Jesus Sound Explosion
These days Anderson teaches writing at the University of Minnesota and drums in a country-gospel-punk band at the nontraditional House of Mercy Church, voted “Best Church for the Nonchurchgoing” by the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. Before that he spent about 15 years as a clerk at the Electric Fetus record store in Minneapolis. It’s not an elaborate resume, and Jesus Sound Explosion is a remarkably down-to-earth, unpretentious read. But it’s far from artless. Anderson’s generous sensibility melds barbs of anger with genuine affection for those he grew up with in the faith. His ability to gently poke fun at himself as well as those around him is highly engaging, and his takes on both rock and Christianity are refreshingly skeptical, calling into question what’s meant by a “rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle” and showing how that lifestyle can be not much more than a cliche.
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In 1976 Anderson and his friends can head down to the mall and pick up a “Concert Kit,” a plastic rectangle containing a pipe, screens, rolling papers, and a roach clip. A mass-produced interpretation of 60s counterculture, the kit was, in Anderson’s words, marketed, “along with corporate Album-Oriented-Radio, for The Burnout, a ready-to-smoke self that could be donned like a favorite concert T-shirt.” And shrugged off just as easily: the minister’s son makes his way among good-natured evening and weekend burnouts who like to party but still try to get Bs on their report cards. But the strictness of Anderson’s upbringing renders sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll much more serious than they are for his peers. His beer blasts and smoke-out excursions are axiomatically more grave than the peccadilloes of his nonevangelical friends because of the heavy load of guilt they engender.
Part of the problem is that the language of Jesus, at least the version the teenage Anderson is immersed in, is worldly to the point of prosaism, at times even laughably banal. A youth pastor admonishes his charges to “go ahead and laugh about it–God has a sense of humor too” and notes that “when God says jump, all we can ask is ‘how high, Lord?’” A relationship with Jesus Christ is, a still-evangelical friend advises the adult Anderson, “a very simple thing.” But by that point, in the mid-90s, Anderson isn’t looking for a God that’s simple or friendly. “If I’m ever going to have a relationship with God,” he writes, “I want it to be the opposite: complex, mysterious, and confounding.”
After all, is it even possible to be in the world but not of it? Anderson’s Sunday school teacher lets slip that “it’s good to be alive.” He discerns that same message in the MOR of Elton John, the hard rock of Led Zep and Aerosmith, the postpunk of Husker Du and Soul Asylum, the jazz of Coltrane. Because of, not despite, his background, pop music was and is a secret revelation, an alternative gospel. His self-mocking tendency, his penchant for indulging in and then puncturing his own rhetorical flights of fancy, are probably part of what made him a misfit in the world of the faithful, but they’re good qualities in a writer.
