Feast at Easter: Secular Artists, Sacred Songs

You know, there's ten trillion songs about Christmas - most of them awful - but where's the love for Easter? You'd figure there'd be more, and not just the obligatory Peter Cottontail kind of thing.

Maybe I'm just feeling extra wistful today, since Easter - and April - was a very big deal for me when I was a kid. 

Read this, from The Endless American Midnight:

When I was a kid I really tuned into the whole Holy Week thing. Aside from Christmas it seemed to be the only time of the year when there was an actual story being told, a compelling focus for all the ritual and sermonizing we had to put up with all year. Sunday School met in the chapel for much of Lent into Easter, and the chapel was like a secret, hidden little mini-church in which kids ruled.

But there was something else that struck me about Holy Week. There were these little vent windows in the stained glass displays and they were usually left open, since the chapel tended to get awfully warm. And I would sit by the window and take in the intoxicating-- and irreducibly pagan-- wholeness of Spring. 

When I was a kid I spent most of my playtime outdoors, often exploring the woods behind our neighborhood. I walked to school until I got to 9th grade. I tuned into the sights, sounds, and perhaps most importantly, the smells of the natural world in a way adults are incapable of. I was able to process all of this sensory input in a way I would never be able to again, because everything was rich, new, unknown and alive.

Spring also meant baseball, which we residents of Red Sox Country took as religion. We'd play until the cold hurt your hands when the bat connected, then mess around with a football for a little while until the ponds froze and it was time for hockey. Baseball meant little league, when Watson Park turned into a city of kids every evening. It was there that I was initiated into the deeper mysteries of Spring.

But Easter was also a story of resurrection, a story that long predates Christianity. It's probably one of the oldest stories we have. But it's also a story of the Dead.

I understood the resurrection story, its power and its emotional appeal. When I was eight years old I lost someone very close to me, someone who died far too young. And died violently. It happened three days after Christmas, just because Fate is a fucking sadist. (I still remember playing with my new GI Joe training center in the basement when my mother called me upstairs to break the news).  

In many ways, my childhood died then and I spent far too much time trying to claw it back later.

This boy was touched by the gods, everyone thought so. Even adults recognized the power of his charisma, his natural charm. He was a natural born leader, other kids just naturally fell in behind him. But most of all, he was a genuinely good person who understood his power over others but never tried to exploit it.    

His death tore a hole through my family. Things I took for granted were going to slowly change, and something important was going to be taken away from me. So his death wasn't just a single tragedy, a focal point in time. It was to have repercussions for my entire human ecosystem. 

The dead boy haunted my dreams for years. You know how it is - you lose someone and they return to you in your dreams, explaining that it was a big misunderstanding, they were still alive and well. In one dream he came back dressed like an astronaut. I met him by the grape orchard in my neighbor's yard. He told me didn't die, that he just had been in outer space. 

How's that for symbolism? I can still picture that dream, better than yesterday.

So, yeah, the story of a charismatic young man rising from the dead and returning to his friends and family had tremendous resonance for me. Add in the magic of Springtime, which promised a banquet of baseball and Cheap Trick records (and hopefully, girls) and you're looking at an admixture that Medieval alchemists would have sold their souls to replicate. 

So with that said, here's what I could piece together as far as Easter goes for one of my world famous Secret Sun playlists. Note that only a few are actually about the holiday itself, but we work with what we have to work with, OK? 

This album (Sparkle in the Rain) ruled my world in my senior year, as hard as that may be to believe today. It also has one of the few "secular" bands singing about Easter. I use secular in scare-quotes because the Minds are actually devout Catholics. 

Or were - I don't know if Simple Minds went Bono on us on account of me tuning them out during their cringe phase in the mid-Eighties.

 

Speaking of Bono, I was just thinking about how turning Bono to the Dark Side was a huge coup for Ol' Scratch. Granted a lot of the power in this track comes from the Edge, Vinnie Kilduff (on the pipes) and (especially) Steve Lillywhite, but this is a fine example of Christian mysticism with a Celtic twist, with some lovely verses from the soul-selling singer.

As I've said, I recognized that Bono had given into self-love when I saw U2 on the War tour. But I had no idea back then how low he would eventually sink. To the depths of Tartarus, really.

Being a precocious little chap I tuned into the whole Jesus Freak trip back in the day. It all feels a bit cringe and not a little bit psy-oppy today, but back then it was like a revelation fulfilled to this wee Methodist lad. 

Even Queen got in the act with the whole Jesus Rock bit. And this song rocks like Spock in hock, Doc...

Heck, even the Sabs were rocking for the Paraclete. Geezer Butler was a practicing Catholic back in the day, which informed tracks like this scorcher. 

I devoted a whole post on this cut way back in the day, which I later reposted on the Secret History of Rock blog:

But when I was a kid, listening to Sabbath didn't seem to clash with the dawn-to-dusk Methodism on Sunday, nor did my comic books or my Penthouse magazines. I was trapped in dream reality and it all seemed to make sense to me. I always felt a kinship with artists like Marvin Gaye and Prince who could sing a wickedly lascivious number one minute and then rip into the most heart-wrenching Gospel tune you ever heard without missing a beat. 

So I felt like my religious longings were vindicated by "After Forever," since to my young mind the Spirit World was filled with horror and lust, just as much as it was filled with love and tranquility. Living in a messed-up place like 70s Braintree, where parents left their kids unprotected and unsupervised, sexual predators ran rampant and one had to navigate an open-air drug bazaar every morning on the way to school, you had to make your own sense of the world. 

Jesus dwelled in a constellation of other forces - both dark and light - and raging contradictions were taken for granted. But through it all I discovered that the edge of the two planes - where Light and Darkness mingled - is the place of true religion. This is why comfortable suburbanites spend so much of their time worrying themselves over the darkness and depravity of the demimonde: the light of Jesus is more clearly seen in the Dark Night of the Soul.

And who can forget the Gospel stylings of Norman Greenbaum? Sure, the theology here is a bit off, but who doesn't love this proto-Glam stomper? 

No one I ever hope to meet.

Oh man, Godspell brings back those old Sunday School memories. This clip is as cringe as you can get without cringing yourself into a wince aneurysm, but a great song is a great song. Like I said, Jesus was all over the airwaves back in the day. 

The first concert I ever saw was also the first time I ever got high. So what better entry point than the Doobs? This was also the first song I heard when I opened my Realistic boombox on Christmas 1980. It sounded incredible to my young ears.

Did I tell you the story about how someone was shooting at cars on I-95 when we were headed to the show and actually shot out the whitewall on my friend's dad's Caddy? I did? A million times already?

It's still a good story.

I got Sandinista! that same Christmas, which featured this wonderful bit of punk rock Gospel. One of Strummer's most impassioned performances, really.

People might look at Nina Hagen and figure her for a hopeless punk rock freak. They'd be right, but she's also a devout Lutheran and has always sung about Jesus, even if her New Age-influenced theology may not be to a lot of her co-religionists' tastes. Or at least back then - she seems more grounded these days.

John Foxx of Ultravox is another unlikely believer, but went through a Catholic mystic phase after quitting the band. Don't know what he's into these days, but here's him singing the Lord's Prayer in Latin to a synth-bop backing.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is one of the most influential albums ever made - it had a huge impact on early Hip Hop and Electro - but it also has tracks like this that are simultaneously inspiring and a bit frightening. As true religion should be.

For all the talk about Reagan and the Moral Majority, the Eighties didn't have nearly as much as Jesus Pop as the Seventies. Christian rock had spun off into its own thing, with bands like Petra, Newsboys and (of course) Stryper. Still, there were some chart entries, like this toe-tapper from Mr. Mister. 

Catholic Mysticism has always had a huge influence on the Goth movement, even if not always in the most devout context. Dead Can Dance were at the forefront of bringing early music - Catholic by definition - into Goth, and this killer track is a prime example.

Now this tune - this tune rips me up inside. It just shreds me. Maybe it's a result of hearing it on the radio at the time, but nothing brings me back to those magical April days I spoke of before more than this track. Just pure mystic numinosity.

Patti was raised a Jehovah's Witness and has delved into Catholicism in later life. She also gave a quote about God to a British rock rag back in the 70s that I love to this day: "I don't want to be like some Hare Krishna weirdo, but there are times when I don't give a **** about anything else."

Passion was a big favorite album of mine back in the late 80s, even if I didn't care much for The Last Temptation of Christ. Sadly, Peter Gabriel also got sucked into the cosmo-demonic orbit of Globalism, but I've never gotten the impression he's nearly as compromised as Bono.

Anyway, I don't care who you are or what you believe, if this stunning piece  doesn't feed your soul then you probably don't have one.

Hammock is one of my favorite bands and has been for several years now. I don't know how to classify them - New Age, Post-Rock, Shoegaze - but does it really matter? Anyhow, they bring a lot of mystical Christian flavor to the table and the results are always lovely.

Let's end it with this lovely instrumental from New Gold Dream, "Someone Up There Likes You." A perfect grace note if you ask me. 

I really miss the old Simple Minds. Visionaries, before the lure of filthy lucre brought them low.