Overview
Mention the record album Jesus Sound Explosion to a typical child of the 1970s and that person is likely to picture one of those collections that used to be shown on TV (Call now! Not available in stores!). When Mark Curtis Anderson spied a copy in a junk store a few years ago, he knew just what he'd found, and the memories of growing up in a Baptist minister's family came flooding forth.
The title of Anderson's memoir is a nod to the live concert album from Explo '72, a kind of evangelical Woodstock emceed by Billy Graham. Explo's crowds of 100,000-plus signaled that enterprising evangelicals were discovering how to use rock and roll in the marketplace of conversion. Anderson was eleven that year, too young to be at Explo but old enough to wish he was. Other preachers' kids may have gazed out at the wider world and craved its movies, clothes, or toys, but he wanted its music. And not just the Jesus-rocker fare of Explo's Armageddon Experience or Children of Truth, but the real stuff, too.
Jesus Sound Explosion recalls Anderson's quest for worldliness-through-rock as he came of age under the gaze, he often sensed, of his father's entire congregation. All of the backsliding and revival, idealism and disillusionment one would expect is here, told with delightfully understated humor and set against the sounds of The Guess Who, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bruce Springsteen. Here is a knowing look back on a time when Jesus Christ Superstar climbed the pop charts, The Cross and the Switchblade hit the big screen, and anxious parents played their kids' records backwards in search of hidden messages from Satan.
Synopsis
Mention the record album Jesus Sound Explosion to a typical child of the 1970s and that person is likely to picture one of those collections that used to be shown on TV (Call now! Not available in stores!). When Mark Curtis Anderson spied a copy in a junk store a few years ago, he knew just what he'd found, and the memories of growing up in a Baptist minister's family came flooding forth.
The title of Anderson's memoir is a nod to the live concert album from Explo '72, a kind of evangelical Woodstock emceed by Billy Graham. Explo's crowds of 100,000-plus signaled that enterprising evangelicals were discovering how to use rock and roll in the marketplace of conversion. Anderson was eleven that year, too young to be at Explo but old enough to wish he was. Other preachers' kids may have gazed out at the wider world and craved its movies, clothes, or toys, but he wanted its music. And not just the Jesus-rocker fare of Explo's Armageddon Experience or Children of Truth, but the real stuff, too.
Jesus Sound Explosion recalls Anderson's quest for worldliness-through-rock as he came of age under the gaze, he often sensed, of his father's entire congregation. All of the backsliding and revival, idealism and disillusionment one would expect is here, told with delightfully understated humor and set against the sounds of The Guess Who, Yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Bruce Springsteen. Here is a knowing look back on a time when Jesus Christ Superstar climbed the pop charts, The Cross and the Switchblade hit the big screen, and anxious parents played their kids' records backwards in search of hidden messages from Satan.
Kirkus Reviews
Charming, thoughtful debut memoir of a Baptist adolescent's drift towards earthly temptation. As Anderson (Writing/Univ. of Minnesota General College) tells it, his years as a drummer, record-store clerk, and all-around secular slacker in the Minneapolis music scene sharply contrasted with his earlier life as an evangelical minister's son who was exhorted to live "in the world, but not of it." Young Mark aspired to the sanctity expected of the pastor's family, yet was fascinated by what his disapproving parents termed "jazzy music": rock 'n' roll from Elvis onward. He was further confused in the early 1970s by the "Jesus Movement," which sought to fuse the spiritual highs of born-again Christianity with the earthly trappings of the counterculture. Anderson watched Billy Graham's "Explo '72" on TV ("It was so me, so where I wanted to be") and was entranced by itinerant longhaired Jesus freaks, whose tales of accepting Christ were backed by guitar and drums. His fervor made his teenage transgressions complex and poignant: he and his friends smoked pot, drank, and engaged in marathon heavy petting at their strict Baptist summer camp, knowing they'd return to the true path from such backsliding. Strangely, Anderson backslid less once his father was transferred to California, where he fell in with some fundamentalist surfer-boys. Yet later, he became alienated from the faith's severe dichotomy between sinners and the saved, demonstrated at a 1990s reunion when one friend castigated him for his sister's insufficiently Christ-centered wedding. Anderson effectively employs a quiet Midwestern humor; his understanding of how transient pop culture can affect personal watersheds reinforces hisincremental portrait of a young rocker tempted and transformed. Deeply concerned with discerning larger communities, his narrative is solidly rather than flashily written. While the slow pace may put off some readers, others will find genuine insight in the author's bemused grappling over time with his strict childhood faith. Unusual, worthy of consideration, and admirable for the spiritual questions it raises.