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).

"Plain Ol' Joe," or the Greatest Contemporary-Christian-Music Song of All Time

(As published in The Door--in 1995, I think)

You can count on one hand the number of great contemporary-Christian-music songs. You can do this even if, like Phil Keaggy, you don't have all your fingers.

No one really denies this, least of all the contemporary-Christian musicians themselves. As any issue of CCM magazine will show, these artisans pride themselves on their humility. "I just have to keep remembering that it's the Lord and not me who's making these anointed albums that are blessing so many people," they say. "When I look down from the stage at all those youth groupies wearing T-shirts with my smiling face on them that they just paid thirty dollars for and see them cheering me on, I think, 'Without the Lord I wouldn't be half as talented or blessed with good hair days as I am.'"

In other words, by the admission of the musicians themselves, the music alone doesn't amount to much more than the Jerusalem dirt that Jesus spat on to make the mud that healed the blind man. Why, the church might just as well listen to Ted Nugent should Jesus ever quit spitting on Sandi Patty. CCM's a lot like punk that way.

Even some of the people who buy the music would secretly like to gob on it. Many of them wouldn't listen to it at all if not for the fact that they belong to youth fellowships or Baptist Student Unions that require initiates to sign a statement of faith stating that they've participated at least once in the ritual destruction--by fire if possible, by sledgehammer if necessary--of "secular" CDs and tapes.

The behavior of the music's older adherents also puts the lie to its staying power, for unlike fans of the Rolling Stones, Dylan, or the Bay City Rollers, veteran CCM listeners seldom, if ever, return to "classic" albums for rejuvenation. If for some reason they ever should happen to hear Leon Patillo's I Used to Be in Santana or Scott Wesley Brown's When I Sit Around the House again, they'll almost certainly react with a hearty "I can't believe I used to listen to this crap!"

In fact, the whole process of CCM assimilation bears a striking resemblance to the process by which the citizens of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 convince themselves that the oily bilge they call gin really tastes good going down. It goes like this: Little Joe Biblethump, having heard one if not one dozen too many sermons about how the music of Green Day and Pearl Jam inoculates him against God's love, decides he needs to listen to something else when he's studying for history class. First, he tries nothing, but the sound of facts pouring unfiltered into his head proves too harsh. So he tries the next best thing--music that sounds like Green Day and Pearl Jam, but with words that, played forward, extol Bible-reading, church-going, and prayer; backward they extol subscribing to Campus Life.

Sure it's lame, but it's either that or backslide. So the kid pretends to like it, and before long he finds his small talk peppered with arguments about why Guardian outrocks White Cross, and his private thoughts devoted to wondering if he was always this way.

And obviously "the world" doesn't think much of CCM. If they did, they'd buy it. As the situation stands now, record stores devote as much floor space to CCM as they do to Albanian Blues, Lesbian Folk, and Menudo simply because CCM cash barely registers.

But to avoid misunderstandings, let's get a few things straight: First, I know that some CCM musicians read The Door--simmer down! It's the ones who don't read The Door that I'm talking about. Second, I'd gladly agree to get paid for writing stuff like "Yet Thorn-N-the-Side consider their music a ministry first and entertainment second" myself if CCM magazine would have me. Third, people shouldn't confuse CCM with "black gospel," a genre that, at its best, sinks some serious fang into Satan's butt while shaking its own big bad one.

And fourth, even someone who pitches for the Seattle Mariners finds the strike zone once in a while.

Which leads us to the CCM pioneer Chuck Girard and his song "Plain Ol' Joe," which he recorded for his 1977 album Written on the Wind (Good News 8106). A Carl Wilson look-alike and founding member of Love Song--the best-known combo in the post-Woodstock days when people called CCM "Jesus Rock"--Girard honed his craft over a series of well-produced solo albums that for some reason always featured members of the big-time art-rock band Ambrosia. At his best, he demonstrated a knack for hanging Beach-Boy-styled vocals on hooks that almost certainly would've imbedded themselves into the Billboard Top 100 if they hadn't supported words like "Who ever thought I'd be a rock 'n' roll preacher / Singing my song so you can hear the good news?"

Search as you may, you won't find Girard's lyrics scrawled on bathroom walls (even at Christian colleges), chiseled onto tombstones, or swelling the pages of The Norton Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry. This omission has less to do with society's overriding secular bias or the quality of the lyrics than it does with the fact that the words tended toward the predictable. They told you Jesus was to blame for making Chuck happy ("You Ask Me Why"), thanked Jesus for making Chuck happy ("Evermore," "When I Was Ready to Listen," "So Thankful," "Thank You, Lord"), and told you to let Jesus make you happy, too ("Lay Your Burden Down," "Slow Down," "Callin' You," "Return").

But he also wrote another type of song: the narrative. And in these he flirted beguilingly with unconventionality. In "Tinagera" (Chuck Girard, 1975, Good News 8102), for instance, he sketches a portrait of a teenage prostitute who goes by the name of her hometown, the Tinagera of the title. True, Girard can't resist evangelizing her ("There's a Way, my Tinagera!"), but considering the commotion Brooke Shields would cause three years later with her role as a Tinagera herself in Pretty Baby, the song takes risks.

Then there's "Old Dan Cotton" (Glow in the Dark, 1976, Good News 8103). A mysterious combination of Grizzly Adams, Grandpa Walton, and Jed Clampett, Dan is so old he's fought Indians and outlived a wife or two, and whenever the ol' ticker commences to actin' up, he gets house calls from Doc Jones. Anyway, one day he wanders off into the woods, finds God (Girard doesn't say how, exactly), and goes to heaven when the big one finally comes.

But "Plain Ol' Joe" is the best of all. It starts with Girard softly playing triplets on a piano with the pedal all the way down, but it soon turns out that more than the pedal's depressed. A few measures in, in an eerily somber voice, Girard begins singing this tale of woe:

He lived in Cincinnati, was born in '29.
His life was uneventful, not a bit like yours or mine.
His mother raised him proper, and his dad kept him in line.
He lived in Cincinnati. He was born in '29.

Then Girard gives us a "Hmm-mmmm" from which the bottom drops out, and all of a sudden only the assurance that he's going to get Plain Ol' Joe as saved as Old Dan Cotton makes the melodramatic melancholy of the descending chord pattern and ghostly production bearable.

He went upstate to college. He got no honors there.
He had a lot to offer, but no one seemed to care.
He'd visit home on weekends, and his folks would see him then.
They never asked him what he'd done or where he might've been.

Then another "Hmm-mmmm," but --holy Harry Chapin!--almost unnoticeable amid the pity party comes that "see" at the end of line three, a verb that in this context connotes something truly awful. "Sized up," "saw through," and "looked down upon" only begin to get at it.

He met a girl along the way. He thought it was romance.
He started to come out a bit. She'd given him a chance.
For a week he couldn't find her. Then he finally got the news:
She married an old boyfriend, and she moved to Syracuse.

"Hmm-mmmm." Syracuse! I mean, could Schenectady have been any sadder? With one well-chosen city of 200,000, Girard captures the same ineffable loss as Dylan does in "Tangled Up in Blue" with "Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives. / Don't know how it all got started. / I don't know what they're doin' with their lives."

He holds the hurt in nicely, so you'd never ever tell.
Outside he looks like heaven, but inside he feels like hell.
He's cryin' out for something that he'll never ever know.
And everyone ignores him 'cause he's just a plain ol' Joe.

No "Hmm-mmmm" this time, rather those Beach-Boy-styled vocals wailing over and over, "Oh, oh, plain ol' Joe!" And for what serious Christian does the haiku-like "Outside he looks like heaven, but inside he feels like hell" not resonate?

At this point, the tug of war that Girard has established between the song's tear-jerking scenario and the optimistic swelling of its singing and production threatens to tear the song in half. But the struggle survives yet another upcrank in intensity as it reaches the bridge:

Everyone around him seemed so self-assured.
Everybody seemed to have it made.
Everybody acted like you never lived.
You're just a guy who never made the grade.
You're just a guy who never had a real friend.
You never seemed to ever really bloom.
But you finally made the papers just the other day
when they found your body in your lonely living room.

That's right, Joe dies. And not only does he die, but he dies alone. And not only alone but unsaved. And not only unsaved but unevangelized. And not only unevangelized but invisible, making him the Bartleby the Scrivener--and in some ways the Camus-esque Stranger--of CCM, a genre that by definition (and by abundant evidence) refuses to acknowledge such people exist. And dig the oxymoronic use of "living room."

But, you say, surely Girard goes on to resolve his tragedy the way Petra would two years later in "For Annie," the titular heroine of which kills herself only to provide Petra's Bob Hartman with an excuse to urge us to evangelize.

No, none of that for Chuck. All he gives us is a reprise of the first verse with the last line changed to "He lived in Cincinnati, and he died in '69." End of song. No heaven, no hell, no purgatory--zilch.
True, the next song on the album, "Harvest Time," resumes evangelical propriety by decrying the dearth of witnesses to the Gospel, and the remaining songs--"Fool for Jesus," "Hear the Angels Sing," "Peace in the Valley," "The Warrior"--betoken more of the same. But in light of the long look into the abyss that Girard braved in "Plain Ol' Joe," what else would you expect? You think any self-respecting CCM pioneer would put two songs about existential despair on one album?

No, and as things turned out, Girard wouldn't put two songs about existential despair into one career, either. Two albums and a best-of later, he disappeared from the scene, resurfacing only within the past year on the Love Song reunion album (Word/Maranatha) that a lot of people seem not to have noticed.

The only call I felt like putting through to Word's PR department was answered first by a woman who said Maranatha Records had no publicists, and second by a woman who, after apologizing for only working there three months, took my info and said she'd get back to me after she told her supervisor to tell Girard's people what I wanted.

Girard's people? A guy makes one, maybe two, albums in ten years that nobody knows about or buys, and he has people? Needless to say, a few months after the call, I'm still on hold. Funny, you'd think saying I was with The Door would've gotten someone jumping. I mean, do we or do we not have six-thousand subscribers?

But I have an idea about how to flush Girard out. Since Written on the Wind has been out of print for years, and since "Plain Ol' Joe" isn't on Girard's aforementioned best-of, I don't see why The Door can't enter into a for-a-limited-time-only agreement with him the way we did with the legendary Wauhobs ten years ago.

Maybe the smell of the millions to be made on this project will convince the man behind the greatest contemporary-Christian song of all time to finally tell us what inspired him to such heights in that long-ago summer of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash.

After all, a guy's gotta pay his people.

EWE: R.I.P.

(This piece was accepted for publication by the Wittenburg Door in the fall of 2007; the issue in which it would've appeared, however, has never seen the light of day due to the magazine's financial difficulties.)

Kenneth Hoagland--a.k.a. "Jacob," the founder and public face of Evangelical Wrestling Entertainment--is bloody (figuratively, for once) but unbowed as he faces the reporters assembled to discover why he has called this press conference. "EWE has run the course and fought the good fight," Hoagland eventually says. "But now, to quote someone with whom I think we’re all familiar, ‘It is finished.’"

At this moment, clean shaven and dressed to the nines, Hoagland is barely recognizable as his pro-wrestling alter ego: a bearded, loin-cloth-girded "Israelite" whose EWE "stairway to heaven" match with the mysterious, masked "Angel" was supposed to be the climax of the much anticipated tithe-per-view extravaganza Armageddon. Instead, the event has been cancelled--and with it, apparently, the entire EWE operation.

"I mean, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, right?" Hoagland continues, his voice trembling. "So, like, blessed be the name of the Lord. Any questions?" But before any of the reporters can say a word, Hoagland bursts into tears. When he finally collects himself, he apologizes, pulls a handkerchief bearing the EWE logo from his blazer pocket, wipes his eyes and blows his nose. Loath to put the besotted accessory back into his pocket, he holds it for the remainder of the press conference, waving it with absentminded nervousness like a flag of surrender.

Hoagland’s fortunes weren’t always this bleak. Indeed, his many nay-sayers and detractors notwithstanding, it looked for a time as if his unlikely enterprise would succeed. Originally relegated to TBN’s late-night ghetto, it quickly earned a semi-weekly primetime slot with an audacious (some would say ingenious) combination of evangelism, sound doctrine, and violence--violence that even at its most obviously choreographed was seldom for the squeamish.

There was, for instance, the notorious "head on a platter match," during which "Herod" defeated "John the Baptist" by hitting him over the head with the platter when the referee was distracted by the dancing of Herod’s sexy manager/valet "Salome." Although the post-match beheading was halted when a dressing-room’s worth of "baby faces" (i.e., "good guys") led by Eutychus ("Master of the Sleeper!") rushed into the ring and literally saved John’s neck, many seated at ringside swear that some genuine neck-slicing had begun.

Similar controversy arose when, after defeating a series of Israelites in both single and handicapped competition, "Andre the Goliath" faced the "Boy Named David" in a no-holds-barred match (a stipulation that was necessary to allow for David’s climactic use of a slingshot and stones). Although that post-victory beheading was not televised, David often carried a frighteningly realistic Goliath head by its hair into the ring during subsequent matches, up to and including his much-hyped showdown with the "Rebel Absalom."

But violence wasn’t EWE’s only thorn in the flesh. There was also the matter of insensitivity, with feuds between the midgets "Zaccheus" and "Bildad the Shuhite" and the immodestly dressed lady wresters "Rahab" and the "Whore of Babylon" coming under particular fire. Others questioned the quoting of "imprecatory Psalms" by angry wrestlers in the broadcasts’ frighteningly realistic interview segments. And, while EWE touted itself as "non-denominational," many perceived a distinct anti-Catholic bias in the "heel" (i.e., "bad guy") known as "Torquemada the Inquisitor."

With such high and volatile "negatives," it’s somewhat surprising that EWE lasted as long as it did. One insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believes that the organization "would’ve folded even sooner if not for the influence of the many former members of the Power Team [an internationally well-known troupe of itinerant Christian weightlifters] for whom EWE served as a de facto halfway house between Christian showmanship and getting a real job."

Perhaps the best known of the former Power Team members was "Samson," a muscular behemoth who entered the ring carrying the jawbone of an ass, accompanied by "Delilah." Prominently featured in a regular succession of "squash" matches against various "Philistines," his winning streak was broken when Delilah betrayed him with a post-victory kiss that was actually a sign for the many Philistines whom Samson had defeated to ambush him and shave his hair in the middle of the ring. Since then EWE broadcasts had included brief "hair-regrowth" updates, leading many to expect a revenge match that would literally bring the house down.

Despite its controversial reputation, however, EWE remained untainted by at least two common ministry-identified transgressions: financial mismanagement and altar-boy molestation. "Keeping honest ledgers was the whole point of having [female tag-team champions] the Mighty Widows chase [male tag-team contenders] the Money Changers from the ring," says EWE spokeswoman Stephanie Glass, "right when they were on the verge of beating [male tag-team champions] Paul and Silas." Similarly, Glass says, taking a public stand against sexual perversion was the "point" behind the decision to turn the Sodom and Gomorrah battle royal into a "lights out" match by ending it with (simulated) hell fire and brimstone.

But several problems proved perpetually challenging and eventually impossible to solve. First, there were the storylines. Because most of them were based on well-known Bible stories, there was seldom if ever any doubt as to their ultimate outcome. No matter how good a fight "Abel" put up against "Cain," for instance, everyone knew that Cain would win. (Admittedly, casting the former WWF superstar Jake "The Snake" Roberts as a guest referee was a clever touch.) And when EWE tried to introduce lesser-known Bible characters, there was usually confusion. (Many viewers, apparently unfamiliar with Judges 3, mistook the match between "Ehud" and the 500-pound "Eglon" to be a match between Jonah and the whale.)

Second, there was sometimes doctrine-based confusion over how to determine winners. One traditional method, that of a wrestler’s using an excruciating hold to make his opponent "submit," was problematic because "submission" is widely understood by Christians to be a prerequisite for victory. As for the venerable "pin fall," would pride have to go before it and thus prohibit baby faces from ever pinning their adversaries? Then, having won, would a victor have to be immediately declared a loser because "the first shall be last"?

"It may sound overly Calvinistic," admits Hoagland at the end of his press conference, "but maybe we were doomed from the start.

"I mean," he concludes, "the ultimate heel is Satan, and while we had many wrestlers who could play him, we never found anyone who could play God."