Sermons

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=200 BGCOLOR="#000000" TEXT="#F7F7FF"> <bR> <div> <B><U>Go to</U></B>:</div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="THE FIRST CHURCH OF HOLY ROCK AND ROLL"><U>Home Page</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id17.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Statement of Purpose"><U>Statement of Purpose</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id23.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Commandments"><U>The Commandments</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id18.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Reviews and Rant"><U>Reviews and Rant</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id25.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Blasts from the Past"><U>Blasts from the Past</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id29.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Desert Island Discs"><U>Desert Island Discs</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id26.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Interviews"><U>Interviews</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id27.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Books and Movies"><U>Books and Movies</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id19.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Miscellaneous Witnessing"><U>Miscellaneous Witnessing</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id20.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Mailbag"><U>Mailbag</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id21.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Favorite Links"><U>Related Links</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id22.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Contact Me"><U>Contact Me</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id28.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Confessional"><U>The Confessional</U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFF33" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>Sermons</B></div> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <B><U>How I Got Over </U></B><B><U> <A NAME="sermon1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></U></B></div> <bR> <div>      The odds were stacked against it, but rock and roll changed my life--that's its story, and that's why it beats the hell outta poetry, fiction, tv, movies, anything you care to name today that purports to give trapped people a way out these days. It'll find your ass, if you'll look for it. It's supposed to be dead, too, but purveyors of such theories are full of shit. Rock and roll is about outreach; everything else is just an invitation to navel-gazing, which is the last thing you need at millennium's end.</div> <div>      I grew up in a household where music was Mantovani, Neil Diamond, Al Martino, the soundtrack to Camelot (literally and metaphorically). What was worse is that it was missing that seldom-celebrated essential figure in any rock and roll-bound kid's life: a big brother who could pass down records. I also lived in a little town in southwest Missouri. The first music I heard that I liked was Sonny and Cher, and my parents bought me Sgt. Pepper's for my 9th birthday--neither a particularly good omen. but it found me. It took a roundabout route, my first collisions with it were scattershot and strange in a decade saved by the Stooges and Dolls, Springsteen and the eternal Stones, the Pistols, Ramones, and Clash...but it found me.</div> <div>      I first caught that feeling of liberation off the radio from Spinners records. Phillippe Wynne's jubilant, scatting leads on "Mighty Love" and "Rubberband Man" and "Then Came You" (in dynamic tandem with Dionne Warwick) promised ecstasies that were just out of reach of my comprehension, but which hit my body dead-on. Elton John was my Jerry Lee and Little Richard, silly, fantastic, and fun; if you were 11 or 12 and stuck in the Bible Belt in his prime, nothing sounded as totally and wonderfully different from the details of your life than " Bennie and the Jets", "The Bitch is Back", "Rocket Man", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Philadelphia Freedom", "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting". Say what you want now , but then, he rocked, and revealed another world to a midwestern kid. Then there was Alice Cooper, supreme boogie-man to the 70's equivalents of the PMRC, but--just like Marilyn--crass as they come. The theatrics were one thing, but the guitar behind "Eighteen", "School's Out", and "No More Mr. Nice Guy" pushed me in front of my bedroom mirror and had me strumming and screaming. I thank my mom and dad for not shutting me down, and I still know those lyrics by heart. I was rawking, posting my personal top 40 om my 6th grade classroom's bulletin board, taping shit off the radio and forcing it on kids who were still sleeping.</div> <div>      Next phase, another rock-life archtype: the chain reaction detonated by the accidental discovery. Coop and Elton were fading, Wynne had bolted the Spinners, and Air Supply and Kenny Rogers were making their MOR moves (the Christian Coalition and lil' George Shrub III remind me of them all the time). I was seeking refuge in Neal Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics on DC, and that series was drawing to a close after having gifted me with a teensy political consciousness and nurtured the gift of rebellion those first rock and roll icons had bestowed upon me. Shit was looking grim.  One day, Mom gave me $5 to buy some comics downtown while she shopped, and the world as I knew it would soon be capsized, yet rescued.</div> <div>      I wandered into the now long-gone corner newsstand and found nothing but shitty art and bad stories on the comic rack, and wheeled to leave in disgust. Something caught my eye: the newest Rolling Stone cover, displaying a 5 o'clock- shadowed, v-neck undershirt-wearin' greaser glowering at me. OK, so I had the seeds of rebellion growing inside of me, but I was still a son of the Methodist church, and I'd been told the mag was for dope-smokers, about which  I didn't know diddley. Still. A defiance burned in the guy's eyes that aligned with something true I felt but couldn't pin down--so I bought it and had it sacked. What the hell.</div> <div>      Later, in the privacy of my room, I got to know not only Bruce (remember: this was southwest Missouri, and Springsteen almost never hit the radio there), but...Dylan. Greil fucking Marcus, reviewing Street Legal in that issue, had stomped a mud puddle in the grouchy old fart's ass, but the excerpted lyrics [from "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)", as I recall] jazzed me, and Marcus' allusion to Highway 61 Revisited sent me down to Ken's Records with my lifeguard's pay, where I picked up those two records and Darkness on the Edge of Town. From that moment, my life's course careened perfectly out of control, into the live (in the explosive sense) domain of possibility instead of the dead one of carefully circumscribed outcomes. Two years later, I was ruining dates and becoming a dis-magnet for my friends as I tried to show and explain this rich, earthy ambrosia I'd drilled down and found; spurning Sports Illustrated for Creem; quitting football and writing my ass off; getting kicked out of class and assemblies; and giving church the bum's rush (my sunday school teacher laid into the Pistols one morning during the American tour uproar, not suspecting that any of her brood knew shit; I exploded, got booted, and my parents gave up on making me go. The “church” was lying about life, just like most of `em do now.</div> <div>      Trouble was, I was alone. Closest I could find to compadres were joint jockeys getting catatonic to everything from Rush to Zep to Judas Priest to Neil, and I just couldn't buy in (well, I made an exception with Young): energy is good , motherfuckers!!! Somebody had spray-painted ramones on the sainted baseball park wall, but damned if I could locate the perpetrators. I was aching for world conquest, but I needed fellow riders.</div> <div>      You can't go through life alone. You'll either be a pompous, arrogant, selfish prick, or a pathetic, self-destructive loner. And in college--bad as it is--I found two other men who joined me on the shining path of rock and roll. I realized that I wasn't some misguided crackpot--other folks loved this stuff. One of 'em validated all my suspicions that rock and roll was American nectar, a way to keep moving when most of the other voices said, "Stand still, boy"; the other led me down through the catacombs of the underground, studded with jeweled doors labeled "Black Flag”, "Replacements", "Minutemen", "Descendents", and "Husker Du", doors too few found until after death and dissent collapsed the rooms within (hell, they're on the verge of being forgotten now). And, in short order, the stacked cards of this midwestern life got shuffled: I've been working as a rocking and rolling teacher--in termite fashion--for the past 15 years, instead of as an accountant, statistician, or real-estate agent; rather than marrying a some future soccer-mom hag, I found a beautiful woman who had Sister Rosetta, Bad Religion, Coltrane, Hank Sr., and the Ramones singing in her soul all along, and I've never been happier; I hear my god in voices as disparate as Eric Bachmann's and Wayne Hancock's and Jimmy Scott's, and I don't need some sterile building in which to kneel to it; and I know the sound of salvation is sweet, sweet racket and piercing cries and hollers in the night.</div> <div>      Don't be misled. Don't be afraid. Listen for that tumult, catch ahold, and ride it. You can be saved, brothers and sisters. This is my prayer of gratitude to the noise that knows no master. Lead on.</div> <bR> <DIV ALIGN="LEFT"></DIV> <div> <B><U>A Holy Trinity</U></B><B><U> <A NAME="sermon2"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="1" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" ></A></U></B></div> <bR> <div>      It's said that a tendency towards nostalgia is a sign of illness in an individual or in society. Maybe. But the lives of departed saints have always provided clues to the proper paths for the lost among us (and who here claims to be found?), whether they stepped on a rainbow 3000 or 3 years ago. The trick is to keep them alive in the memory. </div> <div>      In the world of rock and roll, to use the example of the Velvet Underground, it seems to take about 20 years post-departure for our saints to be regenerated as pervasive influences on our lives. True, Elvis has never gone away, but how many folks' minds' eyes picture the skinny, sexy, defiant country boy rather than the sweat- and pill-poppin' corpulent poster boy for the power of the worm inside of the American Dream (in question form: whaddya do after you attain the Dream?)? So it's about time, here in 2000, to turn away from the barely-smoldering fire in Plato's garage and check out the silhouettes on the wall behind us. Fat guys, skinny guys, “rock” hair and shorn pates...what's up? It's just the Holy Trinity that carried us through the Ten Rings of Hell known as the `80s (well, maybe only the first 5 or 6, but permit me the conceit): Husker Du, the Replacements, and the Minutemen. </div> <div> Maybe it's just me, but you don't exactly hear these colossus' names being bandied about by the youngsters of the vanguard these days. Too fucking bad. For passionate intensity, drunken laughs, and a laser-lock on the puppet strings that control this horror-show in disguise called life, these bands couldn't (and can't be) beat. Not only that, but--goddamit!--their examples demand attention RIGHT NOW, MAN! Irony-overload, political correctness, by-the-numbers post-grunge post-techno post-rap-metal post-gangsta post-inspiring genre slavery, corporate co-opt, and militant know-nothing care-nothing shiny happy noise-making has reduced The Rawk to a fucking SUV commercial (no, I know--not a recent development but a gradual pathetic collapse). Once upon a time, folks....</div> <div>      Bellowing, cathartic (for both the band's singers AND the listener) vocals, speaker-shredding guitar (“Rumble” x 1000!), surprisingly stirring melodies, zero pretension--these were the hallmark qualities of Minneapolis' Husker Du. Whether the target of their onslaught was personal (“Pink Turns to Blue,” “Sorry Somehow,” “The Girl Who Lived on Heaven Hill,” “Makes No Sense at All”) or political (“Turn on the News,” “Real World,” “Folklore,” “Divide and Conquer”), the naked noise and emotion of Bob Mould, Grant Hart, and Greg Norton's music could punch a hole through the thickest clouds--and clouds could get pretty thick in the `80s (no thicker than our present ones, however). Direct assault; no irony or pussy-footing or obliqueness. Plus a perpetual challenge to keep your Can't tell you how many times since I first heard Mould's guitar spraying stone-cutting sparks out of a Fayetteville, Arkansas college dive's speakers on a rainy day that I've returned to that assault to bleed the rage and confusion out of my veins at the end of a futile day. Needle hits groove, couple of pops, POW!!!!!! It's the Byrds' “Eight Miles High,” strangled into a fuzz-packed, barely coherent, screaming-bloody-murder full-on PURGE, maybe the greatest `60s cover of all-time, surely the greatest rant of all-time. Run that through your nervous system a time or two and you'll be ready to fight again. And brothers and sisters, today we gotta be ready to fight again every day `round here. And some of you better learn how to sound a call to arms, `cause we can't just be looking back all the time.</div> <div>      There's more than one way to skin a cat, though, and, if the Huskers couldn't blast your cobs out, the Replacements could at least help you laugh `em away (or drink `em dizzy). Show me one band today that's reckless. Just one. That totally alive feeling you get when you realize that the dude who's driving the oil-burner you're riding in has a but a fingernail on the wheel, not to mention a whiskey and coke between his legs that's sloshing into his lap (we're so politically correct today you'll probably think that's a morally irresponsible metaphor)....what band today can just stick it to you? To further milk vehicular comparisons, fucked-up street punks fighting for the wheel of the brakeless screaming ambulance they just jacked: that was the Replacements at their best. “Takin' a Ride,” “I Hate Music,” “White and Lazy,” “My Favorite Thing,” “Hold My Life,” “Bastards of Young” all communicate the necessity of forfeiting control (at the least most of it) to a properly-lived life. Shit, yeah, there's danger involved; Johnny did die, just like they sang, and so did Bob Stinson, their knee-walking-sloshed guitarist. But danger's what we're most afraid of right now, and it's one of the prime spices of life (in fact, it may be the way out of our epidemic doldrums)! One example of this pathetic reality is the very man who fronted the `Mats, Paul Westerberg, who now appears content to be a pretty-boy cynic recycling the same minor chords into the same tired laments. No need to start drinking again, but Jesus! Try something new and scary, buddy! And when's the last time you and your friends played the same record over and over and over and over during the course of a few days, `til you knew every lyric, every vocal nuance, every instrumental break? The Replacements delivered three of those in a row, Let It Be (`84), Tim (`85), and Pleased to Meet Me (`87), perhaps the greatest string of consecutive “soul of rock and roll” releases since the Stones' heyday. Who today can brag such a steady flow of wisdom and holy foolishness? Such a natural understanding of and feel for...The Rawk? Who?</div> <div>      Finally, with conformity running rampant in the industry and nary a big shot beyond Rage and Earle and Mos Def (and are they really big shots?) giving two shits about the disgrace We have become, our whole danged congregation could do a WHOLE heckuva lot worse than to reinvestigate the work of a SoCal trio who merely broke every rule of rock song structure and length while becoming (almost from their git-go, which was roughly the same as Reagan's) rock and roll's best political band while not letting their absolutely monstrous musical chops keep them from making punk rock....the Minutemen! The most liberating musical moment of my life may have come when a buddy spun their “Punch Line” EP for me while we were antsily awaiting a road trip to Dallas to see the Clash for the first time (Fort Smith, `82). Hard-charging rhythm `n' lead guitar, popping, bucking-bronc bass, drumming straight from Beefheart's avant-jazz woodshed, hollered vocals....and before I could take in the shock of the first song being over (51 seconds!), the second was already halfway downfield! I was already a punk rock convert, already had some free jazz under my belt, had developed a fledgling political sensibility (with some knowledge of how we were getting dicked by the “Great Communicator”), and dug modern poetry quite a bit, but I'd never dreamed it could all be synthesized by three regular guys from San Pedro. By the time my friend had flipped the record and the title song's line “...when they found the body of General George Armstrong Custer/general, patriot, and Indian fighter/...he died with shit in his pants” had shattered my cranium, it was clear: this was the direction we (the seeds that have grown into The First Church and its brother-site, The Rawk) had to go! Through three more EPs, a jam-packed (and seldom wasteful) double-album, and a final LP which boldly struck out into even more surprising directions, we watched flabbergasted as Watt, Boon, and Hurley wrote sharper, clearer songs (45 on the double set!) that continued to challenge Reagan and Amerika on their own turf without being boring or pretentious, learned to play even more tightly and adventurously, fucked around with melody and extended song length and acoustic instruments and didn't get burned, stayed true to the essence of rock and roll while bending and breaking its rules, even wrote the ultimate “rock and roll changed my life” song (“History Lesson, Part 2”). Just pocket-tee and jeans-wearin' regular guys like us (all three of these bands knocked down the fashion wall between fan and “rock star”), working day jobs but landing direct hits on the Enemy Within: “Little Man With a Gun in His Hand,” “Split Red,” “Dream Told By Moto,” “Vietnam,” “West Germany,” “This Ain't No Picnic,” “The Cheerleaders,” “Big Stick,” “Courage.” A five-year rocket-like ascent...that just as quickly was over when guitarist/writer/bellower/force of nature D. Boon was snuffed out in an accident on the highway. Ain't nobody picked up the baton that was left rolling across the pavement. If not now--when?</div> <div>      Do what you have to do to keep the spirit of these bands alive, not only in your memory and ear, but in active reality. I truly believe it's one way out of a bind that's really not much more than a big, wet paper bag. Nostalgia? Not hardly.</div> <div> Just a history lesson we've been skipping out on.</div> <bR> <div> <B><U>Selected Discography for the Impossibly Benighted</U></B></div> <bR> <div> <I><U>Husker Du </U></I></div> <div> Everything Falls Apart (Reflex EP) </div> <div> Metal Circus (SST EP) </div> <div> Zen Arcade (SST)* </div> <div> “Eight Miles High” (SST 45) </div> <div> New Day Rising (SST) </div> <div> Candy Apply Grey (Warner Brothers) </div> <div> The Living End (Warner Brothers)</div> <div> *”Like a Rolling Stone,” fleshed out into a concept album!</div> <bR> <div> <I><U>Replacements </U></I></div> <div> Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash (Twin/Tone) </div> <div> The Replacements Stink (Twin/Tone EP) </div> <div> Let It Be (Twin/Tone) </div> <div> Tim (Sire) </div> <div> Pleased to Meet Me (Sire)</div> <bR> <div> <I><U>Minutemen </U></I></div> <div> Post-Mersch, Volumes 1 and 2 (SST) </div> <div> Double Nickels on the Dime (SST) </div> <div> Three-Way Tie (for Last) (SST)</div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>