In the summer of 1986, about one month after I turned 16 years old, I found myself having emergency toe surgery in an Urgent Care clinic after having spent the better part of a day chasing one of my heroes, an obtuse and mercurial singer-songwriter named Larry Norman, around Estes Park Colorado. It remains one of the strangest, and most inspiring and instructive days of my life.

 

The day started with a shock in a shower house. My family was on our way home from Salt Lake City to the Chicago suburbs and had stopped to spend the night at a KOA campground in Estes Park. My brother and I had actually slept outside the night before, watching a staggering number of shooting stars cross the sky. We never saw that kind of sky in the suburbs. It was so bright I could barely stand to close my eyes. I was afraid I’d miss something important. The next morning, in the shower, I was beyond stunned to be greeted cheerily by the sudsy gentleman in the stall next to mine.

 

“Well hey there, John! Fancy meeting you here.”

 

It was Mr. Brady, my geometry teacher from Glenbard East High School, 1014 miles away.

 

I almost fell over. I’m not sure I could even verbalize my confusion. What was he doing there? Then he asked me something that really made my head spin.

 

“I’m assuming you saw the Larry Norman concert last night.”

 

!

 

What? Mr. Brady knew who Larry Norman was? Mr. Brady just mentioned Larry Norman to me, a thousand miles away from home, and… wait… LARRY NORMAN PLAYED A CONCERT HERE?!

 

I stammered a bit more, assured my teacher that I had no idea what he was talking about and that we just happened to be camping for the night, but that the important thing was that I really needed to immediately know everything about where this Larry Norman concert had happened. He proceeded to explain to me that Larry had done a solo concert the night before as part of a sort of festival or conference at the YMCA camp just a couple miles away. “It was amazing,” he said.

 

I rushed out of the shower, soap not completely rinsed from my hair, and beat a path to our campsite where I proceeded to speed talk through the strange events of the still early morning to my parents.

 

“LarryNormanisinthistownandIneedtogoRIGHTNOWandtrytomeethimbecauseheisTHEBESTARTISTEVERandIjustHAVETOASKhimaboutsomeofhissongsandIwanttodowhathedoesandmaybegoontourandbehisroadieorsomethingsocanyoutakemetotheYMCAcampgroundRIGHTNOWBEFOREHELEAVES….” And then maybe I took a breath.

 

Now, something else was going on, and had been for a few months. The big toe on my right foot had an ingrown toenail that looked like something from a Saturday Matinee “Creature Feature.” It had actually been infected for months, s. I had been putting some medication drops on it, but it wasn’t working at all. It looked as if a purple leech with a runny nose was clinging to the edge of my toenail. I changed the bandage a couple times a day, but it hurt like the devil. If I bumped my toe on anything it bled profusely. I bought cheap socks because I bled through so many I just ended up throwing them away. And somehow I kept this whole disgusting, painful ordeal hidden from everyone. I spent most of the Spring and Summer of ’86 in serious pain. When I focused my willpower I could even manage to walk almost normally.

 

My parents, who were both completely supportive of my new obsession with obscure, underground, countercultural, Jesus-focused, rock, folk, and alternative music, asked me to repeat myself a bit more slowly, but once they understood what was going on, and confirmed that the information given to me in the shower was actually from my real geometry teacher and not a hallucination, my then step-dad (he later adopted me, so now he’s just dad) offered to go ahead and take me Larry hunting. We finished our breakfast and the two of us set off.

 

When I think back now, I’m actually pretty amazed that he agreed to do that. Whatever it was that caused him to say yes, I’m sure glad he did. Off we rolled! We  soon found the campground and proceeded to move from building to building, until I approached someone with a clipboard who seemed like the kind of person with answers.

 

“Do you know where I might find Larry Norman?”

 

Much to my surprise, the lovely woman didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned with my fandom. “I’m pretty sure his room was in that building over there,” she said, pointing to what I think was a sort of lodge. Off we went.

 

The more excited I got about finding Larry the less I focused on hiding the pain in my foot. I started to limp. My dad asked me what was wrong but I brushed him off. I told him it was nothing. We made it to the lodge, asked around, and actually found out which floor Larry’s room was on. When I found someone who may have been a maintenance person, however, he told me that he was pretty sure Larry had already checked out. “You might catch him down where they eat their meals,” he offered.

 

Off we ran.

 

The YMCA of the Rockies is an incredible facility. The buildings were spread out, surrounded by mountains and trees. The weather was beautiful. But I could not possibly have cared less. I was on a mission. I barreled through the place on my way to a building that may have been where the artists were fed and watered. My limp was getting worse. Dad asked about it again. “It’s nothing,” I lied. “I just have a sore toe.”

 

We found the designated space, and another person sitting behind a table with a clipboard and a stack of papers. She looked to have even more answers. “Do you know where I might find Larry Norman”? I asked breathlessly.

 

“Oh,” she said with a sincere note of disappointment that I can still hear, 32 years later. “You just missed him. They just left to take him to the airport.”

 

“OK Dad,” I said instantly, “I guess we’re going to the airport!” Unfortunately that’s where our search had to end. The airport was over an hour away. My chance was gone. Larry was gone. The moment had passed. My foot was killing me.

 

Since we were there anyway, and no one seemed to care that we didn’t have tickets, we checked out a couple of concerts. I saw a girl I recognized and then realized it was Crystal Lewis (I had just met her at Cornerstone a month earlier.) She was in a rockabilly band called Wild Blue Yonder. I talked to her for a few minutes. Dad was helping me make the most of a devastatingly close call with Larry Norman, but as cool as it was to talk to a cute girl, I was really heartbroken to have missed my chance to meet Larry Norman. That’s how big a fan I was.

 

As we were heading back to the van, though, dad asked one more time, “Seriously, what is going on with your foot?”

 

In my grief I had forgotten to hide the limp.

 

He took it a step further. “Sit down. Take your shoe off. I want to see that thing.”

 

He wasn’t kidding. There was no brushing him off this time. All the months of hiding my toe, all the careful bandaging, all the bloody socks stashed deep in people’s trashcans, were about to be exposed.

 

When he saw the infection he was truly surprised. And worried. I could tell that it was more serious than I had thought. He told me that the infection was so bad he needed to take me to an emergency room. “People can lose their toes over things like this,” I remember him saying. Suddenly there was something way more important going on than finding Larry Norman. I felt like an idiot. I actually got scared. What was I thinking? I wanted to cry, but I don’t think I did.

 

We found an Urgent Care clinic somewhere nearby and the doctor performed a sort of brutal surgery on my toe. I’m pretty sure I had never felt that kind of pain before in my life. Even after they numbed the toe, the rest of my foot and lower leg seemed to fight the procedure. They dug out the rebellious bit of toenail, cut out the infected flesh, and plugged up the hole. I was bandaged up and sent away with detailed instructions for cleaning it when we got home. It took a couple of weeks to heal, but it turned out that the doctor failed to kill a piece of nail bed properly (he was not a podiatrist after all.) So, to this day, I have a tiny piece of toenail that grows upward out of that side of my toenail. I have to trim it back or it will snag my socks, but otherwise it causes me no problems. It does, however, serve as a permanent reminder of that bizarre day in Colorado.

 

Last year a book on Larry Norman’s life was released. Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music, by Gregory Alan Thornbury (Convergent) generated more mainstream buzz than I would have ever expected a book like this could. The subtitle, “Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock” seemed interesting, if a bit curious to me. The blurbs, from an impressive list of authors and artists, were enthusiastic (as blurbs are want to be.) The jacket copy was even more tantalizing, and worrisome. “The riveting, untold story of the ‘Father of Christian Rock’ and the conflicts that launched a billion dollar industry at the dawn of America’s culture wars.”

 

Interesting. The “untold” part is certainly a tall promise to fill. Much of Larry’s story has certainly been told. What new information would Thornbury unveil? And what’s all this about connecting Larry to the culture wars? That last bit seemed to be what drove the curiosity of the media most. In the early interviews, including a very impressive feature on NPR’s All Things Considered, Thornbury makes some excellent points about the difference between what the word “evangelical” meant in the mid 70s, when Larry was at the height of his powers, and what it means in the age of Trump. With the exception of mentioning that Vice President Mike Pence became a “Born Again” at a Christian festival (Icthus) at which Larry appeared (along with many other artists) in the late 70s, there really is no direct connection between what Larry was doing and the current genre known as “Contemporary Christian Music,” let alone the modern right wing political movement. Thornbury’s Washington Post article, which seemed clearly designed to promote his book, draws an excellent contrast between the socially conscious evangelicalism of the 60s and 70s and the militaristic, and materialistic version today. But other than high-level bio points there was nothing new for Larry fans to chew on.

 

It’s always exciting for a flurry of awareness to dust up around a tragically overlooked artist from the past. It’s also frustrating when the pictures that emerge are fractional, at best. With a character as enigmatic, inspiring, and troublesome as Larry Norman was suddenly being talked about in major media, I was both thrilled, and nervous. When I heard about a new, scholarly, carefully crafted book on Larry’s life, however, I became more hopeful. When I heard that said book would be sourced completely from Larry’s original archives and materials and not from any conversations with others who were involved, my expectations sank a bit.

 

That’s because I’m not sure that Larry was a faithful witness to his own story.

 

As I believe I have adequately confessed, I’m a huge Larry Norman fan. I make no pretense to objectivity here. He had an outsized influenced on me musically and spiritually. I have been fascinated by him since I was a little kid, and remain so to this day. But that does not mean that I need to imagine him as some kind of saint. I collected his records, poured over his linear notes, learned his songs, counted his lyrics, mimicked his style, and studied his influences. Over the years, though, I heard more and more stories that revealed a darker side. Larry framed it all as persecution. I accepted that, for a while. Then I got to experience Larry first hand.

 

(This article is continued, with more commentary on the Thornbury book, and details from my interactions with Larry throughout the 90s – as well as the true account of the day my band got to back him up on the Mainstage at the Cornerstone Festival in 2001 HERE. )