A recent interview with David Di Sabatino.

[I need to replace this image with one of my own. All apologies to the copyright holder.]

Larry Norman died back in 2008. It seemed like a big deal to me at the time. I had followed his life and music since I was in Grade 7 and it really shocked me that he had finally, actually died. I mean, he'd sung about his impending death so much that it was kind-of weird that it actually happened. I planned to go to a little open-mic tribute show at The House of James in Abbotsford, but was thwarted by unique circumstances. I intended to play one of his lesser-known blues numbers, "When the Son Comes Back."

For all intents and purposes, I was a fan. I think I really enjoyed Larry Norman's music for the most part, or at least I enjoyed collecting it and following him. Some of his songs are excellent; a bunch of them are pretty good; lots of them are laughably bad. Late in his life, he released five or six albums a year on CD-R and I was able to generally keep up with the releases until I got married. Admittedly, most of these albums were disappointing, but I have to admit they were fun to collect.

After a while, I started collecting the albums more for the artwork and the liner notes than for the music itself. Music-wise, I expected disappointment: some raggle-taggle collection of outtakes that didn't deserve to be released in the first place, or perhaps a live concert with a bunch of the same songs released on ten other albums. He seemed to have a mission to release everything he put to tape, even the most unsuitable bootlegs, and often alluded in his newsletters that it was hard to tell what type of music his fans wanted. Apparently there are piles of tapes still sitting at his estate in Salem, still waiting to be digitized.

Recently, on Christian Nightmares, I read an interview with David Di Sabatino, the director of Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman. I saw the film a few years ago and wasn't impressed. I felt it was cheap and sloppy, extremely long, and obsessively shill-ish. Moreso, it seemed as self-indulgent as Larry's own liner notes: it made a big, big deal out of comparatively minor events. The film prompted loads of Internet and real-life drama for diehard Larry Norman fans. I even wrote a negative review of the film on Amazon.

But I couldn't shake a bunch of the film's accusations, largely because I felt he indirectly confirmed them by his many defensive and aggressive allegations in his extensive liner notes, interviews, and newsletters. Even when I was in high school, I could read between the lines and infer that there was more going on than he let on.

So, in case you're interested in the interesting Larry Norman story, although I can't recommend the film, I do recommend the interviews at Christian Nightmares. Here's Part 1: Here's Part 2. I feel that this interview is much more balanced than what came out in the film. Where the film came off as vendetta-like, these interviews come off as literate. Di Sabatino keeps it personal, describes his experiences clearly, and delineates the differences between his facts and inferences.

Here's one part that I appreciated, simply because it confirmed to me that somebody else read through the liner notes in a similar way:

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Plausible deniability was woven into the fabric of everything that Larry ever did. It was as if he not only did these destructive things, but also made sure to have a paper trail of back-story for the big courtroom drama that he felt was always around the corner where he could finally explain away everything that he ever did, show all the evidence and everybody would finally see that none of it was his fault. When Larry died, I think Randy Stonehill nailed it by stating that, “I think Larry was exhausted from always having to spin his own story.” I think that is what you saw in that website, a guilty man who sang about and around God’s grace, but not able to just confess his wrongdoings and accept it for himself. The tragedy of that is beyond words to comprehend. And again, that makes me very sad. But on the other hand, when he crossed over from victim to perpetrator, that is a line where compassion dries up really quickly. 

And I appreciate what he says about being a "fan."

No, I am not a Larry Norman fan, not for a long time, since I met him back in 1990. We had him to the house, and my mother came to me and said some very unflattering things about him, and I couldn’t disagree with her assessment. (My mother has character radar.) The music means little to me anymore. But I am too close to it and have been personally affected by him, and that colors my ability to listen to it the same way as I had. I needed to figure this out because I was curious, and so I did. And I had my “aha” moment where I understood, and had compassion for what he had experienced. But after you cross that line, you lose whatever fascination the music held for you because now you know way too much about what was going on behind the scenes. But I hope that isn’t the case for everyone. What is that warning, keep your heroes at a distance?

It's hard to say whether I'm a "fan" anymore. I only have five or six of his songs on my phone and I usually skip them when they appear in the shuffle. As much as I try to enjoy listening to the So Long Ago the Garden album (which is an excellent album) or scattered songs, interviews like this one have just tainted his image too much to really enjoy the music. And that's kind-of sad because I know his music brought me joy so many times before.

But here's a little version of one of his songs that I recorded a few years ago. His songs weren't all that bad. I just can't enjoy them anymore.