I have to admit that I had never heard of this person before reading this book. As someone who is into all types of music, I got into Christian Rock in the late ’70s and through the ’80s. Even then Christian Rock was still not looking as something part of the service or even a way to connect to anyone who listened to rock music. Going back and looking at the writers of the songs of the music I still have I noticed his name associated or credit to as the writer. So I thought that I would give this book a read and I was not disappointed. I thought that he followed his beliefs and even after he turned his life to Christ the people that are not to judge did just that and the ones that you think would be upset for him leaving the rock scene respected his decision. Even his choice to turn down a roll in the play Hair for it dealt with sex and drugs. The author does a good job in showing all parts of his life and the times when it was not going so well also. I think that this would have been a difficult book to research, but yet the author made it interesting at times. Overall a good book.

I grew up in the Christian church in the 1980s. We went to church two days a week, with Bible studies and prayer meetings on other evenings. I went to a Christian school, read Christian books, and loved Christian music. I both lived in the bubblegum Christian world that Larry Norman would have hated and reveled in the music industry that he helped to create. 

Larry Norman was an artist and a paradox. He grew up creating music while most kids are still playing pretend. He would put together complex harmonies for his younger sisters to sing. After high school, he went into the music industry and cut his teeth on stages in the 1960s. He got to work with artists such as the Who and Janis Joplin. He worked in studios with some of the finest studio musicians and producers of his time. He wrote lyrics that were poetic and that honestly spoke of the political climate of the day. He wrote music that was moving and innovative. And he was a Christian. 

Norman never tried to hide the fact that he was a Christian and a musician. He wrote the best music that he could, believing that people would be drawn to the art. Then he would stand on stage and try to lead his audiences into a personal relationship with Christ. He never saw the paradox in that. 

His musical career spanned decades and resulted in a musical anthology that any musician could be proud of. And while he found a great deal of success through his music--and found fans in fellow musicians such as Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and U2's Bono--he faced many struggles in his personal and business lives. He tried to create an artists' colony and a music production company, but he struggled to find any true partners. He had two failed marriages. But he created beautiful art and spent the last years of his life with his family, who he loved dearly. 

While his music reached audiences around the world, he also faced rumors and back-stabbing from people he thought of as friends and partners. The Christian music industry in America that he helped to start ended up rejecting him for being too edgy and polarizing. But he did everything he could to stay true to himself and the relationship with Christ that he put in the middle of his life and his work. 

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? is Gregory Thornbury's love letter to Norman. Named for one of the artist's most iconic songs, this meticulously researched story leaves no stone unturned in telling the whole story of Larry Norman's art and life. Alternately heartbreaking and triumphant, frustrating and moving, somber and joyous, this book takes you on a journey through the musical and political movements of the 1960s through the 1990s. While Larry Norman was alive, his work reached around the world and touched millions. Now, through this loving biography, it can reach even more.

I was drawn into this book so much more than I expected. It's beautifully written and so conscientiously detailed. It's also brutal in its honesty, not skipping over the challenges that Norman faced or the rumors that seemed to surround him. Thornbury doesn't shy away from the feuds Norman had with other artists, with the record companies, with his business partners, but he also tells the entire story from a place of love and respect, giving the book a perfect balance. This is a must for fans of all genres of music or anyone interested in the American culture of the '60s. It's a powerful story of one man but also of an industry and an era that left us all changed, whether we actually experienced the '60s or not. 



Galleys for Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? were provided by Crown Publishing through NetGalley, with many thanks.

Music is art, not propaganda.
When Larry Norman provided this quote to Buzz Magazine in 1981, he succinctly encapsulated his professional philosophy. Gregory Thornbury’s new book, Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, reveals this philosophy along with Norman’s character and influence throughout his life. Larry Norman was the pioneer of Christian rock, influenced diverse artists and groups such as Petra and TobyMac, had songs covered by over 300 artists, and was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. His album Only Visiting This Planet is considered one of the best Christian albums of all time and was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry as a “cultural, artistic, and/or historical treasure”. Yet most people don’t know of him or have barely heard of him. I was in that number before picking up this book, but I have begun to realize the dramatic influence he has had on both the music I listen to and some important conversations that evangelicals have been having for decades. He is a controversial figure that, in Thornbury’s new book, receives the quality of biography he deserves. It is available for pre-order on Amazon or in bookstores everywhere March 20.

When I first began reading Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, I was asking the wrong question. I wanted to find out what I thought of Larry Norman. Is he a role model? Is he a negative example? You know, a thorough assessment of the good and bad of this important Christian musician. It took a long while, but I eventually realized that is not the correct angle from which to read this work.

Larry Norman was controversial because he pushed so fervently against the status quo of the American church as an institution. Thornbury says it best:

Unlike other Christian leaders, Larry seemed to believe that the easy relationship the Church enjoyed with American culture was more of a problem than a blessing. He somehow seemed to understand that apologetics may actually need to start with apologies: for the Church’s racism, ready acceptance of aggression, violence, and war, and for an unwillingness to listen to the concerns of a generation.
Larry Norman’s own words show the depth of his contentious relationship with the American church. At one of his performances he read a Gordon Bailey poem called “First Day in Church”:

Listen, I only came to church to see if they could offer hope / But everything that happened there was way outside my scope /You know like afterwards, outside, there was a beggar on the grass / He held his hand out to the people. They’d smile, then they’d pass / I’m sure he reached for something real, for something more than cash / He begged them for a little cheer an’ they all pretended not to hear / I get the message loud and clear / Church is middle class.

Whether that aspect of Norman is a positive or negative to you (I, personally, respect that position), there are major issues with his personality and actions. He divorced twice in his life (long stories in themselves that require the attention Thornbury gives them), his business dealings were sometimes ethically questionable, he was much less personable than your average Christian artist, and there is a big question about whether he had a child outside of marriage in 1988 (an allegation which receives a thorough examination in the book). Again, I am tempted to evaluate Larry Norman on a right/wrong scale, but I don’t believe that is the most important takeaway from the book.

As humans (and maybe specifically Christians), we have a propensity to judge others’ character based on the information we know about them. I won’t argue that there is never a time for that, but on balance I would say that judgement should be reserved to the One who knows the whole story. Even as exhaustive as Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? is, we still do not know everything about Larry Norman. What do we do, then, with a work such as this? We try to understand.

Daniel Kahneman, the influential psychologist, has a unique way of questioning a new piece of information. Instead of asking “Is this true?”, he asks “What is this true of?”. Within reason, I think this approach is helpful. In a similar way, I think Thornbury is asking us not to necessarily always ask whether Norman is right or wrong, but to understand why he is doing it. From the available information, I think it is safe to assume that Larry Norman was redeemed by the same Jesus he claimed. To understand him, then, is to understand a brother in Christ instead of simply judging him in the afterlife. This passage by Thornbury perfectly illustrates how even those in Norman’s time were judging him in the same way:

The truth is that, at this point, after all these years, maybe many people in the Christian subculture secretly hoped the rumors were true. They expressed somehow a repressed hope that someone like Larry Norman, someone so free of typical religious conventions, was a fraud. Because if people like Larry were frauds, then the black-and-white distinctions did hold true, and being old-fashioned was synonymous with the faith. Larry Norman as onetime hero turned villainous porn star was a fantasy that far too many people couldn’t resist. The alternative, to them, was unacceptable. There couldn’t be any way a person could fly in the face of religious convention and Church authority and still have something to teach them.
What a powerful message for our church today! Yes, sometimes religious convention and traditions are good, but sometimes flying in the face of them is what Jesus asks of you. Larry Norman claimed that this is what Jesus asked of him, and maybe we should believe him.

Possibly my favorite part of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? was the epilogue. Here Thornbury shares his personal experience with Larry Norman’s music. In college, Thornbury was a Christian radio DJ with a distaste for the slate of contemporary Christian music (he led a “No Carman, None of the Time” Weekend), but a coworker introduced him to the Norman album Only Visiting This Planet and was hooked. My personal experience with Larry Norman, though I only had a vague knowledge with his name, was surprisingly significant. If first picked up this book because I knew the titular song “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”, but from a 90s cover from Geoff Moore & The Distance. As it turns out, I enjoyed multiple Larry Norman covers throughout my adolescence, my favorite being DC Talk’s cover of “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”. Personal experience is so important in music, which makes Gregory Thornbury a perfect conduit for the Larry Norman story and Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? the best possible biography of the Christian rock pioneer.

I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Convergent Books and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

I'd never heard of Christian singer/songwriter Larry Norman, but since I love to read biographies of musicians, I was drawn in by the book's cover. You've got to admit, it's a great cover: An iconic rock star's pose...wearing black pants and dress shirt, long blond hair, holding guitar under the spotlight...photo shot from behind lending a halo effect. The title of the book is on a concert ticket stub at the top of the book cover. I am drawn to rock stars, so of course I got sucked in. Still, I struggled a bit getting through this book. The problem wasn't with the writing, but that I just didn't make a connection with the subject of the book. I wasn't that interested. Still, the writing was very good and the research was excellent, so I managed to muddle through.

Author Gregory Alan Thornbury first learned of Larry Norman while managing a small radio station in college. He hated the adult contemporary Christian music that the station played, but was introduced to Norman's album "Only Visiting this Planet" by a college friend. Thornbury was so impressed by Norman's album that he travelled 750 miles with his fellow college friend (and hardly any money) to see him perform in concert.

Thornbury was very fortunate to have been given full access to Larry Norman's massive archives, which adds much authenticity to the book. There were many excerpts of letters written by Norman throughout the book. He was a BIG letter writer. Clearly, not only was he a talented Christian musician, but also had a keen business sense. He shunned lawyers in favor of handling music business himself, and seemed to do a decent job of it. It reminded me of a Gene Simmons (of KISS) type of musician, as he also handles the majority of his band's business . You might call Larry a control freak where his own career was concerned, and also that of the musicians he discovered. Larry would recruit other Christian music talent and sign them to his own entertainment company Solid Rock. There were many business entanglements and arrangements discussed in the book. Business minutiae makes my eyes glaze over, but perhaps other business-minded individuals would be interested in these details.

I watched a ten minute video of one of Larry Norman's performances, and he truly had a unique gift for speaking to the audience. He would tell stories... religious in nature but tinged with wry humor and married with truth. He had the audience in the palm of his hand well before he played a single note. He didn't really believe that you necessarily had to attend a physical church all the time; he felt that you could be spiritual without being religious and that the young people following Jesus were "having their church out in the streets."

Following his death in 2008, the Huffington Post published an article dubbing him "The Most Amazing Artist You've Never Heard Of."

Thank you to Crown publishing who provided an advance reader copy via NetGalley.

This is a biography of Larry Norman, one of the forefathers of modern contemporary Christian music. A genre I have basically no knowledge of, I was hoping for a lot more from this book both in terms of insight into the genre’s creation itself and of Norman, presented here as an important cog in the CCM machine. We basically get neither – the book assumes a lot of knowledge about CCM that may be clear to fans of the genre, as you get basically no context for the genre itself or where it’s at along the same lines of Norman’s growth/changes as a musician, and Norman himself, to this reader, is portrayed as more of an eccentric crank than a musician of import. It would be fine if the book was trying to present that point of view from the start, but the narrative instead comes across more as a bait-and-switch.



I hesitate to criticize a book for not being what I want the book to be, but I instead criticize this one for not being what it was presented as. It’s a missed opportunity, and I am interested in seeing another book that might better explain Norman and the modern history of the genre.

Going by what you read on the internet Larry Norman was/is a polarizing figure within the Christian community, so I was thrilled when this book showed up on NetGalley. I really enjoyed reading this - the author took a balanced factual approach to his subject and the result is a highly-readable biography. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Mr. Norman and the history of contemporary Christian music.