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The Hit
Somewhere in my late 20s, I remember lamenting to someone over how much I hated the idea of Bible thumpers laying claim to the beautiful, blues boogie riff that plays under Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” (found the original video). I’ve mellowed to a point where I just ignore evangelical Christian pop culture because it always tells the same damn story (e.g., person has problems, they find Jesus, Jesus makes it better, the end. Every. Damn. Time).
I never struggled to get through “Spirit in the Sky,” though, at least not till it reached a suffocating level of ubiquity by way of oldies’ radio play and movie soundtracks, which tells you how far a riff straight from heaven can carry a song. The fuzzed-up snarl on the guitar gives it a nice crunchiness too…only the song didn’t come straight from heaven.
The Rest of the Story
“It wasn’t my religion; I just did it. I didn’t think twice about it. I took some of the seriousness out of it, but I didn’t do it as a joke or against anyone. I guess people can take offense to almost anything. There was the song about the plastic Jesus on your dashboard. They liked that one.”
“[Now], quite a few churches have put it into their services and they sing it quite often. So it turned out OK. To be blunt, I don’t think it’s on the shit list.”
- Norman Greenbaum, Rolling Stone, January 2020 (and here’s that song about plastic Jesus)
As Wikipedia’s entry notes, Greenbaum was raised “an observant Jew.” It also implies he remains observant, but he says otherwise in Rolling Stones’“’Spirit in the Sky’ at 50” retrospective, published earlier this long, awful year. He had to learn a little about Christianity just to write what he did and didn't satisfy everyone; he still gets the odd grievance by first-class mail complaining about the line, “Never been a sinner, I’ve never sinned,” and that’s where the reference to people taking offense comes from.
While Greenbaum pegs the time it took him to work up the lyrics at around 15 minutes, the inspirations for the song came over a period of time and from all over - e.g., a greeting card with Native Americans on it (he thinks they were Hopi) talking about The Great Spirit, an old Porter Wagoner western where a prospector decides to go to a church for the first time in years only to find the pastor on vacation, just westerns in general and the notion of “dying with your boots on.” The arranging took a few-to-several months as well, but the song’s famous sound did come from a place sufficiently specific and bizarre that it touches the underbelly of a miracle.
The fuzz effect on the guitar came to Greenbaum through an acquaintance - as he puts it in an interview with Classic Bands (which never dates its interviews), “Somehow I knew this guy and he knew electronics.” It wasn’t an effects pedal, but a little fuzztone built into the guitar: “It was a nine-volt battery, a couple of wires, and a switch.” He turned it on for the fuzz, turned it off to get rid of it, and he still gets notes from guitar-lovers to this day asking him how he got the sound. That acquaintance “just sort of disappeared” one day and, when his career turned south, Greenbaum wound up selling that guitar, anonymously too, and that segues to Greenbaum’s story instead of the song’s.
He grew up in Massachusetts, born in Malden, and stayed long enough to study music at Boston University. After a couple of years, he “dropped out” and moved to join Los Angeles’ burgeoning folk scene. He struggled in a band called Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band, which struggle mostly involved keeping a working band together despite steady comings and goings. They held on long enough to record the 1966 novelty hit, “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago” (about an alien invasion), but the band fell apart from Greenbaum left; between the Rolling Stone interview and the Classic Bands one, he makes it clear that I found that entire experience stressful. So, he went solo…
“Spirit in the Sky” took off higher than he ever imagined and it took him places - opening for The Door in Hawaii, for one, even if he never got to meet Jim Morrison - but it also set a high bar for a follow-up that Greenbaum never quite cleared. Two came close, 1971’s “California Earthquake” and 1970’s “Canned Ham,” but only the latter really charted (46 on the Billboard; “California Earthquake” topped out at 93 and I draw the line at the top 50). A couple things caused the problem: Greenbaum didn’t want to do the same song over and over, for one, while that’s all anyone wanted him to do; it’s also possible that he just didn’t have a second hit in him. Before long, Greenbaum got tagged a one-hit wonder, something that, as he confessed in a short audio interview in 2015, left him feeling bothered and discarded.
After recording a couple albums - Back Home Again in 1970 and Petaluma in 1972, an all-acoustic recording he clearly sees as his favorite - the work and the attention dried up year over year until he went bankrupt everywhere but in court. He sold his famous guitar to finance a move to Northern California (and I wonder if he ever regrets not selling the guitar’s history along with it), where he worked his way up in the restaurant business. He made it all the way to sous chef by the time his life changed again.
An English band called Doctor & The Medics released a cover of “Spirit in the Sky” in 1986 that became an international hit - and, when I bitch about musical production in the 1980s, the kinds of choices made in that song versus the original are exactly what I’m bitching about (they’re an oddball story, Doctor & the Medics, and they’ve got a history of quirks and covers). The next year saw “Spirit in the Sky” used in a movie soundtrack for the first time - an Ally Sheedy vehicle called Maid to Order - and it’s shown up in one soundtrack after another, on screens large and small (see, Star Trek: First Contact, I think, but definitely Apollo 13 (Greenbaum’s favorite use) and Guardians of the Galaxy II (probably)). Greenbaum says he gets a check for $10,000 every time someone licenses it and that he no longer has to work.
Greenbaum had stopped performing entirely by the time he sat for that Classic Bands interview. 60 years old at the time, he worried about not delivering in a live show. As he charmingly put it:
“What's been happening is, these compilation labels have been putting things out. And, I have the website. I get enough royalties from sitting on my ass. I don't care. I'm divorced. I don't have to pay any more. (laughs)”
By the time he talked to Rolling Stone in 2020, he'd survived a horrific car accident (2015), found a girlfriend, and returned to performing (with her, incidentally), mostly knocking around northern California with the likes of Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Chambers Brothers and even Jefferson Airplane. He got a hell of a lot out of that one song.
About the Sampler
Spotify has only one “album” for Norman Greenbaum, so I’ll be posting that the same time this goes up. Because Greenbaum seems like decent people, I don’t like agreeing with the critics, but it’s a pretty unremarkable collection of folk-rock numbers from circa 1970. To add to the couple titles above, here are some more for the curious: let’s go with “Jubilee,” “School for Sweet Talk,” “Tars of India,” and…, yeah, “Marcy"...which I just (think I) learned all come from his 1970 debut album, Spirit in the Sky.
My only regret is that Spotify doesn’t have the rights to Petaluma. Would have liked to have heard that entire album - he went so deep in the acoustic approach that he eschewed normal rock percussion - but the best I can do right now is the title track. (Wait, just found another one: "Dairy Queen.")
Done here. On to the next one...
Somewhere in my late 20s, I remember lamenting to someone over how much I hated the idea of Bible thumpers laying claim to the beautiful, blues boogie riff that plays under Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” (found the original video). I’ve mellowed to a point where I just ignore evangelical Christian pop culture because it always tells the same damn story (e.g., person has problems, they find Jesus, Jesus makes it better, the end. Every. Damn. Time).
I never struggled to get through “Spirit in the Sky,” though, at least not till it reached a suffocating level of ubiquity by way of oldies’ radio play and movie soundtracks, which tells you how far a riff straight from heaven can carry a song. The fuzzed-up snarl on the guitar gives it a nice crunchiness too…only the song didn’t come straight from heaven.
The Rest of the Story
“It wasn’t my religion; I just did it. I didn’t think twice about it. I took some of the seriousness out of it, but I didn’t do it as a joke or against anyone. I guess people can take offense to almost anything. There was the song about the plastic Jesus on your dashboard. They liked that one.”
“[Now], quite a few churches have put it into their services and they sing it quite often. So it turned out OK. To be blunt, I don’t think it’s on the shit list.”
- Norman Greenbaum, Rolling Stone, January 2020 (and here’s that song about plastic Jesus)
As Wikipedia’s entry notes, Greenbaum was raised “an observant Jew.” It also implies he remains observant, but he says otherwise in Rolling Stones’“’Spirit in the Sky’ at 50” retrospective, published earlier this long, awful year. He had to learn a little about Christianity just to write what he did and didn't satisfy everyone; he still gets the odd grievance by first-class mail complaining about the line, “Never been a sinner, I’ve never sinned,” and that’s where the reference to people taking offense comes from.
While Greenbaum pegs the time it took him to work up the lyrics at around 15 minutes, the inspirations for the song came over a period of time and from all over - e.g., a greeting card with Native Americans on it (he thinks they were Hopi) talking about The Great Spirit, an old Porter Wagoner western where a prospector decides to go to a church for the first time in years only to find the pastor on vacation, just westerns in general and the notion of “dying with your boots on.” The arranging took a few-to-several months as well, but the song’s famous sound did come from a place sufficiently specific and bizarre that it touches the underbelly of a miracle.
The fuzz effect on the guitar came to Greenbaum through an acquaintance - as he puts it in an interview with Classic Bands (which never dates its interviews), “Somehow I knew this guy and he knew electronics.” It wasn’t an effects pedal, but a little fuzztone built into the guitar: “It was a nine-volt battery, a couple of wires, and a switch.” He turned it on for the fuzz, turned it off to get rid of it, and he still gets notes from guitar-lovers to this day asking him how he got the sound. That acquaintance “just sort of disappeared” one day and, when his career turned south, Greenbaum wound up selling that guitar, anonymously too, and that segues to Greenbaum’s story instead of the song’s.
He grew up in Massachusetts, born in Malden, and stayed long enough to study music at Boston University. After a couple of years, he “dropped out” and moved to join Los Angeles’ burgeoning folk scene. He struggled in a band called Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band, which struggle mostly involved keeping a working band together despite steady comings and goings. They held on long enough to record the 1966 novelty hit, “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago” (about an alien invasion), but the band fell apart from Greenbaum left; between the Rolling Stone interview and the Classic Bands one, he makes it clear that I found that entire experience stressful. So, he went solo…
“Spirit in the Sky” took off higher than he ever imagined and it took him places - opening for The Door in Hawaii, for one, even if he never got to meet Jim Morrison - but it also set a high bar for a follow-up that Greenbaum never quite cleared. Two came close, 1971’s “California Earthquake” and 1970’s “Canned Ham,” but only the latter really charted (46 on the Billboard; “California Earthquake” topped out at 93 and I draw the line at the top 50). A couple things caused the problem: Greenbaum didn’t want to do the same song over and over, for one, while that’s all anyone wanted him to do; it’s also possible that he just didn’t have a second hit in him. Before long, Greenbaum got tagged a one-hit wonder, something that, as he confessed in a short audio interview in 2015, left him feeling bothered and discarded.
After recording a couple albums - Back Home Again in 1970 and Petaluma in 1972, an all-acoustic recording he clearly sees as his favorite - the work and the attention dried up year over year until he went bankrupt everywhere but in court. He sold his famous guitar to finance a move to Northern California (and I wonder if he ever regrets not selling the guitar’s history along with it), where he worked his way up in the restaurant business. He made it all the way to sous chef by the time his life changed again.
An English band called Doctor & The Medics released a cover of “Spirit in the Sky” in 1986 that became an international hit - and, when I bitch about musical production in the 1980s, the kinds of choices made in that song versus the original are exactly what I’m bitching about (they’re an oddball story, Doctor & the Medics, and they’ve got a history of quirks and covers). The next year saw “Spirit in the Sky” used in a movie soundtrack for the first time - an Ally Sheedy vehicle called Maid to Order - and it’s shown up in one soundtrack after another, on screens large and small (see, Star Trek: First Contact, I think, but definitely Apollo 13 (Greenbaum’s favorite use) and Guardians of the Galaxy II (probably)). Greenbaum says he gets a check for $10,000 every time someone licenses it and that he no longer has to work.
Greenbaum had stopped performing entirely by the time he sat for that Classic Bands interview. 60 years old at the time, he worried about not delivering in a live show. As he charmingly put it:
“What's been happening is, these compilation labels have been putting things out. And, I have the website. I get enough royalties from sitting on my ass. I don't care. I'm divorced. I don't have to pay any more. (laughs)”
By the time he talked to Rolling Stone in 2020, he'd survived a horrific car accident (2015), found a girlfriend, and returned to performing (with her, incidentally), mostly knocking around northern California with the likes of Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Chambers Brothers and even Jefferson Airplane. He got a hell of a lot out of that one song.
About the Sampler
Spotify has only one “album” for Norman Greenbaum, so I’ll be posting that the same time this goes up. Because Greenbaum seems like decent people, I don’t like agreeing with the critics, but it’s a pretty unremarkable collection of folk-rock numbers from circa 1970. To add to the couple titles above, here are some more for the curious: let’s go with “Jubilee,” “School for Sweet Talk,” “Tars of India,” and…, yeah, “Marcy"...which I just (think I) learned all come from his 1970 debut album, Spirit in the Sky.
My only regret is that Spotify doesn’t have the rights to Petaluma. Would have liked to have heard that entire album - he went so deep in the acoustic approach that he eschewed normal rock percussion - but the best I can do right now is the title track. (Wait, just found another one: "Dairy Queen.")
Done here. On to the next one...
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