Re: Larry Norman Quiet Night Rar
Cre Wallace
The Tent Hall, Steel Street, Glasgow, 1972. A cavernous space, smelling of mothballs, polish, sweat and antiseptic, bone-meltingly heated against the vicious winter night outside. It is packed, rammed with mostly young Scottish evangelicals from across the denominations curious to see the latest fundamentalist phenomenon from the USA.
Americans. From the 19th Century onwards, they came here to Scotland looking for souls. Seduced them. Stole them away. They came, drawling, gleaming of tooth. Stars for Jesus, they brought a new vision of a groovy God. Divine new clothes, new songs, new hairstyles, new life. New Life.
Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-99) was a Massachusetts farm boy and former shoe salesman who became the pre-eminent preacher of his generation. He had a musical sidekick, Ira David Sankey, singer, hymn writer, and song collector; the two of them compiled a hymn book called Sacred Songs and Solos which is still in use today, which became ubiquitous in the evangelical world, and whose tunes and lyrics influenced huge swathes of popular music, notably reggae. Sacred Songs and Sea Shanties, we used to affectionately sneer.
As a result, a group of local businessmen set up the Glasgow United Evangelistic Association, with its primary aim not so much winning more souls as feeding the poor and hungry. Regular breakfasts for the homeless began, and it was in this social action that the initial canvas kirk on Glasgow Green began, finally being transformed into stones and mortar on Steel Street. The GUEA, funded by Rutherglen chemical billionaire James White, ended up presiding over the gigantic Christian Institute in Bothwell Street, a gothic monstrosity which spawned the YMCA and the Bible Training Institute, and took up an entire city block.
The development of premillennialism in the context of post-civil War USA is socially understandable, if pernicious. Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to George W Bush, said it both justifies and accepts a pessimistic view of world events. Writing in The Atlantic, he said this:
Larry Norman, who died in 2008, became a worldwide star, and he was, if not better than all the other Christian guitar pluckers and bellowers, at least genuinely American. He was strange, he was from Over There. He possessed a kind of implacable charisma, and he was a combination in vocal terms of Neil Young and Bob Dylan. In retrospect, his album Only Visiting this Planet was the first properly recorded (at Abbey Road in London) Christian rock record, and stands up now as derivative, banal, occasionally ridiculous but still confident, forceful, and sonically convincing. He meant it, man.
In the end, Larry Norman was all too human, with sad stories of an unacknowledged child in Australia. Yet the last gigs continued, the songs remained the same. He kept singing them. He was big in Belfast.
Shall we scare the living daylights out of them with fearsome stories of the tribulations and the rapture, and being left behind? Especially when quoting First Corinthians chapter 15, verse 52, in the King James Version:
The inspiration for writing it during the Trump presidency was the story - since questioned - that Vice-President Mike Pence had been \u2018converted\u2019 after attending a Larry Norman gig. Now it seems that it was at a festival Norman may have headlined. That led me to have a think about how sci-fi premillennialist evangelical theology underpinned and appeared to underpin some policy making at the Trump White House.
A figure shambles on stage, very late; we\u2019ve been sitting for hours, singing Gospel choruses. God\u2019s Not Dead, He Is Alive. Feel Him All Over Me. We\u2019re too innocent to hear the potential ribaldry. Ungodly weather has delayed the tour bus. There\u2019s a guitar case, battered, and a pantomime over opening it, extracting a cheap guitar, tuning it. Its player looks like a space alien. Long, absurdly long, girlishly long white-blond hair; he\u2019s rail-thin, plastered into tight jeans, a mad jacket with embroidered stars. We gaze in astonishment, we youth fellowship and Bible class members, we singers of Kumbayah and Oh Sinner Man.
Larry Norman, the first Christian rock star, originator of the \u2018one way to heaven\u2019 sign (first finger, please, not middle) pioneer of the Jesus Movement, is among us. He has been thrust on stage while the support band Parchment prepare. The only amplification is the Tent Hall\u2019s venerable system, and as we watch, paralysed with holy mirth, Larry acts out Chaplinesque puzzlement as to how it can be used. Eventually he clambers onto the oak pulpit, teetering dangerously on the lectern in order to get his guitar close to the microphone. An ear-shattering, distorted chord. Then a voice whose ragged, torn glory comes just the right side of squeaky:
A Brylcreemed, suited-and-tied pastor lumbers on stage and in a quiet fury demands that the singer gets down off the lectern, apparently a precious gift from a now deceased Tent Hall supporter. For the first time in the building\u2019s 100-year history, possibly, audience boos echo to a crescendo of fury.
It was the moment everything changed for me. A year later, I would stagger out of the newly-named Apollo Centre, formerly Green\u2019s Playhouse, deaf and delirious from my first \u2018proper\u2019 rock concert. The Rolling Stones, Goats Head Soup, the Starfucker tour. For the next decade I\u2019d try to reconcile born-again Christianity and rock\u2019n\u2019roll, until rock\u2019n\u2019roll decidedly won the battle. But it was all Larry Norman\u2019s fault, really. America\u2019s fault.
Six years later, in the spring of 1978, Norman was headlining the Ichthus festival in Lexington, Kentucky. It\u2019s said that one young man in the audience that day was deeply moved by the experience, and went from enthusiastically applauding the music to falling on his knees, and praying to \u2018receive Jesus Christ into his heart\u2019.
That\u2019s just how it worked, how it has always worked in the world of conversionism. Writing online, one former Tent Hall adherent remembers the youthful Billy Graham and his Crusade musical director Cliff Barrows, stepping out of a taxi in the sooty, tenemental gloom of Steel Street in 1955, and literally \u201Cseeming to glow\u201D due to \u201Cthe bright and colourful suits\u201D the pair were wearing. Cliff Barrows was clutching a trombone, that instrument of sin.
But the late Dr Graham\u2019s crusade - in the same year Bill Haley hit the charts and rock\u2019n\u2019roll really began - was not the first time God had sent Americans to transform Scotland\u2019s religious experience; nor was it to be the last. And the cavernous Tent Hall -today converted into flats, its surroundings sandblasted into something less dark and satanic - was crucial to all of it.
The Tent Hall\u2019s roots were, unsurprisingly in a tent, a canvas church and homeless shelter on nearby Glasgow Green, erected as a direct result of the 19th Century evangelical crusade which dwarfed Graham\u2019s subsequent visit in both immediate impact and long term effect. Glasgow and Scotland in turn influenced enormously the man whose preaching arguably resonates today into the theology and right-wing politics of the Trumpian forces now running rampant in the USA.
The pair arrived in Glasgow in 1874, and between February and April - without amplification - held huge rallies in the City Hall, on Glasgow Green and in the Kibble Palace in the Botanic Gardens. Over 3000 people \u2018came to Christ\u2019.
James White\u2019s businesses polluted large tracts of land east of Glasgow, and he built a vast mansion high above Dumbarton called Overtoun House. In the early 1980s, I lived there as part of a Christian commune.
Moody and Sankey returned to Scotland several times - in 1883 and 1892. Their influence was colossal, and not just in Glasgow. In Edinburgh, their crusades led to the building of a city centre home for the Carubbers Close Mission (now the Carubbers Christian Centre). Rural Scotland\u2019s churches were also influenced, and Moody himself was deeply affected by his stays during his visits to Scotland with Andrew Bonar, Free Church minister at Finnieston. In the book Mr Moody and the Evangelical Revival, Timothy George says that \u201CBonar\u2019s union of scholarship zeal and devotion made a profound impact on Moody - and so did his success in Glasgow, his first major urban crusade. It showed that the evangelist was capable of stirring a large population. His first breakthrough to fame came not in the United States but in Glasgow. Moody was moulded by Britain as well as by America.\u201D
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