HEAVEN’S CHIEF MUSICIAN by Kirk Perry
Music, when not abused, is a great blessing; but when put to a wrong use, it is a terrible curse. It excites, but does not impart that strength and courage which the Christian can find only at the throne of grace while humbly making known his wants and with strong cries and tears pleading for heavenly strength to be fortified against the powerful temptations of the evil one. Satan is leading the young captive. Oh, what can I say to lead them to break his power of infatuation! He is a skillful charmer, luring them on to perdition.
– Ellen G. White, prophetess of the Seventh-day Adventist Church
I.
Mike Lefevre was only a seventh-grader, so I didn’t pay much attention to him until he approached me in the ninth and tenth-grade homeroom just after Algebra and right before Bible. Mike had blond hair an inch long on top, sticking straight up in a dry spray that swept around back to the hint of a tail. I didn’t think his hair was that cool in 1988, but I was still trying to figure out what to do with my own hair. This was my first year at Mid-Michigan Adventist Academy, just a few miles out of Lansing, and after moving here from small-town Columbus, Wisconsin, I hoped to demonstrate my sophisticated grasp of fashion. I had begun to put gel in my hair to create exciting, frozen rivulets, but the problem was that by the end of the day the rivulets melted and my hair dried out, leaving a flattened thatch that made me look like a farm boy.
Mike knew I liked U2, he said, and he handed me a tape. It was obscure B-sides, really great, and I should tell him what I thought. He must have seen the stickers on my binder: a large white “U” next to a crooked “2,” along with the Amnesty International logo and a Greenpeace whale. I never participated in either organization, but I thought they conveyed the right spirit.
I took the tape home and stowed it out of parental sight until I could listen to it in bed on my secretly purchased Walkman. Seventh-day Adventists condemn rock music because its relentless beat hypnotizes the mind and stimulates the body’s carnal instincts. Rock music is Satan’s most powerful tool. He can wield it so effectively because in his unfallen state as Lucifer he was Heaven’s Chief Musician. Consequently, my parents did not allow me to possess any music-playing equipment. The summer before, I had slipped my first records into the house – 45s of U2’s “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” – and I had played them when my parents were gone on the big family stereo, which we used primarily to listen to Bill Gaither and The Heritage Singers on Fridays after sundown. That’s when the Sabbath started. As a child, I had loved this Friday evening ritual with the whole family relaxing in the living room on chairs or sofas or the soft carpet with lights dimmed, letting my thoughts drift peacefully, floating along on the worshipful harmonies of The Sixteen Singing Men.
After the Sabbath had passed, the only pop music my parents sanctioned was The Carpenters and John Denver, although my father did eventually find a reason to turn against Mr. Denver. Surprisingly it wasn’t “Rocky Mountain High” he objected to. He appreciated this song’s theme of communicating with God through nature, so he accepted Denver’s explanation that everybody around a campfire being “high” referred only to a nature-inspired state of spiritual exaltation. What concerned him was the philosophy promoted in the song “It’s About Time,” particularly in the image of the whole world seeing a light through the “Vatican window.” My father saw here a dangerous conflation of all religions, presided over by the Catholic Church – which Adventists regard as the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation.
When I was five, the image of rock music terrified me. I remember seeing posters of Satanic figures in kids’ bedrooms. My parents, fantasizing about moving into a nicer place, took me along on a tour of the houses for sale in our Polaris Parkway neighborhood. As the realtor lady guided us through a series of strangers’ homes, I investigated each kid’s bedroom, trying to picture it as my own. Without fail, every home had one teenager’s room plastered with posters of four hideously leering Satans, mouths gaping and twisted, serpentine tongues flicking out. I felt frightened and confused. Who would want to decorate a bedroom with pictures of demons dressed in silver and black with studs and spikes protruding from their bodies, with white paint on their faces and black, scaly patterns around their eyes? And what kind of parents would allow this? They might as well be sacrificing their children to the devil. In Sabbath School I had learned about Satan, and I had repeated dreams of visiting Satan’s palace, irresistibly drawn away from my parents and God’s Chosen People toward Satan. Anything suggestive of Satan disturbed me. I averted my eyes from the members of Kiss.
Three years later, however, I got seduced by Joan Jett. It started with my most influential friend in third grade, Mark Garrow, another teacher’s son, chanting the lyrics to “I Love Rock ’N’ Roll.” (He also proudly chanted the lyrics to The Village People’s “Macho Man,” a song he took as a powerful expression of authentic masculinity – which it was, of course, albeit in an entirely different way than he imagined.) I first heard “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll” on the radio in our family’s old brown Ford LTD with my sister driving. Joan Jett’s cool, sneering voice thrilled me. The roaring guitars and ruthless beat charged me with a feverish impulse to run and scream and explode. Soon after this my parents went away on a rare overnight trip and my sister’s bad-ass boyfriend with a motorcycle stayed over. The two of them pranced around singing another Joan Jett song:
“Do ya wanna – ?”
“Yeah!”
“Do ya – ?”
“Oh yeah!”
One day with my sister at a record store in the mall, I saw on an album cover what Joan Jett actually looked like. Dressed all in black, with black makeup around her eyes, black spiky hair sticking into her face, sharp cheekbones painted red, and a silver chain around her neck, she looked like Jezebel. She even had a song on her album called “Jezebel,” and I shivered to think what happened to that evil heathen Old Testament queen who painted her face and adorned her hair. (She got thrown out a window and eaten by dogs.) And yet, unlike the cartoonishly masked male devils of Kiss, Joan Jett’s face evinced a trace of girlish softness, of sadness. I could not resist her dark siren’s call.
Even my older brother, the good child, fell under the spell of rock ’n’ roll. He sold Current cards and cleaned old ladies’ yards and moved bee hives so he could make enough money to buy a stereo to listen to Air Supply, The Beach Boys, 38 Special, and Hall and Oates. In his noble-spirited forthrightness, my brother left his albums out in the open, stacked neatly next to his stereo. But my parents took one look at John Oates wearing purple pumps and they confiscated all my brother’s records. Eventually my brother and sister located the records on a shelf in our parents’ closet, sticking out beneath some folded towels. As soon as our parents left the house, my brother and sister played the records at high volume for a safe amount of time and then carefully replaced them. Years later, my sister would wonder if my parents had deliberately left the records visible as a test of temptation. Perhaps so – or else they simply believed my brother would not dare look for them. In any case, the lesson was clear. I had better pursue my taste for rock music in secret. My parents would not approve, and no argument was possible.
II.
I discovered rock music in second grade through my brother and sister, but just before sixth grade I moved with my parents from Oregon to Wisconsin, and my siblings stayed at their Adventist schools in the West. I almost forgot that rock music existed. I no longer had my sister driving me to swimming lessons at a hundred miles an hour down Garden Valley Drive shouting along to the radio: “Abra abracadabra, I wanna reach out and grab ya.” (My brother liked to alter the line to “reach out and stab ya.”) I tried at times to keep track of the Top 40, and I had a remote awareness of the rise of Michael Jackson and Madonna, but without my older siblings around I had few chances to listen to the radio. Then, in eighth grade, influenced by my classmates, the lure of pop music again became irresistible. My parents kept a small radio in our main bathroom, and that spring of 1987 as intoxicating scents of earth and growth wafted through the window, I dallied there, listening at a very low volume to Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” Cutting Crew’s “I Was Just Dying in Your Arms Tonight,” and U2’s “With or Without You.”
The lyrics to this last song intrigued me. They weren’t as obvious as the lyrics to other Top 40 songs. They were more poetic and mysterious. Bono sang about his lover having a stone in her eyes and a thorn in her side. He sang about waiting for her on a “bed of nails.” I tried to imagine myself in a relationship where I couldn’t live without my love and I couldn’t live with her. But I had trouble imagining any kind of relationship. I had only “gone” with one girl since second grade and that had just lasted a few weeks because I had no idea what I was supposed to do or say. Thus I was all the more mystified by what was going on in Bono’s relationship. He sang this first verse softly, but the language seemed violently biblical and sexual. The image of a thorn in his lover’s side suggested both the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head as he hung from the cross and the spear thrust into his side to finish him off. Bono’s lover became a Christ-like martyr figure, and yet she was the one making the singer wait for her on nails. These lovers appeared to be torturers and torturees. If someday I had sex, I too would understand the mystery. I too would participate in such sweet torture.
But these were afterthoughts. When I heard “With or Without You,” my first thought was of the pure beauty of Vicky Mummert. What I most appreciated about the song was its tone of aching sadness, and I applied this to my own simple case of unrequited infatuation. The meaning of the song became “I can’t live without you, Vicky Mummert, delicate and lovely Vicky Mummert with pale, thin arms and pale, thin neck.” She blushed when she laughed and held her hands up to her face. I knew where her house was and rode past it on my ten-speed. One Sabbath afternoon I even rang her doorbell on the pretext of asking about the correct time for a youth group event, and her mother invited me in. Vicky was hanging out with her horrid friend Sherri Morauske who sharply perceived which boys liked Vicky because they never liked her. I ended up staying for almost two hours playing the Ungame – that stupid game where everyone’s a winner so no one really is, and you have to answer all these awful philosophical questions: “What is your favorite way to spend an afternoon?” (With you, Vicky Mummert) and “How do you define success?” (Being with you, Vicky Mummert). But I had no success. At school I was awkward and rough, showering her – literally – with the wrong kind of attention: I shot her with a tiny syringe from my desk ten feet behind hers and got spots of water all over her clothes. She fell instead for the smooth ministrations of J.J., the new student who had learned French kissing from a high school girl, and had an easy, jocular grace with girls. “With or Without You” was still my favorite song, but now I would have to find someone else to apply it to.
In the summer of 1987, my father became the Educational Superintendent for the Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, in charge of all the church’s grade schools in that state, and we moved to Lansing. Soon after school started in the fall, I rode my bike to the mall and bought two items: a Walkman, and a tape of The Joshua Tree. Arriving home, I snuck upstairs to my room, worried that my parents would notice my shopping bag and start asking questions. Now I had the whole album, not just the 45 singles, and I could listen to it every night in bed. Earlier that summer, I had seen my brother at his graduation from Walla Walla Adventist College and learned that he too had fallen for U2. U2 was the perfect rock music to seduce someone raised as a Christian. U2 was to rock music as pot was supposed to be to hard drugs: the gateway. Despite the sadomasochistic metaphors of “With or Without You,” the political darkness of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” and the suicidal madness of “Seconds,” U2 seemed good and grand, concerned with serious social issues. They sang about oppressed coal miners, tragic poets, and the mothers of Argentinean political prisoners. I didn’t hear pretense or bombast, I heard sincerity and truth. If rock music embraced such noble causes, how could it be wrong? Surely its driving beat could not be faulted for rousing one to a righteous energy? I had known in my heart that Joan Jett was evil; she incarnated the Whore of Babylon. But U2 made rock music more than a guilty pleasure. U2 made rock music moral.
Ninth grade at Mid-Michigan Adventist Academy did not go as planned. I had trouble making friends and my infatuation with Lisa LaFave failed miserably. Then, in the spring, Mike Lefevre loaned me his tape of U2 B-sides and a golden era commenced. He would come to my house on Sabbath after church or I would ride my bike five miles to his family’s rented farmhouse on the edge of town. We would go out into the woods and fields and take pictures of ourselves. We wanted to look like U2 on the cover of The Joshua Tree – statuesque, stoical, in semi-profile. Our hair was longer now. I had abandoned the frozen gel look and parted mine to the left; Mike parted his down the middle. Summer passed and the next school year was not so bad, and then it was summer again. Our hair kept growing. Mike’s was shoulder-length, mine almost as long. We wanted to look like River Phoenix. We wanted to look like poets. After all, we had started to write poems. One picture shows me barefoot, wearing cutoffs and a green pajama top over another pajama top with a v-neck and a ’60s design of mechanical flower-wheels. Around my neck I have a wooden whistle on a string, a stone carved into a tiny face on another string, a bead necklace, and the strap for Mike’s red guitar, which I am pretending to play with a slice of bread while leaning awkwardly against a tree.
III.
But these golden summers would pass. I would have to go north to Great Lakes Adventist Academy for my Junior year. I would have to stay in a dorm. For months I dreaded GLAA’s isolated and restrictive environment, but as the day for my departure approached, I couldn’t help feeling hopeful. My roommate was a friend from Mid-Michigan and we had gone shopping together for housewares. After our parents dropped us off with our boxes and suitcases, we got out our hotpot, our hot chocolate, our instant oatmeal. We filled our closets and made our beds with matching puffy teal comforters. We hung our closet curtains, sewn by my mother, of dark gray material with subtle lines of teal. Finally, we arranged our desks. Then we went out to the social gathering at center campus, where everyone ate watermelon and got sticky hands and a long line formed and everyone shook hands and there were cute girls and everyone was nice and GLAA seemed great.
Within the week I met Tammie Ernst, who had a straight, strawberry blonde bob, and I asked her to sit with me at Friday night vespers. I wore a big, gold, pink, reddish-brown ‘70s tie that used to be my grandfather’s, and as we sat there together on the pew, smiling incessantly, looking straight ahead, I fiddled with my tie and it flipped over and I saw the brand name: Ernst. I showed it to her. She smiled. It was fate and perfect. How could I have worried about coming to GLAA?
A few days later, during Rec period, Tammie and I sat in the balcony of the gym pretending to watch a basketball game. No one else was up there but another couple, so we nervously held hands, worried that a faculty member would spot us and have us put on “Social” – short for “Social Holiday” – which would mean no contact for two weeks, even on the phone. Holding hands was when everything started to go wrong. Something about her hands made me queasy. The fingers were short and stubby, and they had tiny hairs on them. The next day I was supposed to meet her, but instead of pleasure I felt a creeping sense of horror. I had dreamed of a girlfriend for so long, and now that I had one, it was all too much, everything was just too much. Was I even attracted to her? There was something clayey and clammy about her body, her skin; she seemed to be melting with emotion into the earth, and I couldn’t let myself get sucked in. I had to pull back. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked, and I told her over the phone that I couldn’t see her again.
I began to stay in my dorm room as much as possible. I stopped doing my Algebra homework even though I was the second best student in the class, I never went to rec in the gym, and I ate alone in the caf. In my room I occupied the lower level of the bunkbed, and I hung a blanket from the upper level to create a dark cocoon. When the hall monitor checked the room every morning at ten and every night at ten – a half-hour before electricity was cut off in the dorm until morning – he would have to call out, and I would answer faintly from my cocoon. I lay in this secret bubble dreaming of strange, mythical girls who wore beads and moccasins and floated through the sky. For a while I wrote tragic, wistful poems about these fantasy girls, and then I began to write poems about drugs and suicide – two more topics I knew nothing about – with titles like “Wired,” “The First Darkness,” “October Crucifixion,” and “Zero Hour.” All this time I had no music, no grand and good U2, to comfort me. All music and musical devices were subject to seizure in random room searches.
My only chance to listen to music was when I went home. At the end of each month everybody left school for a long weekend called “Home Leave.” We were only allowed to go home one other weekend per month, and only a weekend with no special student function, such as Week of Prayer. During that week we had even longer morning worships, additional evening services conducted by a guest speaker, and on Friday night, an Altar Call – a chance for the penitent and attention-seeking to go up front and give teary testimonies about how God had changed their lives. Every weekend spent at GLAA was torment and despair. So I would become sick with the flu or a slight cold and get special permission to go home for the weekend. In Lansing, I saw Mike. We sat in our favorite tree, The Tree of Rape and Beauty, and we read each other’s latest poems. In October, Mike gave me a new tape: The Cure, with Disintegration on one side and Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me on the other.
Mike warned me about two songs on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me that he found disturbing – “The Kiss” and “Shiver and Shake.” He had intended to leave them off the tape, but it had been easier just to let the whole thing record, and plus I might as well hear the full album at least once; I could always skip these songs later. I remember listening to “The Kiss” on the last day of Home Leave, locked in the bathroom with my Walkman, feeling nauseated because I had to go back to GLAA. The Cure’s singer, Robert Smith, sang with a voice somewhere between a wail, a whine, and a scream. He repeatedly told his lover to love him. Then he told her to nail him down, to push out his guts. He couldn’t stand her “fucking voice.” He wanted her dead. Robert Smith addressed his lover as “you,” and for me “you” was Tammie Ernst and GLAA and my parents and God all mixed in a shrieking babble of voices. This song got straight to the point. No need for U2’s majestic metaphors or poetic landscapes. This was fear and hate in the rawest form. I did like other Cure songs too. I appreciated the sincerity of “Love Song,” the whimsy of “Catch,” the manic, identity-warping fun of “Why Can’t I Be You?” – but only “The Kiss” could plumb the darkness I felt myself falling through.
As the fall term progressed, I became more and more isolated at GLAA. I started doing my homework again, but I immediately returned to my room after classes, and I went home whenever I could. I hated everyone and everything to do with GLAA. I hated the worships, the song services, the prayers, the sermons. I hated the rules, and I hated the popular kids who broke the rules and then piously confessed. I hated myself. How could I possibly survive here for another year and a half until college? I thought about committing suicide, but that seemed a bit extreme. The only answer, I concluded, was for me to get kicked out of school. But how? Typically students got kicked out of GLAA for drinking or having sex. I had heard wild stories about kids sneaking off campus to get smashed on Boone’s and fuck in a graveyard. But I had scant knowledge of either activity. And I wanted to break the rules in such a way that it would be clear I was breaking them only because I wanted to get kicked out, not because I couldn’t restrain myself from engaging in some forbidden pleasure. I fantasized about running away, but where? And how?
In early December an opportunity presented itself. My roommate, who had a car at GLAA that he and his sister were allowed to use for Home Leaves, needed to see a dentist in our hometown of Lansing. He would be leaving Thursday morning for his appointment. This was my chance. I would ride down to Lansing with him, and on the way back, I would have him drop me off at Ionia Recreation Area, a large park just off our route. My idea was to hide out in the park for two days. I figured that would be enough time to get me kicked out – not just suspended. I would wear lots of warm clothes, and during the day I would keep moving, stamping my feet and exercising. At night I would build a fire in the woods. I didn’t need any food because I would only be there two days, and for water I would eat snow. I told my roommate about my plan, and he agreed to help. My only worry was that I wouldn’t get kicked out and I would have to return ignominiously to GLAA. The key, I believed, was holding out for at least two full days. That should cause a big enough fuss. Wednesday night I lay in bed anxiously rehearsing my course of action. The next morning I would get up, take a shower, put on three layers of clothes, and go. It was that simple.
I couldn’t sleep. I lay there remembering the summer – back when life seemed full of hope and possibility, back when my parents had taken me and Mike to the Ionia Recreation Area on a Sabbath afternoon. Now the park would be covered with snow. All the trails would be covered with snow, and the snow would be scored with the tracks of cross-country skis, boots, and hooves. The lake would be a field of ice. The river would have crunchy edges of ice. The picnic tables, the railings, the signposts would be coated with ice. The icy chains of the swings would stick to bare hands. My breath would show like smoke. Back in summer, all had been warm and flowing, the river and the trees, the grass fluttering in meadows. And Mike and I, in cut-offs and bandanas, had headed out on our own, wending the trails, hanging from trees, screaming poems . . .
IV.
I recollect, two decades later, that I thought wearing a bandana was my original idea. Of course, I saw Axl Rose wearing one first. In the spring of 1989 – months before GLAA – I just didn’t want to admit Axl had any influence on me because I scorned the hair metal bands I saw on MTV; and I placed Guns N’ Roses in the same camp as Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and Poison. I wasn’t into stupid, hedonistic metal groups; I was into socially responsible rock groups like U2 and Midnight Oil. I do remember riding in a car with some friends from Mid-Michigan and shouting along to “Paradise City,” but I thought I was being ironic. So what if I occasionally wore a bandana? That didn’t mean I was trying to look like Axl. A photo from this era shows me wearing canvas Sperry Top-Siders, pegged jeans, a black, military-style Generra Giovanni sweatshirt, and a red bandana on my head with the corner untucked, flapping straight up, as I hunt for an Easter egg. All I had done was add the bandana to my normal mall attire. In the summers, it’s true, Mike and I wore cut-offs and t-shirts and bead necklaces, relaxing our “classic” Gap look of the school year, but our touchstone was hippies, not white trash metalheads. If some annoying little seventh-grade twerp asked me if I was trying to look like Axl with my bandana, I responded witheringly: “Of course not. I’m wearing it because I want to.” Yet secretly, Axl fascinated me. I couldn’t resist watching him on MTV in the videos for “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” There was something about him, something magnetic, something disturbingly attractive.
I should explain here that in early 1989, half a year before I left home for boarding school at GLAA, my parents purchased a TV – as a result of my going to see Rattle and Hum the previous October. At fifteen, I had never been allowed to go to the theater. But Adventists in Lansing, the state capitol of Michigan, were more “liberal” than Adventists in Columbus, farm town of Wisconsin, and my new friends had parents who let them go to the movies. I didn’t know anything about movies or movie stars so not going to the movies didn’t bother me until U2 unloosed Rattle and Hum. Then I had to go. Even if it took deception.
I asked my mother if I could go over to a friend’s house for the afternoon, but the plan was really for a group of us to go to the mall to see Rattle and Hum. My mother, however, became suspicious and started asking questions. Finally, to avoid an outright lie, I revealed my true plan.
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
“Why not? Why can’t I go see this movie? What’s wrong with it?” My tone became strident now that I could consider myself truthful; it also helped that my father wasn’t home to immediately quash my plan.
“What is the movie about?” asked my mother.
“It’s about a musical group, U2, and how they travel around America.” I was careful not to say “rock group.”
“Do you think that’s a good thing for you to see?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re smart enough to make the right decision. I just want you to really think about this and be sure you’re making the right decision. I wish your father were here. You need to talk to him about this.”
“You just said I could make the decision for myself.”
“It is your decision. But you need to make a wise decision. Is this movie a positive thing for you to be putting into your mind? Everything we put into our minds influences us. And maybe it’s not a bad thing, but is it really a good thing? Is it something that should be filling your mind?”
“Yes, I think it’s a positive thing. U2 is a positive group. They always support good causes –” I tried to think of one but drew a blank.
My mother hesitated. Her expression was serious, even sad.
“Well, I really wish your father were here. But if you think it’s a positive, healthy experience for your mind, then I suppose you can go.”
I had a transcendent experience. I saw the band members in giant black and white talking and playing songs booming through the speakers. It was almost like a real concert. That evening my father lectured me about values and questioned me about the movie, but nothing could dim my afterglow. I talked about Rattle and Hum at school for days. Of course Mike had seen it. He had gone with his dad and his brother.
A few months later, the TV appeared. For the first sixteen years of my life my parents had rejected TV as a pernicious influence, but now they reasoned that maybe if we had a TV at home, I wouldn’t feel compelled to venture out into the world for entertainment. This way they could control my intake of pop culture. For instance, my father programmed the TV to block out MTV. If I was on Channel 29 and pressed the channel up button, it skipped to 31. But one day I pressed in three and zero and hit enter: presto, Downtown Julie Brown. I started watching videos whenever my parents left the house. And when I turned off the TV, I was always careful to change the channel twice so my father couldn’t hit the Return button and discover my secret vice.
I now had Bono, Robert Smith, and Axl Rose in my home. Bono I found an admirably vigorous masculine presence striding the stage in his leather vest. His long hair tucked into a ponytail only made him more manly. Robert Smith, in contrast, appeared strangely hermaphroditic. In the video for “Love Song” he sits in a fake grotto with his long black hair sticking up like a fern and coming down in tangles over his eyes. His hair mesmerized me. Just as certain fish have wormlike appendages that they unroll in front of their mouths to lure prey, Robert Smith had snarled tendrils of hair to ensorcell his fans. I remember seeing the cover of Disintegration for the first time and thinking he was a beautiful girl – glimpsed through mist and flowers, looking up from the depths of a well. It troubled me to discover this was the face of Robert Smith, not some tragic temptress. But neither Bono nor Robert Smith did I find as physically compelling as Axl Rose, unwilling though I was to admit it.
In the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” Axl wears skintight, shiny, black leather pants, a white t-shirt with the shoulders rolled up, silver chains and bracelets slipping loosely on his slender wrists, and a silver cross around his neck. One arm is tattooed with the face of a black-haired girl. Axl has teased blond hair. He has a beautiful face, angelic and girlish, as he snarls into the mike. With the slithery shifting of his shoulders, he draws the eyes of his audience. He caresses the mike stand or stalks the stage with it. He wants to shake his hips but to do so he must sinuously move his whole body, a movement like that of a fish shooting from water. Unlike Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop with their sharp pelvic thrusting, Axl swishes from side to side. And when he sings “You’re a very sexy girl,” he raises his arms in the air and shimmies as if he is the girl, and for a moment he is. Not since Joan Jett had I seen a singer so lovely, and yet so ready to smash something.
With his thin, pale body and long hair, Axl seemed like a Jesus who had escaped from the cross on his own power and started a rock ’n’ roll band on earth. As a rock star singing Satan’s music, Axl was really a Satan masquerading as a Jesus; but his version of Jesus appealed more to me than the image of Jesus I saw most frequently in Adventist classrooms: Warner Sallman’s 1940 “Head of Christ.” A reproduction of Sallman’s painting hung in the History-Business-Bible classroom at Mid-Michigan Adventist Academy, but I tried not to look at it.
Painted in rich, warm browns, this Jesus has neatly-flowing, shoulder-length, golden brown hair pushed sharply back from His face. His face glows in a light that seems to be shining against the opposite side of His head. He has a beard of darker, more manly brown, and through the beard can be seen His firmly pressed lips. He has a straight, dignified nose and a high, noble forehead. We see Christ’s features clearly, in three-quarter profile, but He cannot see us. His eyes are unusually large: dry now, they seem capable of producing enormous tears. He holds His head level but lifts His eyes slightly, as if communing with His Father. In contrast to the forceful bearded chin, His cheeks and forehead and the dab of His earlobe have a gentle, curving softness. His expression is sincere, solemn, and resolute.
This painting made me uncomfortable because I did not want to give my heart to such an intense, weirdly androgynous creature. I did not want to be rebuked by his manly side nor comforted by his womanly side. I preferred to keep Jesus as an abstraction. I knew I was supposed to have a relationship with Him, but what exactly would such a relationship involve? Pouring out my soul to Him? Begging for forgiveness and love and then melting in the warmth of His embrace? Imagining Jesus as a physical being made me queasy. When I saw Sallman’s “Head of Christ,” I hurried past. I felt guilty about not feeling as I was supposed to feel about Him. I felt dread, not radiant joy. I didn’t want to look at Jesus, and I hoped he wouldn’t suddenly turn and meet my eye. I could never withstand His gaze.
I couldn’t withstand Axl’s gaze either, but I knew Axl had no interest in looking at me and so I didn’t fear him. Axl had the same androgynous mix of traits as Sallman’s Jesus, but Axl’s masculine force was not stern and judgmental – it was fierce and wild, a force of nature. Axl might kill me if I got in his way, just as a tornado might kill me, but he would feel no animus toward me. I would die by chance, in his path at the wrong time, and so I could forgive him. Axl’s feminine qualities also encouraged my forgiveness. He was more attractive than Jesus, more winsome, more playful. And whereas Jesus presented a static mixture of masculinity and femininity, Axl Rose flipped from one gender to another with a snarl or a grin. He offered no comfort, no abstract salvation, only a half-glimpsed world of momentary pleasures – limousines and alcohol, sullen girls on rumpled hotel beds. But what more did we have than a moment? Heaven was a long way off, if even achievable. And Heaven was a place of immaculate, sterile order and rigid, eternal joy. I wanted something liquid and fun. And I wanted it now. Before GLAA, I hardly dared to let myself think such thoughts, but after GLAA, I allowed them to flourish.
V.
In the spring of 1991, just over a year after my fantasy of running away from Great Lakes Adventist Academy, I found myself in the southwest corner of Michigan at another Adventist high school. I had not run away. I had been reasonable and safe. I had only rebelled in private, symbolic ways. But later that spring at GLAA, my parents had secretly read my poems and concluded that I was suicidal and using drugs, and they had decided to let me attend a different school the next fall. My father, Education Superintendent, had made a special arrangement for me to stay in the Andrews University dormitory but take classes as a Senior at Andrews Academy, a day school. Since I stayed in the college dorm and took a college English lit class, I was excused from morning worship at the Academy and could come and go as I pleased. I had to attend mandatory dorm worships, and a hall monitor checked on me every night at 10:30, but this guy’s dorm, unlike the one at GLAA, was not locked up. After room check, I could slip out of the dorm and even leave campus – if only I had somewhere to go, someone to meet. But that fall I never did. I spent most of my time alone reading or walking in the wooded hills around the college. In March, I wore hiking boots and sloshed through the sloppy melting snow, listening on my Walkman to a tape Mike had made me of his favorite Doors’ songs.
The lyrics of Jim Morrison offered an archetypal world of freedom and violence, pleasure and fear, fire, sun, moon, death. It was a world of visionary excess, of circus dogs and screaming butterflies, of momentous gold-colored copulations in the wan forests of night. In Jim Morrison’s songs, it was always summer, dangerous summer. I was riding in a car down the American highway. I was the driver. I was the hitchhiker. I was the killer in the passenger seat. I rode blazed immaculate under cinema skies. I rode the hurricane until I crashed through. I rode until my body twitched like a toad.
Jim Morrison seemed like the embodiment of Byron and Shelley, a visionary Romantic Poet in the line of Milton’s Satan, a dark Jesus, a Dionysus. Like Arthur Rimbaud, Morrison practiced a total “dérangement” of the senses in pursuit of poetical transcendence. He consumed vast quantities of alcohol and drugs. He fucked a million girls named Freedom and Enterprise. Then he went to the desert and had visions like an Old Testament prophet. When he returned to the world, he took the stage to guide us.
Later in the spring of 1991, I would see Val Kilmer channeling Jim Morrison in the Oliver Stone movie. But before I saw this full-bodied movie star version of Morrison, I knew him primarily from his picture on the cover of my Best of the Doors cassette tape. Morrison looks sullenly at the viewer, his eyes hooded in shadow, his hair in dark tangles falling around his face. His lips are sensuous, full, fixed in a slight pout. His arms, cropped just past the shoulders, appear to reach out crucifixion-style. Around his neck hangs a thin bead necklace. The outstretched arms distend his torso and reveal his skinny ribs. He is almost as skinny as I was in twelfth grade, not so filled out as Val Kilmer. I found Jim Morrison even more beautiful, dangerous, and Christ-like than Axl Rose, and I thought he was a serious visionary poet, a true artist, not just some trashy rock star.
When I went home to visit that spring, Mike and I took pictures of ourselves in The Tree of Rape and Beauty doing crucifixion poses – snarling, smeared with mud, wearing bead necklaces. It was easy to pretend to be a visionary poet around Mike. We could inhabit a world of woods and poems and nymphets of our own imagining. But back at school, I sat alone in my concrete-block room, waiting for something to happen. I wanted experience, sex. I wanted to break through body and mind. I wanted to achieve transcendence. But how? And where? With whom? I had never had a real girlfriend, I had never been to a rock concert, I didn’t have a car, I was socially awkward, and I was lost somewhere between high school and college, attending one and living in the dorm of the other.
The summer before, on my first trip to Europe, I had made my final attempt to find transcendence through God. My brother was studying architecture in Stuttgart, and I stayed with him for several weeks. I felt ecstatic. I had survived my Junior year at GLAA and looked forward to my Senior year at a new school. Now I was in Europe, soon on my way to the Swiss Alps. One night as the two of us sat on a parapet in a park looking out at the night sky breathing with stars, my brother spoke of God and faith, and for a moment I believed in an all-encompassing divine power, not the Adventist God, but some mystical entity floating around us. This rapturous feeling quickly faded – just as it had at age twelve when I got baptized into the Adventist Church. I had believed then what my sixth-grade baptism class taught me: that I was fundamentally a sinful creature and that I needed to have a personal relationship with Jesus. So I was baptized on a brilliant summer day in the river outside my house. I felt excited because everyone was there on my lawn, gathered around me, congratulating me, and I strained to achieve some special religious feeling. But my excitement was really for the event itself, not for what it was supposed to represent.
The only surefire way to have a religious experience, in every account I had heard, was to get on your knees and pray for hours – even if it took all night. This is what Bible characters and the Adventist pioneers always did. But I could never picture myself praying for eight hours straight. I mean, what would I say the whole time? I would run out of stuff after five minutes. I would just be kneeling there, uncomfortable and cold, pretending to talk to some disapproving manly presence in space. How could I ever have my own transcendent experience?
The prophetess of the Adventist Church, Ellen G. White, had also longed for an unmistakable feeling of transcendence. In 1842, at age fourteen, she had urgently required proof that she was saved. So Ellen was baptized into the Methodist Church. This did provide some assurance, but then she heard a farmer named William Miller preach that Christ was returning in 1843 or 1844 and she didn’t feel holy enough to face Him. As Ellen struggled to regain her sense of salvation, a new dilemma troubled her. She felt called upon to minister publicly, to share her faith, but she was so shy. Jesus would be here in months and she couldn’t even pray in front of others. Ellen stopped praying and for three weeks fell deeper and deeper into despair. Finally, one night at a prayer meeting, she worked up the courage to offer her first public prayer, and at last this frail, sickly, hysterical teenager achieved the correct religious feeling: “Wave after wave of glory rolled over me, until my body grew stiff. Everything was shut out from me but Jesus and glory, and I knew nothing of what was passing around me.” Soon Ellen began having regular visions at all-night vigils. She would go into a trance and an angel would show her Jesus and Heaven, or reveal the sins of those around her. While Ellen lay on the floor for hours relating her visions, her peers would greet each other with “holy” kisses, creep on their hands and knees in humbleness, and shout praises until they too felt exalted.
Rising from the ashes of Millerism after Jesus failed to show up in 1844, the Seventh-day Adventist Church relied increasingly on Ellen G. White’s divine revelations. As the church became more established, as well as her authority within it, White rejected the visionary experience of others as “fanaticism” of the devil. She could be a visionary, but no one else could. That would threaten the new church hierarchy. In 1892, near the end of her life, White reconsidered the role of transcendence in Christian experience in what would become her most widely distributed work, a pamphlet called Steps to Christ: How to Know Him Better. “A life in Christ is a life of restfulness,” she explains. “There may be no ecstasy of feeling, but there should be an abiding, peaceful trust.” My Bible teachers, in line with the Conference Office, abhorred such charismatic behaviors as speaking in tongues and too-boisterous singing. They emphasized White’s point that a relationship with Christ required no “ecstasy,” but at the same time they glorified her early visionary career. They offered White as a model of genuine religious experience, yet they discouraged us from feeling the need for equally dramatic emotional sensations. What kind of transcendent spiritual experience, then, was permissible? None at all?
That spring of 1991, I started hanging out with Dave Hanover and Jeff Blue, who smoked cigarettes. We went to Denny’s to drink coffee and pretend to study, and one night we met two fifteen-year-old girls, Gail and Anna, who went to public high school. We hung out with them all weekend at Anna’s house in the countryside because it was Memorial Day weekend and her parents were gone. On Sunday, Gail’s brother brought over some acid. I had begun to hear more and more about acid. Kids had always told me I was “weird,” and weirdness was often associated with doing acid. “LSD” sounded scientific and scary, but “acid” didn’t seem so bad. I felt a sickening, nervous curiosity. Was this my destiny as a weird person? Was it time for me to follow in the visionary footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison? I put the little white square of paper onto my tongue and felt a horrible, chilling thrill. What could a tiny piece of paper possibly do to me?
The girls went crazy. They twirled around under the ceiling fan so fast they thought the stuff was already kicking in. Couldn’t I feel it? I felt something, an ominous tingling deep inside me. I went outside. I came back in. The music kept building. Then the song got inside me. I had Jim Morrison inside me. I acted calm and rational, and I turned with sober, graceful movements. Gail and Anna ran up to me, shaking me, shrieking I must feel something, everything. We ran outside, the girls naming plants and bushes and trees with their own personalities, the summer night sky full of fireflies under stars and thin layers of clouds coursing in evanescent strata as I looked out over the meadow behind the house, my speech slowing, explaining that . . . that nothing did . . . was affecting me and I could speak like . . . like. Then I was writhing on a waterbed with the hands and arms and hair of girls all over me. Mirrors, incense, messages glowing in the dark. Lights. Shaking. I couldn’t take it. I went outside into the chicken coop and looked at my hands. Lizards . . . then withered branches . . . always twisting, twisting, and then my hands were bones. I was a thousand years old, I realized with immense, sad wisdom. I saw everything. I saw the darkness in everything. And then I remembered my Adventist college, Andrews University, and I laughed. What a joke! Andrews simply did not exist. Time did not exist. No time. No Andrews. Only me, with a consciousness vast as space. I had this moment of beautiful clarity – and then I began to descend, teeth clenching. It was dawn. I was crawling on the softest, warmest carpet I had ever known in my life, and my friends were large, bright creatures making noises in the other room. My body felt like it had been penetrated by a sick machine, running its diseased programs through my brain. Someone gave me a ride back to my dorm room and I lost a contact lens in the sink. I looked in the mirror and I had enormous, pulsing devil eyes, and then I slept, tossing in an electric mesh of dreams.
VI.
I was frayed, I was shaken, but I was experienced. I had tasted the fruit of knowledge, and I lived. Lacking sex, drugs and music became my transcendent mix. To be drunk or high at a rock concert was to surmount Heaven. In 1992, I went with Mike Lefevre to my first concert: The Cure, in Detroit. Then I saw Ministry and The Jesus and Mary Chain in Chicago at the second Lollapalooza. In England, I saw Nick Cave and Einstürzende Neubauten, Daniel Ash and Nine Inch Nails. I saw the reunion of The Velvet Underground. In Portland, PJ Harvey and Seven Year Bitch. And then in Boise, Nirvana.
At these concerts, I was taller than those around me, so I had to dodge the flailing legs of stage divers and crowd surfers, and I had to repel the people trying to use me as a ladder. The mosh pit swirled before me, but I didn’t stay long in this stew of pummeling male bodies; I surged forward in my steel-toed boots until I joined the tight cordon of fans pressing the stage. At last I could see the face of the star, and I strained forward, crushing through the bodies ahead of me, reaching up toward the star. I worshiped this shimmering singer, animal and god and man and machine and woman in one, mercury upon the stage. I wanted to possess the singer, the star, to project myself through the medium of the star, to become the star, to seize power and voice, to achieve apotheosis.
For an instant, Lucifer thought he was equal to God, thought he was God, and that pure vision of power filled him with spasms of joy. And in that instant he became Satan, and he fell from Heaven. But it was all worth it. Rock music was worth it. The cold streets and strange doorways in desolate cities . . . the brutal hangovers, the vomit, the filth . . . the bad habits, the ruined relationships, the thwarted dreams . . . the paranoia and despair – it was all worth it just to have this feeling for a moment, to embrace the wave of emotion at its peak, to ride it, to feel it inside you, to choke the moment in your grasp, and laugh and laugh and laugh, your head charged with shooting beams of light and sound and beauty, and only then to fall.
“Heaven’s Chief Musician” is Kirk Perry’s first essay to be published in a national literary magazine.