ON THE face of it, Siniad O Connor s recent ordination as a Tridentine priestess might have seemed pretty GUBU, the latest out-there act of a rocker off her rocker, a woman desperately seeking something. But whatever about the theological legitimacy of Siniad s rebirth as Mother Bernadette (and that, as the man says, would be an ecumenical matter), her ordination conforms to a long and intriguing rock n roll tradition: that of identifying with Christ while rejecting the dogma of the orthodox church.
But then, music and (for want of a better, less Californianised word) spirituality have always been the yolk and white of the same egg. Indeed, it could be argued that music is nothing more or less than the purest, rawest expression of the human spirit, distilled perfectly in those timeless lines: Amazing grace/How sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me . . . Or, if you prefer a more recent but similarly elevating hymn, John Coltrane s A Love Supreme. (On the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church web site, you can find a homepage in honour of the saxophonist, set up by the Sisters Of Compassion Of The Holy Order Of Saint John The Divine. Therein, amongst numerous religious readings into the saxophonist s work, you ll find a theory which holds that his constant use of triplets during the late 50s was a deliberate reference to the Holy Trinity.)
And of course, we could trace the idea of music-as-prayer back to Pythagoras and his buddies on the Greek island of Santos circa the sixth century BC. The Pythagoreans reasoned that because the sun, moon and planets are so vast in size, they must make a hell of a racket while logging the groove of their orbits, reverberations that would constitute a cosmic symphony the Music of the Spheres, the rattle and hum of Creation itself, the monolithic throbbing of God s monochord. And so, in that age, musicians played not on the premise of expressing themselves, but their Maker.
But then, in his book Genesis Of A Music, hobo composer Harry Partch asserted that even the Pythagoreans were working on principles cogged from ancient Chinese, Egyptian and Babylonian cultures. In truth, if we really wanted to isolate the point where our species emitted that original Hallelujah!, we d have to rewind to the moment the first biped crawled out of the swamps and emitted a nodal, pantheistic croak in praise of his or her environment.
Since then, homo sapiens have chosen a bewildering array of churches in which to sing their chosen Lord s prayers. In the late 20th century alone, seekers of every stripe sought solace in a multiplicity of doctrines: The Beatles and the Maharishi, Madonna and the Kabbala, Jimmy Page and Aleister Crowley, Van Morrison and his flirtations with Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrianism and L. Ron Hubbard s Scientology sect, Faithless Maxi Jazz and Shoshu Buddhism, Leonard Cohen and Zen Monasticism, Michael Jackson and the Jehovah s Witnesses, New York rap collectives like Brand Nubian and the Wu Tang Clan s adherence to the quasi-Islamic 5 Per Cent Nation, and of course, last, but by no means least, good ol Christianity.
If you re a rock n roll disciple of Irish Catholic extraction, chances are you bought into music around about the same time as experiencing your first crisis of faith, between the ages of 10 and 13. The church know this, and shrewdly schedule the confirmation ceremony for pre-pubescence, just before that first tsunami of doubt comes crashing in. So, while the tongues of the holy spirit are dancing on the brows of doubting young Thomases, the tongues of musical icons are moistening their ears. Both, it could be argued, are merely different emissaries of the one belief system.
As we retreat from religion, our ancient opiate, there are bound to be withdrawal symptoms, Salman Rushdie writes in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The habit of worship is not easily broken. In the museums, the rooms with the icons are crowded. We always did prefer our iconic figures injured, stuck full of arrows or crucified upside down; we need them flayed and naked, we want to watch their beauty crumble slowly and to observe their narcissistic grief. Not in spite of their faults but for their faults we adore them, worshipping their weaknesses, their pettinesses, their bad marriages, their substance abuse, their spite.
Consider the similarities in symbolism and structure between Mass and the rock concert: the supplication, the giving over of the self to an omnipotent icon, the dry ice/incense, the passing of beers and joints like so many loaves and fishes. This fan, like so many, began going to gigs around the time he first started skiving off from mass a rock n roll show was merely new skin for a very old ceremony. Hark, the sound you hear at the back of this religion class is St. Colmcille muttering, Sing while you pray, and you pray twice . And beside him, Leonard Cohen testifies: Now I ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played and it pleased the Lord/But you don t really care for music, do ya?/It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth/The minor fall, the major lift/The baffled king composing Hallelujah!
So, while the term rock n roll might ve been coined after the act of copulation, the music itself was conceived under a Godspell, the wails of the Appalachians, originally imported from those hotbeds of religious fundamentalism, Scotland and Ireland. The Devil s music originated in heaven, and virtually all the founding fathers and mothers of rock n roll, the original hellfire club, wrestled with a metaphysical riddle: How to live like a heathen, yet sing like a seraph? Or, as Tori Amos so succinctly put it, How can I be a sacred being and a hot pussy? Well, that s a pretty heavy question, but consider this: even Jesus preferred fast company.
In his prologue to The Last Temptation, Nikos Kazantzakis confessed, My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. Within me are the dark, immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
Kazantzakis could have been describing the life-throes experienced by performers attempting to reconcile myriad dualities and dichotomies: God and the Devil, pimps and priests, sex and the spirit, heroin and holy water, the sacred and the profane. The Greek writer s arena is the same one in which the bloodsport of rock n roll is enacted, where a man like Jerry Lee Lewis petitions the lord with prayer, yet lives like the last gunslinger out of Gomorrah.
The Killer (a Pentecostal thrown out of Eden, or at least, an ecclesiastical assembly, for playing My God Is Real in a boogie-woogie stylee) has lived out one of the most Biblically sordid sagas in popular music, a grisly tale of child brides, bigamy, suspected murder, shootings of band members, drugs, alcohol, madness and religious mania. The fear o God is the fire that keeps Jerry Lee s engine stoked legend has it that the singer despaired, I have The Devil in me! at the original Sun recording sessions for Great Balls Of Fire . And Lewis, of course, is the double first cousin of preacher Jimmy Swaggart, scandalised when caught beating his meat and photographing $10-an-hour prostitutes in a room in New Orleans red-light district.
He and Jerry Lee are incredible, a contemporary Cain and Abel if you like, only you re not sure which is which, testified Adam Fields, director of the Lewis biopic Great Balls Of Fire. Actor Dennis Quaid, who played The Killer in that film, added, Let s just say Jerry Lee Lewis has a very close personal relationship with God. I mean, haven t you ever felt that you were damned?
When Nick Kent called Lewis on it in 1989, the singer replied, You think ol Saint Peter s gonna swing open them pearly gates for a crazy old rock n rollin cat like me? See, it s like Satan, he s got a power next to God. He s seated right next to im. Satan, he s the Archangel, he s like the Programme Director or somethin . . . Seems like the two o them are always playing some damn game against each other, using me as their pawn. That s what it feels like anyway.
If The Killer, like Job, felt like the fall guy in some twisted celestial endgame, he wasn t alone. Little Richard was also raised Pentecostal, but got booted out of his family home when he was 14 for homosexual activities . Throughout his life he would zig-zag from rock n roll to theology and back again, before reconciling the two in the broad-minded Universal Remnant Church Of God.
Then of course, there s Elvis. Over a decade before John Lennon uttered his infamous Bigger Than Jesus quip, Elvis Aaron Presley assumed the mantle of The King, extracting the bad seed of rock n roll from gospel standards. Fast forward through two decades, zipping past titles as apparently diametrically opposed as You re The Devil In Disguise and The Wonder Of You , and we find Presley suffering his own private Gethsemanes and Golgothas, flagellating himself with drugs and junk food, reading Corinthians and shooting at the TV in his Gracelands bolt-hole. Five years after The King s death, Sam Phillips would tell a gathering of fans that the most important events in the history of the USA were the births of Jesus and Elvis. Two years after that, Nick Cave would drape Presley in the myth of the returning Christ in Tupelo .
But if Elvis was The King, then Robert Johnson was Abe. And if, according to the hoary old myth, Johnson sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for a preternatural talent, songs like Hellhound On My Trail and Me And The Devil Blues shiver with as much mortal terror of the man above as the fire down below. Johnson died in 1938, poisoned by a jealous husband, leaving as his legacy the 29 commandments on which rock n roll was founded, primal chords of doom which would later clang through the work of the Rolling Stones, Roky Erikson, The Gun Club and 16 Horsepower (whose singer David Eugene Edwards, is, unsurprisingly, the spawn of a preacher man, as are Neil Hannon, Tori Amos, Toni Braxton, and Lemmy).
Then there was Hank Williams, a man who had one hell of a life (evoked in the cursed cry, When the Lord made me/He made a ramblin man ), but attempted to redress the balance by adopting the alter ego of a morally upstanding gospel testifier by the name of Luke The Drifter. And though Hank s plaintive yodels of Praise The Lord, I saw the light still ring as true as the Angelus, Chet Flippo s biography Your Cheatin Heart leads the casual reader to speculate that the only light the singer saw in his life was at the very end of it, his essence leaking out the back of a black Cadillac then speeding down the vortex to meet its Maker. Or perhaps, to descend upon the embryonic soul of Kurt Cobain, whose Fatherless howl could uncannily echo Hank s own. And, lest we forget, Nirvana appropriated The Vaselines wry rewording of an old Protestant hymn Jesus Don t Want Me For A Sunbeam on Unplugged In New York.
Of course, country music and fundamentalism have always been intertwined: Nashville s second biggest industry (after insurance, but ahead of music) is the manufacturing of bibles. We re all familiar with the stereotype of the Stetson-headed, shit-kickin , good-book beatin , bigoted, homophobic yee-haw tooling down Route 666 in his rig, bawling along to the raydeeow (altogether now: I don t care if it rains or freezes/Long as I got my plastic Jesus/Ridin on the dashboard of my car. . . ). And while The Byrds drew a pretty gruesome cartoon of this guy in Drugstore Truck Drivin Man , they also covered the Louvin Brothers The Christian Life on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo in 1968, just when it seemed like that good ol religion was gettin hi-jacked by faggot longhair liberals recasting the Good Lord as some commie hippie dropout in shows like Jesus Christ Superstar.
Speaking of The Louvins, in a world of a la carte Catholics and pussyfootin Proddies, the music of hardcore troubadours Charles and Ira, provides a strange kind of comfort. By 1958, this award winning close harmony gospel/country duo had a string of hit singles and albums like Nearer My God To Thee and Tragic Songs Of Life to their name, but it was their best known or if you prefer, most notorious collection Satan Is Real (the title tune was inspired by an old man s outburst during a revival service in Alabama) that pushed them into the ashen wastes of extremism. Friends of Ira Louvin maintained that he d always felt guilty about not fulfilling a calling as a preacher, but the ghostly Pentecostal imagery in songs like Are You Afraid To Die , The Kneeling Drunkard s Plea and The Drunkard s Doom suggest that the guy was merely delivering the Good News from the honky tonks rather than the pulpit.
And if the songs were made of stern stuff, that album cover was extraordinary, depicting the brothers in their best white linen suits, posing before a huge image of Satan, surrounded by the fires of hell. Charles Louvin recalls, The devil was actually twelve feet tall, and built out of plywood. We went to this rock quarry and then took old tires and soaked them in kerosene, got them to burn good. It had just started to sprinkle rain when we got that picture taken. Those rocks, when they get hot, they blow up. They were throwing pieces of hot rock into the air.
Hellzapoppin ! the brothers barely escaped serious injury during the shoot, but escape they did, and the result was one of the most downright bizarre record sleeves ever to hit the shelves.
So, in this book of generations, Johnson begat Hank; and Hank begat Elvis; and Elvis begat Lennon and his brethren; and Lennon begat Lydon; and Lydon begat MacGowan, a self professed Irish Catholic Taoist who has been continually dogged by the Devil s Doberman.
As a child in Tipperary and London, Shane MacGowan experienced a rite that would anticipate the two most dominating influences in his life his studies of catechism were rewarded with bottles of stout. The best of the Tipperary man s songs swagger with the bravado of the damned, postcards from the beyond the point of no return: If I should fall from grace with God/Where no doctor can relieve me/If I m buried neath the sod/But the angels won t receive me/Let me go boys . . . let me go down in the mud where the rivers all run dry.
I love Irish Catholicism for its beauty, the beauty of the Mass, the rosary, Our Lady, MacGowan once told this writer. But I hate it for its teaching children about hell, y know what I mean? Frightening the hell out of people. Keeping them in their place. Bullying people in school, bullying them through using excommunication as a threat, and all the rest of it.
MacGowan s enduring fury at the Catholic church can probably be traced back to London when he was 14 years of age, and learned of an injustice perpetrated on his mother by a local priest. Describing a scenario which chillingly echoes that portrayed in Austin Clarke s poem The Redemptorist , the singer recounted that, She had been denied the sacraments communion and confession because she had to use the pill. The doctor had told her if she got pregnant again her and the baby would die. For 20 years, until the menopause came, the priest made her stand at the back during mass like a leper. Eventually she had a breakdown. Then I had a breakdown. But when I was 16 I got into acid and returned to my faith.
The drug/deity axis may be, discounting blessed wine, unheard of in orthodox Christianity, but in Rastafarian and Native American doctrines, the ingestion of weed and hallucinogenics are sacramental rites, no more, no less. MacGowan even wrote a 15-minute acid house epic entitled You ve Got To Connect Yourself in 1989, presaging the acid house country of the Alabama 3 by nine years.
The Bammies holy roller live shows and songs like Let s Go Back To Church at once celebrate the puritanical zeal of the American south and send up TV evangelists like Billy Graham. The band even published a promotional pamphlet entitled Loving You The Organ Of The First Presleyterian Church Of Elvis The Divine (UK), which included such pearls of wisdom as The Last Gospel As Revealed To Larry Love (Fragment XVII A Brief History Of Polysexuality), The Twelve Step Plan Explained (Step I: You Must Consider Yourself Powerless Under Me), How To Be A Pimp and I Went Ten Rounds With The Devil .
And speaking of ol Nick, for the Cave man (who served as a choirboy in his youth), the Old Testament provided a language with which to vent the misanthropic worldview he adopted during his Birthday Party years.
I found in the tough prose of the Old Testament . . . the voice of God and it was brutal and jealous and merciless, Cave wrote in his 1996 essay The Flesh Made Word. For every bilious notion I harboured about myself and the world, and there were a lot of those, there in the Old Testament was its equivalent leaping off the pages with its teeth bared. The God of the old Testament seemed a cruel and rancorous God and I loved the way He would wipe out entire nations at a whim. So it was the feeling I got from the Old Testament, of a pitiful humanity suffering beneath a despotic God, that began to leak into my lyric writing . . . all I had to do was walk on stage and open my mouth and let the curse of God roar through me. Flood, fire and frogs leapt out of my throat.
Perhaps what musicians find compelling about scripture is that it resounds with so many voices of dissent. The image of the doubting disciple berating God for abandoning him, for bailing out, is one that has preoccupied both Patti Smith and U2 s Bono. In the former s Privilege (Set Me Free) from Easter, she all but rails from the mountaintop, trying to harangue a response from the heavens: Hey lord I m waitin for you/Oh God I m waitin for you/Waitin to open your 98 wounds and bleed thee/Be thee/Lead me/Or LEAVE ME! These last words are not so much sung as bellowed with the fury of a woman spurned not by any ol man, but her very creator. Leave me something, she continues, in an old wives wail, Leave me somethin to live/Oh God give me somethin /A reason to liiiiive/I don t want no handouts/No, not sympathy/C mon, come and love me/C mon set me free/Set me FREE!
It s a livid, heretical performance.
David was the first blues singer, Bono told John Waters in October, 1993. As well as praising, he was there shouting at God you know: Where are you when we need you? . . . We re surrounded . . . Your people are starving! . . . Are you deaf? That type of thing. He d be wailing, this military mind, this poet-musician with enough faith to believe he had a deal with God . . . believed it enough to get angry when it looked like He wasn t coming through. (He) gets banished from the kingdom and is forced to hide out in some border-town cave, where in this blackest of black holes he pens his first psalm, a song about being abandoned by God. A blues song. It s from this moment the real journey begins. It s all there in the story of David sex, murder, faith, doubt, imagination . . . the blues.
At the time he gave that interview, Bono had already penned Wake Up Dead Man , which surfaced on Pop four years later as a bleak amplification of David s psalm, the last prayer of a man stuck in a Dock Boggs-like hole in the ground, waiting for God-O. Over an emaciated acoustic figure that suggests bones being bleached in the desert sun, the singer, sounding dispirited and weary, mumbles almost to himself, Jesus/Jesus help me/I m alone in this world/And a fucked up world it is too .
Behind this, a wailing vocal sample from Besrodna Nevesta by Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares verges on the subliminal, like newsflash cutting through apocalyptic shash on a TV screen, like Frank Black s visions of the viral epidemic in Millennium. Then, The Edge s spaghetti western guitar and Larry/Adam s lumbering rhythms conjure a post-war terrain where only the amoral survive, as the singer, his voice edged with a panicky despair, attempts to rouse his unresurrected avatar, a tragi-comic (but mostly tragic) replay of Ricky Schroder and The Champ: Wake up, wake up, dead man!
Of course, those with the insolence to provoke their God must be prepared to take a fall. Both Bono and Patti Smith have sustained injuries while negotiating the darker corners of their live performances the former broke his shoulder during Exit , the murder meditation that made up a third of the Heart Of Darkness section of their live set in the late 80s. Smith s number came up during Ain t It Strange in Tampa, Florida in 1976, when she lost her balance and fell ten feet from the stage, breaking at least two vertebrae at the top of her neck, ending up in traction for months. The words in the song are directed totally to God, she reflected later, C mon God, make a move. I don t even understand now why, but I did fall during a very significant part of the song, you can take it either as a technological boo-boo, or, that there is a lesson to be learned . . . n
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