “You Ought to Be with Me,” a come-on to a woman that on this night metamorphosed into an ecstatic sermon replete with KJV quotations. Don’t know whether the cultural Buddhists in attendance got the gist, but they cheered anyway. Question for the ages: Were they moved by the Spirit or by a premonition that in fifteen years they’d own our corporate butts?

Little Richard: Lifetime Friend (Warner Bros. ’86). Talk about a man ahead of his time. According to his own bad self, Little Richard Penniman has spent much of his life overdrugged and oversexed every which way. But, according to his good self, he loves the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. On this all-but-ignored major-label “comeback,” his bad self kept the music rockin’ while his good self kept the lyrics biblical. Every song bespoke a faith at least as big as Sandi Patti (er, Sandi Patti’s), yet church folk were quicker to buy the Police instead. Maybe they were put off by Richard’s effeminate leer as captured in the cover photo or by that trace of eyeliner. (Goop it on like Tammy Faye and you’re O.K.) Or maybe they didn’t think that a man with whom they wouldn’t trust their sons could be trusted with God’s one and only.

The Mercy Seat: The Mercy Seat (Slash ’87). Fronted by Gordon Gano, the leader of the acoustic sleaze-punk trio the Violent Femmes, this oddball quartet’s gimmick was to sing gospel, traditional and new, to acoustic sleaze-punk rave-ups. Actually, that was just gimmick number one. Another was to have guitarist Gano, drummer Fernando Menendez, and bassist Patrice Moran dress in matching tuxes. Gimmick number three was to have the lead singer, a statuesque black bombshell named Zena Von Heppinstall, wear dresses so tight and short that you couldn’t help wondering what Gano really meant by “mercy seat.” But it was the husky spunk of her singing as much as her great legs that sparked the concept. Best line ever about being ready for Judgment Day: “I don’t wanna be caught doin’ my nails when the world comes tumbling’ down.”

Van Morrison: Common One (Warner Bros. ’80). This album is regarded by most as the Morrison not to own because it’s weird and amorphous. Besides, he’s sung more snappily about Jesus on Into the Music, Avalon Sunset, and Enlightenment. Yes, but remember this about God’s spies: They’re often up to more than they seem. Morrison has always been weird, from his go-to-hell attitude toward fans to his freakish overnight corpulence. As for amorphousness--well, when one sets out to convey the instant of conversion in a fifteen-minute song with few words and no melody (“When Heart Is Open”), he will sound somewhat “out there.” Out there for Van means growling and wheezing and howling and otherwise almost speaking in tongues. Or maybe he just had to sneeze really bad and didn’t want to funk up the mic. Stuff costs money, you know.

Maria Muldaur: Live in London (Making Waves/Stony Plain ’85). Homiletic excerpt from the final three minutes of the last song: “Y’know, people, something might seem so very tempting to you, something might seem so very attractive to you, something might seem so very irresistible to you, ’til you feel like you just can’t rest, ’til you go out there, and you try that thing, or you buy that thing, or you, I don’t know, maybe you smoke that thing, or, mmmmm, you might drink that thing, or maybe you think it’s cool to go out and snort that thing. Whoa! You might even shoot that thing in you arm. I know temptation comes in a lot of different sizes and shapes. Yes it does. And, y’know, you might not even have to wait ’til the hereafter to pay the price--you might start payin’ the price as soon as tomorrow morning’! So before you do it, you better think about it twice! Before you do it, people, you oughta think about the price! What about the price? What about the price? Whoa, people, I want you to steal away to the quiet of your room sometime and have yourself a little private talk with God and just ask him from the bottom of your heart, ‘Oh, Lord, what is it you want me to be doin’ down here?’”

Sam Phillips: The Indescribable Wow (Virgin’88). As Leslie Phillips she was a bright spot on CCM playlists. As Sam Phillips she recorded this gorgeous folk-pop hookfest with some knob-twiddling and band-member selection from her producer (and future husband) T Bone Burnett. No, Leslie didn’t get a sex change. She just thought that “going secular” merited a new appellation, and in her sweet innocence she didn’t even know that rock ’n’ roll already had a Sam Phillips. Like her namesake (who produced Jerry Lee Lewis, after all), she knew that sexy music, when it was good, could feel like a struggle between flesh and spirit. Unlike her namesake, she was something to look at (and probably still is).

Maria Muldaur & Bob Dylan: The Shot of Love Incident

In "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," a chapter in his 1989 book Dylan: A Biography, Bob Spitz relates a series of interesting Bob Dylan anecdotes from the early '80s (i.e., the "Gospel Years") as told to him by Maria Muldaur. In one of them, Muldaur describes being blown off by Dylan after she'd dropped in--and been made to cool her heels for a long time in a waiting room--at the Shot of Love recording sessions. (Besides being an old and close friend of Dylan's--even accompanying him a few months earlier on his last visit to Mike Bloomfield--she had been invited to the sessions by the background singers.) "Finally, I saw his face at the little window," Spitz quotes Muldaur as saying. "He looked right at me and right through me [italics in the original]. Then he whispered something to a friend and ignored me, which was a message, I guess, so I took off."

Spitz then writes:

"Put yourself in the place of someone who had known Bob all those years and tried to keep up with the conflicting messages he sent out.... [Y]ou attempt to ride the highs and lows as long as it is humanly possible. But after awhile, you just give up trying.

"Maria went back to San Francisco feeling like [sic] she'd lost one of her best friends, just as others before her ... had felt when they had been dismissed from the entourage with similar blunt shrift."

I asked Muldaur about this incident when I interviewed her in January 1993 for the Door. The main subject of the interview was her Christian faith, so I excluded her Dylan comments from the article. But they were very interesting. As you will see from the unedited transcription below, what she made of that 1981 episode and what Spitz made of it were entirely different.

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MULDAUR: What happened was that I went to the rehearsal studio because by now I had made friends with all the girl singers, right? And he [Dylan] had always welcomed me there before. I had gone there before. And so they said, "Oh, come on. We're rehearsing." And I said, "Are you sure it's O.K.?" "Oh, sure! Bob always wants to see you."

So I went, and it was just this funky warehouse in Venice, California. And I went upstairs, and I was sitting on the couch. I mean, I wasn't about to go bursting in. It was this big, kind of loft room. Everyone was set up, and the girls were at one end. And he kept peering at me. But, you know, he's very myopic. He didn't have his glasses. But I didn't know it at the time, and he was, like, squinting, almost glaring at me, right? And I started to think, "Oh, God! I probably shouldn't have been here."

And I knew everybody in the band--[Jim] Keltner and everyone. But I just thought, "Well, I'll just sit here. I'll leave during the break and just say goodbye to the girls and tell them to meet me later or something." Because I'd known him for so many years. I'd known him to show up at my house unannounced then make everybody uptight as if they'd shown up long after he had. You know what I mean? So it wasn't throwing me, personally, for a loop. I just thought, "Well, he just wants to have his privacy. This is obviously not the right time to be here."

Well, what happened was--and I don't know if this is in the book--he [Spitz] sent me the book, but I have never had the time to read it--all of a sudden, there was this commotion! And the music abruptly stopped, and I saw these two roadies whisk this chick with short hair, this chick--and I had been to some of his other concerts, both in the Northwest and down around here--her name is Carmella or something [Carmel Hubbell]. She, like, goes--I'm still good friends with Victor Maimudes, who's been his road manager for thirty years, and the last time I spoke to him [Maimudes], he said this woman's still following him [Dylan]. She must have untold money and just finds out where he's playing. She does things like goes to his hotel, says she's Sara Dylan, and sometimes gets the key to his room. He'll walk in from the bus, and there she is! I mean, this chick is like--she follows him everywhere.

Well, that day she showed up while I was sitting there at the rehearsal. I guess she had come around a couple of times before, and he had been really bugged. And what I didn't know and found out later from Keltner is that--like, Keltner had brought his son--you know, people were just bringing too many people by the rehearsal. And it was making Dylan edgy and nervous. And, unbeknownst to the girls, he had just said, "O.K., if you don't check with me, I don't want you just bringing anybody by the rehearsal." And the roadie told me later that he [Dylan] couldn't see who I was from where he was sitting.

The other weird thing that happened--meanwhile, my being there was totally minor because he would've come over during a break and seen it was me and it would've been fine. But what happened was this chick showed up, and they jumped up and stopped the rehearsal, and the girls were freaked because--don't forget, that wasn't long after John Lennon was assassinated. So they whisked her away, they called the police--it was the first spring day, and the roadies had absentmindedly left the--even though they were watching for her at the normal door, she had come up a ramp into the loading area. They'd left the loading door open.

So that was the end of that. That's when Jim Keltner came down and said, "Oh, God, this shit's been going on, and this girl's been hanging around and driving us crazy, and we can't just call the police because she hasn't really done anything. But now that she's trespassed--" You know.

So they were in the throes of all that, and the girls had just picked a bad day to invite me.

Maria Muldaur: Gospel Nights--T Bone Burnett's Liner Notes

Maria Muldaur's excellent live album Gospel Nights (Takoma 1980) has been out of print for years. (It was briefly available on CD piggybacked with John Fahey's Yes, Jesus Loves Me! minus one track to make them both fit.) The band included the Alpha Banders David Mansfield and Steven Soles and the now-departed Steve Bruton, and there were special-guest cameos by the Chambers Brothers and the Burns Sisters. The liner notes, written by T Bone Burnett (who would go on to produce Muldaur's 1982 album There Is a Love, as well as albums by Los Lobos, Elvis Costello, and Sam Phillips, and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack), were nothing to sneeze at either (unless, of course, one was allergic to beautiful writing). Neither were they reprinted on the aforementioned Fahey twofer CD. I hereby reproduce them in their entirety and in their original format, with the following exception: I have been informed by someone who should know that the "van Gogh" in line six was supposed to be "van Goyen." So "van Goyen" it now is....


I was asked, "Do you think Christianity is a fad?"
"A fad," I wondered.
And I thought about C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton
And T.S. Eliot.
And I thought about Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
And Rubens and van Goyen and Rembrandt.
And Handel and Hayden and Bach.
And Luther.
And Pascal.
And Dante Alighieri.
And a Kempis and Augustine.
And Saul of Tarsus and Simon Peter.
"It's been going on for years," I thought,
"Back to about one."

This is a record of two nights of music
Recorded live in the back room of
A guitar shop, McCabe's, from
Next door in Takoma's studio.
It wasn't planned. It grew there.
The Chamber Brothers were called
And the Burns Sisters
And Steven Soles and Stephen Bruton and David Mansfield.
And Danny Timms and Ron Tutt and Leon Gaer.
They got together and remembered songs
And made music
Drawn from a rich heritage.
One of Celebration.
Of Joy.
Of Freedom and Release.
And Generosity.

This is a singer in touch with the source
Of Rhythm & Blues and Country & Western and Rock & Roll.
Of Otis Redding and Hank Williams and Elvis Presley.
Al Green and the Stanley Brothers

Sam Cooke and the Carter Family
Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones
Doc Watson and the Watson Family
Ray Charles and Curtis Mayfield.
Mavis Staples
Reverend Gary Davis
And Dorothy Love Coates.

Not that she thinks she is any of those people.
She looks in their direction
And a breath of fresh air
Blows in through a window
Painted open.

In a world in which people put their lives in boxes
--Spirit and Beast and Leisure and Work and Faith and Reason--
That never touch,
This is music that is connected.

In a world whose memory
Goes back to about 1963,
A world cut off from the past,
It is important to discover our history.
Because we are all leaves on a tree.

T Bone Burnett