Stranded in Babylon, Until the Last Day
“And when I was ten you murdered law with courtroom politics,
And you learned to make a lie sound just like truth;
But I know you better now and I don’t fall for all your tricks,
And you’ve lost the one advantage of my youth.”
“Stranded in Babylon” album cover
In the fall of 1975, going into eighth grade, I was bused to what had been an all-Black middle school in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, due to the previous year’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
The Robert E. Lee Elementary School was located at 1108 Jefferson Street. Even then, the irony was not lost on me.
This was the height of perceived progress to address lingering, systemic racial injustice that still existed, particularly in the south, a decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed by Congress in 1964. It was in this context, then, that I can remember celebrating America’s 250th anniversary in 1976 with my new Black friends, with an unsaid feeling that the country was moving in the right direction. In 1977, we all watched Roots together, as well as Welcome Back Kotter and Sanford and Sons.
Since screening both The Jesus Revolution and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I’ve been reflecting on my childhood, growing up in the 1970s. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, as I look back I am also reminded how much the little known (at least now) musician named Larry Norman. Larry was an influence on my life as well as virtually every artist in today’s Christian music scene. He later became a friend.
Larry was perhaps the first Christian rock-and-roll musician. A child of his age, he wrote not just of his faith, but of the injustices and abuses of his day. He offered hope to a generation disappointed by the false promises of the “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” cultural priests like Timothy Leary. He challenged the drug culture, and lamented the loss of fellow artists like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison. But he also challenged the failures and hypocrisy of the Christian church that he had been raised in, as illustrated by these lyrics from his song “The Great American Novel”:
You kill a black man at midnight just for talking to your daughter,
Then you make his wife your mistress and you leave her without water;
And the sheet you wear upon your face is the sheet your children sleep on,
At every meal you say a prayer; you don't believe but still you keep on.
Larry was never fully accepted in mainline or evangelical church culture, with his butt-length white hair, confrontational lyrics, and end-times focus. But he opened the door for a generation of artists that continue in his wake today.
In 2000, I met another Christian musician who had an influence over me: Bono from U2. I had listened to the band throughout my college years (Boy/1980, October/1981, War/1983 and Unforgettable Fire/1984). Their lyrics–with a focus on social justice concerns–helped form my faith.
I was working on Capitol Hill as Rick Santorum’s Chief of Staff, and had the opportunity to engage Bono’s team (including two still with him, Tom Hart here in DC and Lucy Matthew in the UK) on the Jubilee 2000 effort to promote debt forgiveness. Following that effort, we worked with them and the Bush Administration to address the global AIDS emergency.
This is where the streams of story come together.
In an elevator ride with Bono, I asked about Larry’s lyrics for the song “God Part III” from Stranded in Babylon (1991), in relation to Bono’s own lyrics in “God Part II” from Rattle and Hum (1988). It was not clear to me that Bono was aware of Larry’s version, and possibly not even aware of Larry. I had another meeting scheduled with Bono a few days later, before a concert in DC that night, and was determined to get him a copy of Larry’s CD. I called Larry’s label, Solid Rock Records,to get a copy sent overnight. My call back was from Larry himself, who offered to bring the CD in person. This caught me a bit off guard, but I gladly accepted.
Unfortunately, Larry didn’t make the concert. He and his son were stuck on the tarmac in St. Louis. Bono set aside tickets for them, but they didn’t meet. When Leanne got home from a conference the next night, she found Larry at our dining room table with his green-spiked hair son, Mike. The next morning, we took them to meet with some DC influencers at Bilbo Baggins restaurant in Old Town, decorated in the style of the 1977 Rankin-Bass animated film, The Hobbit. One of my greatest regrets was not asking Larry to play a song there (he had brought his guitar). I never heard him play live.
We talked together about art, faith and poetry. The conversation helped birth the idea to connect Bono to other Christian artists to raise awareness of the growing AIDS crisis, as well as to support the Bush Administration’s historic effort to combat it. (You can see more about this effort in a short doc we produced for the 15TH anniversary of PEPFAR.) We also discovered that we would be in the UK at the same time a few months later, in the same city and the same night that both he and U2 would be performing there. We agreed to try again to connect the streams.
On the back of Larry’s official UK tour tee-shirt was a faux schedule. Along with “Leave a rose on the Queen’s pillow,” was “Go see U2 with Mark Rodgers and his family.” Larry’s show started early that night but would go late (he didn’t know that two opening acts were booked), so we ended up only taking his two sisters with us to U2. As we walked from behind the stage into the venue, late, Bono was a few feet above us, quoting Psalm 116 from Eugene Peterson's Bible translation The Message:
“What can I give back to God for the blessings he's poured out on me? I'll lift high the cup of salvation -- A toast to God!”
But this was not the end of the story. Larry’s tour tee-shirt also revealed that he and we would be in London the same night a few days later, which just happened to be the last night of U2’s tour in the UK.
The back of Larry’s UK tour tee-shirt (see number 15)
With Lucy’s help, we secured a final set of tickets for Larry to go with a mutual friend of his and Bono’s, the writer, journalist and poet Steve Turner. Our plans were to have Jack Heaslip, U2’s pastor, join us together for dinner before the show, but sadly Bono’s father had just passed away, and Jack flew back to prepare for the funeral.
On the day of the concert, and our last day in the UK, we were walking near Piccadilly Circus as a family and stopped at an outdoor restaurant for a quick bite. To our surprise, in ALL of London Larry was seated unexpectedly, and uninvited, next to us. The odds were infinitesimally small, and the chance meeting could only be counted as a Providential one, a reminder of God’s attention to the small details of our lives which Larry needed at that moment.
That evening at dinner Larry announced that he wasn’t feeling well, and was inclined to take a pass on the concert. Steve convinced him otherwise, but Larry’s health was more dire than we realized. Larry had a heart attack after returning to the US, and was never able to fully play again.
But that still wasn’t the end of the story. In 2004, Larry emailed me that Bono would be nearby in Portland and one last time Lucy worked to arrange a meeting between them, which would turn out to be their first and only. Larry emailed me later:
“It seemed like we spent ten or fifteen minutes talking and having our photos taken. In one of the last photos he put his arm around me and out of the corner of my eye I saw that he stretched up taller, on his toes. I remembered a line from The Beatles movie, Hard Day’s Night, and said, “Stop being taller than me.” He said, “Well, I don’t get the chance very often,” and laughed. His staff was very sweet, very kind … I’m used to Christians performing their faith like it was meant to be witnessed from the outside. They want to be seen in their Christianity, with their Christian aura, Christian cloak. But there is nothing personal with many of those Christians I meet. Of course, because I’m Larry Norman, I’m not sure if they’re being themselves or if they’re incapacitated by propinquity. But I suspect that they think being a Christian is something you do, not something you are. So it was a relief to feel Bono’s spiritual pacificity and his openness and warmth. He’s a real man, not a poseur.”
Larry, like Bono and the rest of us, was part sinner and part saint. It’s what made him the Outlaw that he was … pushing against the church and the world at the same time. But there was a hunger for Jesus and love for others that drove him until the end, when he passed away in 2008 at 60. It was this courage to break conventions and pioneer paths to share good news to a broken world that has inspired us at Clapham.
The former Robert E. Lee Elementary School is still located at 1108 Jefferson Street, but it is now a community recreation center renamed after Nannie J. Lee (1934-1977), a community activist who fought back against injustices during the Jim Crow Era in Alexandria. Our stories aren’t fully written until the very last day.
Bono let me know that God Part 2 was his take on John Lennon’s song God. We are thankful at Clapham that we have been permitted to pursue a mix of faith, culture and social action to seek the flourishing of the city in which we have been invited to live, while we are Stranded in Babylon (the album on which is Larry’s take God Part 3) until the very last day.