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345 Pages·2018·29.989 MB·English
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THE DEV IL’S MUSIC THE DEV IL’S MUSIC How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll Randall J. Stephens Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts London, England 2018 Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Stephens, Randall J., 1973– author. Title: The dev il’s music : how Christians inspired, condemned, and embraced rock ’n’ roll / Randall J. Stephens. Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038288 | ISBN 9780674980846 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Rock m usic— Religious aspects— Chris tian ity. | Rock music— History and criticism. | Rock music— United States— History and criticism. | Christian rock music— United States— History and criticism. | Fundamentalism— United States— History. Classification: LCC ML3921.8.R63 S74 2018 | DDC 306.4/84260973— dc23 LC rec ord available at https:// lccn.loc . gov / 2017038288 Jacket photograph: Explo ’72 Dallas, Texas by Paul Slade, 1972 © Paris March/Getty Images Jacket design: Tim Jones CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 Pentecostalism and Rock ’n’ Roll in the 1950s 27 2 Race, Religion, and Rock ’n’ Roll 65 3 The Beatles, Chris tian ity, and the Conservative Backlash 102 4 The Advent of Jesus Rock 146 5 The Fundamentalist Reaction to Christian Rock 190 Epilogue 236 Notes 251 Acknowl edgments 319 Index 323 INTRODUCTION In 2014, the rock ’n’ roll and country m usic legend Jerry Lee Lewis was seventy- nine years old. He had entered a quiet, more reflective phase of his life. And he was ready to talk a little about it. Somehow, he had survived, whereas other first-g eneration dynamos like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and so many others had passed away. The Ferriday, Louisiana, native’s sensational career, starting in the mid-1950s, had been marked by a frenetic stage show, wild pounding on the piano, and songs that r ose to a blistering crescendo. His 1957 hit song “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” rose to number three on the pop chart and topped both the country and the rhythm and blues charts. The follow-up, “ Great Balls of Fire,” scored similar success. But in the harsh glare of the public spotlight, Lewis also suffered the indignities of marital scandal, came under the watchful eye of the Internal Revenue Ser vice, had run- ins with the law, and succumbed to drugs and al- cohol. One of his sons drowned in a swimming pool. Another died in a jeep accident.1 His c areer suffered a particularly strange blow on November 23, 1976. The Killer, a nickname that stuck, showed up at the gates of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in the m iddle of the night, waving a gun and shouting obscenities. He wanted to see the hermit King. Elvis did not go out to meet the maniacal Lewis. Instead, police came to arrest him at three in the morning. “Talk about rock- and- roll depravados,” cracked the critic Nick Tosches, “Jerry Lee makes them all look like Wayne Newton.” He dubbed the performer a “Baptist Dionysos aflame with glorious cow- ardice and self- killing guilt.”2 Late in life, however, it seemed as though Jerry Lee wanted to set things right. “I put God first now, always,” an older, chastened Jerry Lee told Patrick Doyle of Rolling Stone magazine. “I pray all the time, 2 THE DEVIL’S MUSIC really. I do a lot of what’s required,” he confessed. “I pay my tithe offer- ings at the Church of God, in Cleveland, Tennessee. That’s how I was raised.” That pentecostal denomination, headquartered in the hills west of the Blue Ridge mountains, had once counted the young Johnny Cash among its faithful.3 Try as he might, Lewis could not keep the hounds of guilt at bay. “I was always worried whether I was going to heaven or hell,” he confided to a Guardian journalist in 2015. “I still am. I worry about it before I go to bed; it’s a very serious situation. I mean you worry, when you breathe your last breath, where are you going to go?” He regularly hinted that he felt torn between good and evil, God and the devil. His pente- costal roots ran deep. So in 1979, when Rolling Stone magazine’s Robert Palmer asked him, “[Is it true] that you believe you’re a sinner and going to hell for playing rock & roll,” Lewis fired back, “Yep.” “I know the right way,” he replied emphatically. “I was raised a good Christian. But I couldn’t make it. . . . Too weak, I guess.”4 Conservative Christians found the Killer’s life and actions objection- able, to say the least; however, they certainly agreed with him on some counts. Rock ’n’ roll was the devi l’s music. Indeed, Jerry Lee’s cousin, the pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Lee Swaggart, said as much from the pulpit. The two w ere close in their youth, along with another cousin, the future country singer Mickey Gilley. Swaggart liked to say that he and Jimmy Lee w ere almost like twin b rothers. They took in the m usic and the message of pentecostalism, the religion of the spirit, of signs and won ders. Neither completed high school. But what they lacked in formal training they more than made up for in charisma and stage pres- ence. As Jerry Lee made it big as a rock ’n’ roller, Jimmy Lee embarked on his preaching and music ministry career. In the 1970s and 1980s, the high-p rofile Assemblies of God minister was using his rock ’n’ roll cousin as a sermon illustration and a stern warning to youngsters and their parents.5 At a summer 1985 ser vice in New Haven, Connecticut, Swaggart made direct links between the satanic scourge of rock music and pen- tecostalism. He was ashamed to admit that his own religious tradition had helped produce the horrid music, he said as he paced furiously back and forth on a long stage. He was wearing his trademark large, square- framed glasses, and his blonde hair was styled into a conservative coif. INTRODUCTION 3 To dramatize his points, he spoke with a loud, staccato voice, elongating words like “pul- pit” with his southern drawl. Sweating under the harsh, bright stage lights he waved his open Bible high above his head. “My family started rock and roll!” he shouted to the quiet assembly of thou- sands and then paused for emphasis. “I d on’t say that with any glee! I don’t say it with any pomp or pride! I say it with shame and sad- ness, because I’ve seen the death and the destruction. I’ve seen the unmitigated misery and the pain. I’ve seen it!” His voice cracked with emotion. “I speak of experience,” he warned, pointing his index fin ger into the air. “My family— Jerry Lee Lewis, with Elvis Presley, with Chuck Berry . . . started rock and roll!”6 Such claims served a rhetorical point. And they worked well. The congregation clapped with approval while some wiped away tears, moved by his convincing words. Fi nally, the well- known evangelist concluded the event with an emotional call to repentance and an invitation to the altar.7 In t hese years other forms of repentance would be worked out in public rituals. A popu lar record- burning craze in the late 1970s and early 1980s had already made the moral outrage of Swaggart and other crusaders the stuff of national headlines. In early December 1980, Pastor LeRoy Peters, a Catholic- turned- fundamentalist Christian, or ga nized an anti- rock-’n’- roll rally. It was a quarter of a century since Jerry Lee and a host of other performers had fired the imagination of the country’s teena gers and sparked a moral panic. One hundred evangelicals gathered with the minister on a chilly night in Saint Paul, Minnesota, at Zion Christian Life Center. They came to smash and burn rock reco rds. The red- carpeted chapel was soon littered with their night’s work. Shouts of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord” rang out over the ruckus. They pulled the black vinyl reco rds out of their sleeves and snapped and cracked them with excitement. Scat- tered around their feet lay thousands of LP covers by American and En- glish bands and artists like the Ea gles, Donna Summer, Chicago, the Electric Light Orchestra, the Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, John Denver, and the Beach Boys.8 The glam metal band KISS was a favorite target of such holy rage. The group, decked out with its outlandish makeup and costumes, embodied all sorts of dev ilish tropes for evangelicals and fundamentalists. The band licensed plenty of kitschy merchandise, including trading cards,

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