Transcription
In 1971, Time magazine put Jesus on the cover. This was really strange because 5 years earlier, the same magazine had run a cover that asked in bold red letters on a black background, "Is God dead?" That cover had been a good representation of how people felt. The 1960s were ending, the church was losing, American Christianity in the eyes of popular magazines was dead.
But in June of 1971, Time magazine changed its mind for some reason. The June 21st cover was a psychedelic pop art image of Jesus, painted in orange and reds and yellows and glowing. And the headline simply said, "The Jesus Revolution."
This is episode two of our series on how the Christian music world got bought. And this episode is about the 5-year period that created the foundation [music] for every single thing that comes next. Maranatha, Hillsong, Bethel, the billion-dollar machine that produces Christian [music] songs that you sing on Sunday. All of it traces back to a few hundred hippies in California in 1968.
So by 1967, the American church was, by every account, in crisis. Church attendance was plummeting. Mainline Protestant denominations were losing members year over year for the first time in modern history. Young people were leaving in numbers that nobody knew how to deal with. The Vietnam War was tearing the country apart, and the counterculture, the hippies, the anti-war movement, and sexual revolution was offering a kind of alternative spirituality that the church was struggling to compete with.
In San Francisco in the summer of 1967, somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 young people poured into a neighborhood. They were looking for something. With that, they tried a lot of things: LSD, Eastern mysticism, Hare Krishna, the Maharishi. But the summer of love ended and gave way to the tough year of 1968 with assassinations and riots and the Manson murders just around the bend. The promises of the counterculture had turned out to be hollow. A whole generation was suddenly looking for something else. [music]
And some of them started looking at Jesus again, or for the first time. Not the Jesus that their parents, the suburban church people, had. A Jesus who was, in their imagination, basically a long-haired countercultural prophet guy who hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors [music] and told the religious establishment that they were a bunch of hypocrites. And they called themselves the Jesus people. The press called them Jesus freaks, and they were about to walk into a church and freak everyone out.
Let's move to Chuck Smith. He was 41 years old in 1968. He was a pastor of a tiny church called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. About 100 people on a good Sunday. And he had been in the ministry for almost 20 years and spent most of that in a small, struggling congregation. He was balding and wore a suit and a tie and preached old-school Pentecostal doctrine. And he looked, in every visible way, like the exact kind of Christian that hippies of Southern California hated.
But Chuck had a daughter named Janet. And Janet was dating a young Christian named John. And one day, John was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and saw a hitchhiker. The hitchhiker had hair [music] past his shoulders and a beard and sandals and a robe, and it kind of made him look like an Old Testament prophet of sorts. So, John picked him up. Not necessarily safe.
The hitchhiker's name was Lonnie Frisbee. He was 19 years old, and Lonnie had grown up in Costa Mesa. He'd gotten heavily involved in the hippie scene, LSD, and involved in the Laguna Beach gay scene. And then, about a year before this car ride, he had taken a tab of acid and gone into the desert. And he had what he described as a vision of Jesus. He had come out of the desert convinced that he'd been called to be an evangelist. The problem was that nobody would let him. The Christian establishment of 1968 wanted nothing to do with him.
John, who at this point was driving down the highway with this guy in his passenger seat, had an idea. His girlfriend's dad was a pastor who had been talking about wanting to reach out to hippie communities, so maybe his girlfriend's dad would want to meet Lonnie. So John drove Lonnie straight to Chuck's house, and this is the catalyst. Two guys who, on paper, should not have been able to sit down and bond, by every account, hit it off immediately. Chuck Smith later said, "I was not at all prepared for the love that this young man would radiate."
Smith offered Lonnie a place to stay, and Lonnie took him up on it. He and his new wife Connie moved into the Smith family home, and within a few weeks, Lonnie Frisbee was preaching at Calvary Chapel.
So, 1969, Lonnie starts preaching on Wednesday nights, and he preached on the beach and in coffee houses on the streets of Costa Mesa, and he was absolutely magnetic. >> "Here comes the Lord walking in the garden, and man, they, they realized they were naked. So they ran and they hid themselves in the bushes and they started sewing leaves together real quick." >> He looked like Jesus, he talked like a hippie, and he spoke with a kind of immediate, unfiltered, charismatic intensity that the hippies of Southern California had never heard from a Christian before.
So the hippies started showing up to church. First, a few dozen, and then hundreds. Calvary Chapel's regular congregation, the older suburban folks who'd been there for years, were mortified. The hippies were dirty, they smelled bad, and they, they sat on the floor instead of the pews. There's a real documented moment in the history of Calvary [music] Chapel where the deacons of the church demanded that Chuck put up a sign saying, "No bare feet allowed." Chuck refused. He famously said, more or less, that if the carpet's the problem, we'll rip up the carpet.
By 1969, Calvary Chapel was overflowing. They had to rent a giant tent next to the church just to handle the crowds. The Wednesday night services that Lonnie led were attracting thousands of people, and those people were getting baptized by the thousands. Lonnie and Chuck started doing mass ocean baptisms at the beach called [music] Pirate's Cove in Corona del Mar. Just lining people up, walking them out into the Pacific Ocean and dunking them in. The LA Times covered it. National news outlets started showing up to it. And by 1971, when Time magazine ran its cover story, [music] they were photographing those ocean baptisms as this iconic image of the entire movement.
And here's what no one fully understood at the time. The music that those kids were singing in the water, the music they were playing on the guitars that they were bringing into Chuck Smith's church on Wednesday nights, was about to become the foundation of an industry that 50 years later would be worth nearly a billion dollars.
So, let's go ahead and start talking about the music. The Jesus freaks didn't play hymns. They didn't have choirs. They played the music of their generation. They played folk rock on acoustic guitars, and they sounded sonically like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Simon and Garfunkel, and James Taylor. But the lyrics were all about Jesus. The exact same musical style that the counterculture had been used to singing about love, [music] war, drugs, and revolution was now applied to Jesus.
The Beatles had just put out the White Album, and in this exact moment, a generation of Christian hippies started writing songs. The first band that mattered was called Love Song. Four guys from Southern California. They had been playing in secular rock bands and they converted [music] at Calvary Chapel. And Chuck Smith, who could have easily said, "We don't have rock music in church," instead said, "Come up and play your songs." >> [music] >> "Lord, don't let me [music] strive against my brother. I'm so tired of it. Don't want [music] to do it no more." >> Welcome back. "Changes," "Little Country Church," "Since I Opened the Door." They were all earnest, folky, simple, and unashamedly about Jesus. They wrote songs about how before they had met Jesus, they had been lost. And after they met Jesus, they had been found. And the kids who came to Calvary Chapel ate them alive. They learned these songs by ear and played them on guitars in their dorm rooms. They taught them to each other at coffee houses.
And there were others. I mean, there was a woman named Karen Lafferty who wrote a song called "Seek Ye First." It's based on Matthew 6:33. And it became one of the most sung Christian songs of the entire 20th century. >> "Well, I went home that night. I just picked up my [music] guitar and I started uh plucking out this little melody. And [music] uh then I just found that it uh the verse would fit with [music] it. So I started, you know, I'm singing, 'Seek ye first the kingdom [singing] of God,' and so forth. And uh so that little song got written."
By the early 1970s, Calvary Chapel was home to more than 15 of these bands. All of them playing what they had started calling Jesus music. And while all that is happening, completely separate from Calvary Chapel's scene, there was a young man in LA named Larry Norman. Larry Norman is one of the most important figures in the entire history of Christian music. He's also one of the strangest. He had been the lead singer of a secular psychedelic rock band called People. But Norman was a Christian, a very passionate and intense Christian. And he wanted to make Christian rock music, but the label Capitol Records just wouldn't let him. They wanted hits, not Christian music.
But in 1969, Larry Norman released a solo album called "Upon This Rock" on Capitol Records. This is the first Christian rock album released by a major label. It is, by general consensus, the moment Christian rock as a commercial genre is born. But the album that really changed things came 3 years later in 1972. Larry Norman released "Only Visiting This Planet." According to a lot of people, this album is one of the most important albums ever recorded for Christian music. It was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry in 2014 as a cultural, artistic, and historical treasure. The first Christian rock album ever selected. Bono of U2 has cited Larry Norman as a major influence. The Pixies' Black Francis has cited him. Mike Pence converted at a Larry Norman concert, in fact.
>> "Your hands are shaking while your [music] body is sweating. Why don't you look into Jesus? [music] He's got the answer." >> [music] >> It has songs about the rapture and hypocritical Christians and American racism, and all of them are so direct that it would be considered pretty radical in church today. >> [music] >> In fact, there's a great song called "The Great American Novel" that contains the lyric, "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 on your face is the sheet your children sleep on. At every meal you say a prayer you don't believe, but you still keep on."
That lyric is already controversial, considering that in the '60s and '50s, the church was arguing against rock music and against music with rhythm, calling it savage music, and clan members were sitting in the pews. So again, this guy on a Christian rock album calling out clans and racism and hypocrisy in the church, he was just not a comfortable person. He was uncompromising and, according to some, very difficult to work with. Christian bookstores often refused to stock his records because his lyrics were too edgy, and some pastors banned his music from their churches. And meanwhile, secular rock critics took him seriously in a way that they would not take any other Christian artist for the next 30 years.
There's a quote that's attributed back to Martin Luther that we talked about already, but Norman made it really popular. He said, "Why should the devil have all of the good music?" Again, that line may or may not have been said by Martin Luther, but Larry wrote it as a song title, "Why Should the Devil Have All the [music] Good Music?"
Now, back to Calvary Chapel. By 1971, Chuck, he, he had a problem. All of these bands playing in his church made tapes. He had tapes circulating hand-to-hand on cassette. People wanted recordings. The Jesus people scene up and down the West Coast wanted the recordings. And there was no infrastructure to do it. So, Chuck reached into his own pocket and took out $2,500 of his own money. And he used it to fund the recording of a compilation album. The album was called "The Everlasting Living Jesus Music Concert." It was released in 1971 [music] and featured Love Song, Children of the Day, Debbie Kerner, and other Calvary Chapel artists.
But, big problem, Chuck and his team had no idea how to distribute an album. Major distribution networks weren't going to touch this stuff. Christian bookstores were small, and so they never heard of any of these bands. So, they did the only thing they could think of. They sold it out of the trunks of their cars.
Maranatha Music, which would eventually become one of the most important labels in the history of Christian music, the, the label that would shape the entire praise and worship movement, started with a guy named Mike McIntosh driving up and down the Southern California coast with boxes of records and tapes in his car, walking into Christian bookstores, and bowling alleys, and youth group meetings, and just trying to convince anyone to take a few copies. That first album sold from car trunks through mail [music] order 160,000 copies.
This is the moment that Jesus people stops being just a religious revival and starts becoming a commercial product. Not on purpose, though. Nobody at Calvary Chapel in 1971 is sitting around thinking, "Ooh, we're going to, we're going to build the foundation of a billion-dollar industry." They're just trying to keep up with demand, trying to give kids these records that they're asking for. And within a few years, Maranatha Music will be releasing what they call the praise series, [music] albums of simple congregational worship songs designed for churches to sing [music] together. Those albums will be the seeds of modern worship as we know it. Songs that any congregation can learn in 3 minutes.
But like all good things that grow quickly, things start to get out of hand. In June 1972, in Dallas, Texas, 80,000 college students filled the Cotton Bowl. This event was called Explo '72, short for spiritual explosion. It was organized by Bill Bright's Campus Crusade for Christ, and it was, in many ways, the moment that the Jesus Movement broke containment. This was no longer a weird California thing that was happening with the hippies. 80,000 students from every state in the country came to Dallas for a week of preaching and music. Billy Graham and Bill Bright preached, and they, Billy Graham and Bill Bright, Billy Graham and Bill Bright preached, and the music lineup was, by the standards of 1972 Christianity, completely unprecedented. I mean, a lot of the Calvary Chapel people, you know, Love Song. And then, in a move that genuinely shocked the establishment, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash played. The country outlaw standing in front of 80,000 college students in the Cotton Bowl playing songs and talking about his Christian faith. Cash had recently had a very public conversion experience and had aligned himself, at, at least publicly, with the Jesus Movement. His presence at Explo '72 was the moment when secular mainstream music and the Jesus people movement officially overlapped in a way that was very new.
Explo '72 was, depending on who you ask, either the moment that the Jesus Movement reached its peak or the moment it started to be corporatized. Probably both. Because Explo wasn't a grassroots gathering. It was funded, it was branded, it had merch. Campus Crusade for Christ was a serious organization with budgeting and marketing departments, and what they did at the Cotton Bowl was prove that the Jesus people aesthetic and sound, you know, long hair and guitars, could be packaged and produced and sell. Some of the original Jesus people really hated this. They thought Explo was selling out. They thought that the movement was being absorbed by exactly the kind of evangelical machinery that they had been trying to escape. They weren't wrong, but they were also too late to stop the machine that had just turned on.
Now, let's pause and remember some stuff from episode one. For 400 years, there had been a wall dividing Christian music and the worldly music, and every generation, somebody pushed that wall a little further back. Luther used tavern tunes, Watts wrote original lyrics, Wesley made emotional worship, and Moody made it commercial. The Pentecostals made it loud. What the Jesus movement did between roughly 1968 and 1972 [music] is possibly the biggest wall move in the entire 400-year history. >> [music] >> They took the entire sound of the secular counterculture and they [music] imported all of that into the veins of the church. There's no precedent for this. I mean, the Reformation moment, it, it didn't even take the lifestyle of the taverns as a whole. The Wesleys did not start dressing like opera singers and stuff, and the Pentecostals, as wild as they got, they still wore suits to church.
Bob Larson, a Christian radio host, wrote a series of books in the early '70s warning that Christian rock was a satanic infiltration of the church. Christian bookstores again were debating whether or not they were going to stock Larry Norman's records. Is all of this sounding familiar to you? Like 1600s familiar? By 1972, there were millions of kids who built their entire Christian faith on the music that the Jesus people had created. The old guard eventually would not just stop fighting it, they would start funding it because by the late 1970s, somebody in Waco, Texas was going to look at this hippie subculture and realize there is real money in this.
But before we close, we need to talk about Lonnie Frisbee because the Jesus movement had a cost, and that cost fell, more than on anyone else, on the man who started it. Lonnie and Chuck had a falling out in 1971. They disagreed about the roles of spiritual gifts in the church, and they disagreed about how to handle the increasingly chaotic growth of Calvary Chapel. And underneath all of this, there was a question that the Calvary Chapel leadership did not know how to handle: Lonnie's sexuality. Lonnie, as we previously stated, [music] had been involved in the gay scene in Laguna Beach before his conversion. He had been open about it when he first started giving his testimony, and he was very quickly told to stop talking about that part of his story. By 1971, there were people in Chuck Smith's circles who believed that Lonnie had, in fact, not left that part of his life behind.
Lonnie left Calvary Chapel [music] and he spent years drifting through Florida and international ministry and through Bob Mumford's controversial shepherding movement. Lonnie even was involved in the founding of the Vineyard Church movement until he got too controversial for that. And they also don't talk about him. He died of AIDS in 1993, and he was 43 years old. Chuck Smith, to his credit and showing the genuine reconciliation that these two men had worked towards in the past few years, was the one who preached at his funeral. Chuck Smith [music] called Lonnie a Samson figure who had powerfully been anointed by God, but had also been deeply broken. The history of Calvary Chapel barely mentions him, and even when they made a movie about him, they didn't actually tell the whole story. The man who more than any other single person lit the fuse on the Jesus Movement, [music] the movement that built the foundation of every Christian music industry, died at 43 of AIDS, having been quietly written out of the official record by the institutions that he had helped build.
We find that the institutions tend to write people out of the story because this isn't the only time that we will see this happen. The Jesus Movement is the high point of grassroots Christian music. It's the last time that we're going to see music belonging to the people who made it. Because right around 1972, somebody in Texas, a man who we haven't talked about, looked at the records selling out of [music] the car trunks and the 80,000 young people in the stadium, and he had a thought: "There's business here."