lindsey price – Only Visiting This Planet

March 5th, 2008 · No Comments

lindsey price –

Christian rocker Larry Norman moves on.

By S. Brent Plate

The first album I ever bought was Larry Norman’s Only Visiting this Planet (1972). I was probably about ten, and the album had already been out for a couple years, but I remember it all so well. (To this day, I could quote you pretty much the entire album’s lyrics.) The allure certainly had to do with this being my “first,” and the ways we all remember our firsts. But it also had to do with the somewhat radical stance the album’s imagery, lyrics, and melodies carried for me, a young Christian, firmly embedded in the evangelical tradition.

Others have posted their comments, eulogies, and curiosities on Norman since his death on February 24th at age 60. Christianity Today gave him a sober sending off, and GetReligion offered a take on Norman’s life by Biola University’s Michael Longinow. I’m not sure what choir, save my own, I’m speaking to here or why I’m writing, but I feel a bit of a personal tug/loss that I can’t let go. As Entertainment Weekly‘s online blog put it in relation to the album, “It didn’t sell much, but whatever born-again kids there were out there with Fender guitars all had a copy and wore out the grooves.” Indeed. In the late 1970s, my friend David and I spent many late night sleepovers listening to Norman, and the then early voices in the Christian rock scene, including Randy Stonehill (Welcome to Paradise was the album to listen to), Daniel Amos (Shotgun Angel), and Pat Terry Group (Songs of the South). A decade later in college, Norman’s influence was still felt as my buddy Patrick and I would sing some late-night wild renditions of “Why don’t you look into Jesus?” (even after we’d sipped some whiskey from a paper cup).

But back to the 1970s: I buy this thing (you know, in the days when there were 12″ photos for the covers in order to fit the LP format), and there, staring at me, was a long-haired blond hippie in ragged denim with the promise that he actually was a Christian. Curiously, thirty-some years later, this is the same image that bedecks the Larry Norman website. The album included the lyrics in the liner notes and I remember clearly how my mother couldn’t get past the phrase in “Pardon Me”: “Making love if love’s
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