Next month Cherry Red Records releases
‘All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967-1974’, a 3CD Box set.
Introducing the collection, they write:
‘During the late 60s and early 70s, the restless, questing nature of the Woodstock generation and the horrors of Vietnam saw the pop scene add a new spiritual element. Many young people embraced Christianity, viewing Jesus as the prototypal long-haired hippie, persecuted by the establishment of the day while dispensing peace and love to a troubled, cynical world.
The American branch of the Jesus movement effectively started in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there was also a parallel development in the UK that slowly evolved from beat groups performing in church coffee-bars. By 1971, leading British Xian rock band Out Of Darkness were appearing at notorious countercultural gathering Phun City, while Glastonbury introduced a “Jesus tent” that offered Christian revellers mass and holy communion twice a day.
‘All God’s Children’ assembles the best of the British Christian acts, including such respected names as Out Of Darkness (and their earlier incarnation, garage R&B act The Pilgrims), Parchment, Whispers Of Truth and Judy MacKenzie. It also features the secular alongside the sacred, including the likes of Strawbs, Moody Blues, Amazing Blondel, John Kongos and Medicine Head – bands who, though theologically shyer than their more overtly Christian contemporaries, all wrote songs with a strong spiritual message.
A 3CD, four-hour set, ‘All God’s Children’ – which takes its name from the gorgeous Kinks’ ballad which is included in the set – is a fascinating look at an under-documented phenomenon and unexpected by-product of the hippie era.’
In an excellent
review for
International Times,
Rupert Loydell explains why, in the main, this collection is not an anthology of Jesus Rock, but more a compilation of music from the period that includes references to Jesus. Loydell also shares memories from that time and summarises the development of British Jesus Music.
For more of Loydell’s reflections and memories of this period see
‘Looking down the wrong end of a telescope’ where the writer and poet looks back to the collaborations and collisions between church culture and the wider culture in the 1970s and 80s, with a cast including Jesus Rock Music, the Greenbelt festival, Mary Whitehouse and musicians such as Larry Norman and Steve Fairnie of Writz.
‘All God’s Children’ can also usefully be set alongside
‘Lysergic Saviours (A Psychedelic Prophecy! The Holy Grail Of Xian Acid Fuzz 1968–1974)’ and
‘The Rock Revival’, the latter of which documents the early Jesus Movement in the US while the former includes rare tracks from both sides of the Atlantic.
While ‘All God’s Children’ may not be a particularly full collection of British Jesus Music, its focus on secular music that references Jesus demonstrates something of the wider impact that the Jesus Movement made. While there was a particular focus around this period, Jesus has consistently been referenced in Rock and Pop music from early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll onwards as the
‘Rock of Ages: Jesus in Popular Songs’ website demonstrates. This is a constantly-updated, searchable database of 500+ secular songs in which Jesus shows up by rock stars, rappers, singer-songwriters, country stars, and hardcore punks.
The recent film '
Jesus Revolution' has been described as telling ‘the story of a young Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney) being raised by his struggling mother, Charlene (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) in the 1970s. Laurie and a sea of young people descend on sunny Southern California to redefine truth through all means of liberation. Inadvertently, Laurie meets
Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie), a charismatic hippie-street-preacher, and Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer) who have thrown open the doors of Smith's languishing church to a stream of wandering youth. What unfolds becomes the greatest spiritual awakening in American history. Rock and roll, newfound love, and a twist of faith lead to a Jesus Revolution that turns one counterculture movement into a revival that changes the world.’ The film is based on the book '
Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today' by
Greg Laurie and
Ellen Vaughn.
The Jesus Movement birthed two major new groupings of churches/denominations. The first being the Calvary Chapel movement, the story of which is told in ‘The Jesus Revolution’, the second –
The Vineyard Fellowship - emerging from Calvary Chapel at a later point. Lonnie Frisbee was influential in the early stages of both developments. However, the Jesus Movement as a whole did not arise solely from Calvary Chapel, as, for example, the story of Arthur Blessitt’s ministry demonstrates -
https://blessitt.com/new-jesus-movement/.
All these strands of the Jesus Movement used Jesus Music within their churches and ministries.
The LA Times has described how Frisbee and Chuck Smith transformed Calvary Chapel into a haven for touched-by-the-spirit bands such as Love Song, Gentle Faith, Blessed Hope and Children of the Day. Half-a-dozen Calvary Chapel bands united in 1971 to create “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.” Released on Chuck Smith’s new Maranatha! Music label and costing about $4,000 to produce, the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies. A film called
‘The Jesus Music’ tells the story of this strand within Jesus Music and examines how the spirit of the times, a rush of faith-filled creativity and the emergent “Jesus People” movement begat a multimillion-dollar industry fuelled by devotees eager to support their blessed messengers. The documentary includes interviews with Girard and his Love Song bandmate Tommy Coomes; contemporary Christian stars Amy Grant, Kirk Franklin, TobyMac of DC Talk, Lecrae and Michael W. Smith; and volumes of archival footage.
Blessit worked with musicians such as Eddie Smith, Andraé Crouch, Sharon Peck and the Sunshine Sisters, Charles McPheeters, and The Jimmy Owens singers and others as well as preaching at mainstream rock festivals such as like the West Palm Beach International Rock Festival, where his ministry’s band ‘The Eternal Rush’ also played.
Explo '72 was an evangelistic conference sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ which has been called the most visible event of the Jesus movement, and came to be associated with the same, even though its primary attendees were not directly involved in that movement. Billy Graham spoke on six occasions during the event including the final event which was a public, eight-hour-long, Christian music festival on Saturday, June 17, 1972. Dubbed "The Christian Woodstock", the event drew an estimated attendance between 100,000 and 200,000. Newsweek described the crowds as being "militant Christians." Featured artists were Love Song, Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, The Archers, Andrae Crouch and the Disciples, Children of the Day, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson.
The first local Vineyard church began when Kenn Gulliksen brought together two Bible studies, both meeting at the houses of singer/songwriters: Larry Norman and Chuck Girard. This was in West LA in 1974. Later, three members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue – T. Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield - attended the Vineyard Fellowship.
John Milward notes ‘T-Bone [Burnett] was the first one to go through this [born again] experience and Steve [Soles] sort of followed him, and I eventually did too,” said David Mansfield.’
Christianity.com says that ‘Burnett attended the Vineyard church during or just after the Rolling Thunder Revue tour ended in 1976. Around this time, he had a spiritual reawakening some sources reported as his conversion. He described it to Gallagher as more of a reconnecting with God: “when I was 11, my needs were very different from when I was 28 or so. At different times in my life, I met God from a different point of view.”’ The three played together as
The Alpha Band, their second album being 'humbly offered in the light of the triune God'.
In 1978 Bob Dylan followed, ‘taking a three-month, four-day-a-week course at the Vineyard Fellowship.’ The result was his Gospel-influenced albums from ‘Slow Train Coming’ to ‘Infidels’ and a subsequent strengthening of the religious and Biblical imagery and influences which had always been a feature of his work. As a result, the Jesus Movement claimed its highest profile convert while pissing off thousands of his fans who wouldn’t fully appreciate what he was doing or the wonderful music he was making until the release in 2017 of ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981’.
The music emerging from the
Jesus People USA Christian community in Chicago, most notably the
Resurrection Band and its founder Glenn Kaiser, should also be noted. ‘Resurrection Band, also known as Rez Band or REZ, was a Christian rock band formed in 1972. They were part of the Jesus People USA Christian community in Chicago and most of its members have continued in that community to this day. Known for their blend of blues-rock and hard rock, Resurrection Band is credited as one of the forerunners of the Christian metal genre. Christianity Today called them "the most influential band in Christian music history." Following their debut in 1978, the band's greatest popularity was during the early 1980s, but later in the decade they received some crossover success when they had two music videos featured on MTV. Led by the husband-and-wife team of Glenn and Wendi Kaiser, the band sought to evangelize using Christian rock, and addressed a variety of social ills in the lyrics of their music. While the group is officially disbanded, they played several one-off dates at the now defunct Cornerstone Festival, which members of the band helped establish. Currently Glenn Kaiser has an established solo career as a blues musician and is also a speaker on various spiritual issues to youth and adults.’
From its beginnings, the Jesus Movement has included a range of controversial characters and events. The movement has been criticised, by Reformed Christians in particular, for being un-Biblical, particularly in its focus on signs and wonders. The Calvary Chapel movement and Vineyard Fellowship have been particularly wedded to ‘End Times’ thinking of the kind made famous by Hal Lindsey’s book ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth’. Dylan was particularly influenced by these teachings in his Gospel period. Key Calvary Chapel pastor Chuck Smith predicted that the “rapture” – when, in this interpretation of the Book of Revelation, all true believers in Jesus Christ will suddenly be raised, leaving cars and buses driver-less, and plane’s pilot-less (described by Larry Norman in the song ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’) - would happen in 1981. His ministry was somewhat discredited when this prediction did not occur. Additionally, and unacceptably, as with all the mainstream Christian denominations, the movement has had to face examples of abuse that occurred within its churches.
Two of the most controversial but central figures within the movement were
Larry Norman and
Lonnie Frisbee.
Kelefa Sanneh has written of Larry Norman that:
‘Many historians trace the birth of Christian rock to the release, in 1969, of “Upon This Rock.” It was an inventive concept album, by turns fierce and sweet, that was the work of a stubborn visionary named Larry Norman—the founding father of Christian rock. Norman, who died in relative obscurity, in 2008, has often been viewed as a tragic figure: a gifted and quirky musician who inspired a generation while alienating his peers and, at times, his fans. In “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?,” the first biography of Norman, Gregory Alan Thornbury tells a more triumphant story, portraying Norman as a genius and a prophet, clear-eyed in his criticism of what he sometimes called “the apostate church.” …
Norman grew up in the Bay Area, and dedicated his life to Jesus when he was five—purely on his own initiative, he later remembered. He discovered a talent for singing and songwriting when he was in high school, and soon joined a local band called People!, although he quit after one marginally successful album. (There were religious differences: most of the other band members were Scientologists.) Norman moved to Los Angeles and made his solo début with “Upon This Rock,” which attracted a small number of buyers and, in time, a large number of acolytes. Over the next few years, Norman came to seem like less of an outlier, as the Jesus Movement went from a fringe pursuit to a national obsession. Time put a Pop-art picture of Jesus on its cover in 1971 (“the jesus revolution,” it said), and the next year hundreds of thousands of young people gathered in Dallas for Explo ’72, a weeklong revival that was widely described as the Christian Woodstock. In retrospect, the event marked the moment when the Jesus Freaks began to shed their freakiness: Norman was one of the headliners, but so was Billy Graham, the embodiment of mainstream Christianity …
Like many rock stars of his generation, Norman was proudly antiestablishment, which meant that the increasing popularity of his chosen field presented something of an existential crisis. By the nineteen-eighties, Norman had grown contemptuous of the Christian music business that had sprung up in his wake. According to industry conventions, Christian bands were expected to eschew profanity and any drug stronger than caffeine. They were also expected to proclaim their faith in Jesus—although the necessary frequency and clarity of these proclamations were the subject of much debate. Norman hated the idea that his faith should dictate or limit his subject matter. (He once said that, because he was a Christian, all of his songs were necessarily Christian songs, no matter what they were about.) In some cases, the contempt was mutual. Thornbury reports that, in the nineties, when a Norman tribute album was arranged, he was so controversial within the industry that some Christian-music stars “had to get permission from their pastors” before they would agree to participate.’
'
Lonnie Frisbee was a young hippie seeker fully immersed in the 1960s counter culture when he claimed to have experienced an encounter with God while on an acid trip. This event so transformed him that Lonnie became an itinerant Christian evangelist, something of a John the Baptist of Southern California who compelled thousands of fellow spiritual seekers to make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. During the 1970s Lonnie Frisbee became widely known as California's "hippie preacher," the quintessential "Jesus freak" whose pictures frequented such magazines as Time and Life as the media told the story of a burgeoning "Jesus movement." Lonnie Frisbee provided the charismatic spark that launched the Calvary Chapel church into a worldwide ministry and propelled many fledgling leaders into some of the most powerful movers and shakers of the evangelical movement. During the 1980s Lonnie was at the centre of the "signs and wonders" movement, one that focused on reviving the practice of spiritual power through diving healing, speaking in tongues and other demonstrative manners of manifesting the power of God. But besides his influence and beyond the miraculous stories that swirl in the wake of his life, what makes the story most fascinating is that his call into the ministry came while deeply involved in the Laguna Beach homosexual scene. Treated with contempt by the ministers whom he helped establish, Lonnie has been written out of their collective histories. He died as a result of the AIDS virus in 1993.'
Frisbee has been reinserted into the story of the Jesus Movement by the documentary film
‘Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher’ and the ‘Jesus Revolution’ (although the latter glosses over what are understood to be the controversial aspects of Frisbee’s life). However, it is fundamentally the lack of inclusion shown to the LGBTQIA+ community by the Jesus Movement as a whole that is the real tragedy in the story of Frisbee.
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