Sometimes when we do interviews here at Down the Line we don’t always come across as clear and concise as we intend, or sometimes it is not as clear and concise as the interviewee would intend or be happy with. Obviously we interview people whose work we appreciate and find merit in, but sometimes we like to offer a bit more insight and depth into a subject. Thus was the case with David di Sabatino from our last interview. David’s films on Larry Norman and Lonnie Frisbee have been the subject of much debate and speculation, even to the point of attack and accusation. We are not drawing any lines in the sand here, just trying to offer again a bit more insight into a two complex films that encompasses just as much from an artistic standpoint as they do a spiritual standpoint. Hopefully we offer a bit more depth here in addition to what we ran in the last issue as well…think of this as the companion piece.
From one of our emails you said, “Also…my docs aren’t pussyfooting around. I am raising the possibility that Larry Norman was a fraud…” So along that line of thinking, obviously Norman didn’t practice what he preached or what he confessed to believe, so where is the dividing line that makes him a fraud, or just another person who chooses to go after what he wants instead of living by what he knows is right? Maybe also, how would you define the term fraud?
I realize that a lot of those looking in cannot understand how a guy that could write such music that stirred the heart toward God could possibly be called a “fraud.” And that is the problem. It is a tough story to tell precisely because you almost had to experience the darkness to understand this might even be possible. And none of us want to believe it possible because, well, who wants to live in such a dark and cynical zone. So, for some, I guess it is easier to believe this all a grand conspiracy, that we have all lost our minds and are spreading lies and gossip about Larry Norman. That denial in the face of such meaty evidence is really difficult to stomach. These folks simply are unable to separate the artist from the art which is something you must do to understand this story.
Another group of people want to settle in to that familiar Christianese zone where all of us are sinners, and so, we shouldn’t look at anyone else’s sin different from our own. …we’re all fallen. …we all do bad things. …and God still loves us all anyway. And thus, Larry Norman was a mixed bag, broken like the rest of us and was trying to do good but he fell short of the mark.
This isn’t that storyline either.
From the beginning there were people in my ear that were very hawkish about Larry Norman. They believed that he was an outright fraud projecting a false image to a bunch of people too awestruck to ask tough questions about behavior that was at best contradictory to his message and at worst was downright despicable and evil. Ultimately, so these hawks suggest, he was conning his audience out of their money and a position of influence. Not a particularly nice line of thinking, but when faced with the testimonies, when faced with a neglected child, when faced with a mother whose family was turned upside down, you start to believe that something was really off here.
As I began interviewing, the typical storyline was that there was almost complete and utter dissonance between what he was saying on stage and the image he was projecting to his fans and how we lived his life once he got down from that stage. Let’s give the most glaring example in the movie. Rock stars having babies out of wedlock is not a particularly shocking revelation. But what is difficult to fathom is the amount of effort to push his own child and his mother away and to cast aspersions upon anyone that dared question this or other confounding behavior. And he did this over and over and over again in every situation where he was faced with taking any responsibility for his actions.
So, when faced with this kind of behavior, what other word do you have? Larry Norman got up on stage night after night singing songs with lines like “without love, you are nothing” all the while he was also plotting the destruction of the lives and careers of those who’d drawn close to him and knowingly ostracizing his very own child. And as I dug, I found that this behavior was happening as early as the late 1960s but got progressively worse and worse and things spiraled downward. Having listened to people wonder aloud at the dissonance between the image he projected and fought so desperately to maintain and the gravity of the actions that were visited upon people he deemed his enemies, I took the notion raised by the hawks seriously, that Larry Norman was either a man who lost the narrative thread of whatever resonance he had with the Christian message, or he was someone who embraced that image as a wolf in sheep’s clothing to con the faithful. And I present that as one of the themes in the movie, but my title for the piece tells you where I lean.
The word “fraud,” however, is a slippery one and needs some elaboration. It conjures up images of someone who is knowingly conning and duping, that they have from the beginning sat down and orchestrated the ruse with a full and conscious intent to beguile. I think this may be too shallow an observation. I think this story is much more complex than that.
Larry Norman was a very confused man. I take it some sort of traumatic event triggered this sort of behavior since it is out of tremendous pain that you settle in to such a world of your own making. And I think that his confusion blurred the lines of responsibility. In his head he was always the victim, even though it was obvious to anyone on the other end of his actions that he was very much the perpetrator. That doesn’t excuse the behavior, or even make it explainable, but I think in his own confused way he believed he was being sincere and doing the right thing. In his mind, he was the evangelistic troubadour who went around the world spreading God’s love. And he spent a lot of time telling you this in his liner notes and Phydeauxgrams to his fan base. All the actions he visited upon anyone that threatened to (or those whom he thought were going to) upset his carefully constructed reality were in some means a way of preserving the good that he did while up on stage. The problem for those of us on the other end of his, let’s call it “Larry Norman’s survival mode,” were experiencing what can only be described as evil.
What’s all the more strange is that because some (certainly not all) evangelical Christians have bought into this sort of Faustian deal that posits as long as these imbalanced characters are ultimately bringing people to the Lord and sewing a positive message, none of the other stuff matters. I remember speaking with a guy who Larry obviously wronged very badly, and this guy swore me to secrecy because he didn’t want to hurt Larry Norman’s ministry. When I pushed him and inquired whether he thought keeping someone’s lie to extend God’s kingdom was a little bit backwards, the fellow broke off communication with me. And I wonder how keeping the silence helped Jennifer Robinson when she phoned up CCM magazine and told them about Daniel and how she needed to speak with Larry and get medical information. Larry wasn’t returning her calls, but the powers that be at CCM magazine put them in contact with one another. And the very next year when Larry released his Home at Last album, they put Larry on the cover and said nothing about the child.
Getting back to the word “fraud,” this might help explain the situation a bit. I recently saw a movie called Who is Clark Rockefeller? about a man who posed as a relative of the famous American family, and who managed to keep the charade for more than a decade before his wife finally caught on and turned him over to the authorities. The ending of the movie shows a scene where the exposed man sits in jail repeating over and over something to the affect of that he never meant to hurt anybody and that he had done everything to help others.
If you had come across this fellow during his heyday, he would have been completely immersed in his Rockefeller persona, so much so that the lines between reality and fiction were completely blurred. Somewhere along the line, this man actually starts to believe his own lie. In his mind, he is Clark Rockefeller. And he will take offense to anyone that tries to take that delusion away. In fact, he might even resort to the most heinous of crimes to make sure that nobody ever finds out his lie. The lie becomes reality, and that lie must be preserved at all costs.
What’s saddest of all is they deceive themselves into believing the lie is helping people. So when you or anyone else comes to say, “Hey, this is all a lie,” they look at you like you have two heads and wonder aloud why you cannot see how good they are and how much help they are to everyone. Frighteningly, the conclusion they draw is that you yourself are evil for wanting to stop all the help they are giving to others, and it is you that must be destroyed.
Now, nobody with any sense thinks that these people get away with anything. I didn’t do this documentary because I felt that Larry had led a charmed life or had gotten away with the ruse. Nobody gets away with anything, and anyone that sews this kind of discord is a person in a lot of pain who continues to heap more pain on themselves the more they act this way. One of the great lines in M. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie describing the inner life of sociopathic behavior is that those looking for vengeance need to realize there is no temporal hell they could dream up to punish these “people of the lie” worse than the one that goes on every day in their heads. These are tortured individuals whose self-loathing is off the charts. But, while you want to have compassion for them, in no way does it justify their behavior or give them the right to silence others who simply wish to say that these things occurred.
So, the best you can say is that the good that he did to draw people to a closer relationship with God cannot be taken away from him, no matter how many doubts one might have about his sincerity. But the darkness that he put his hand toward to derail people’s lives is of such vile nature that there is no other conclusion other than he was a sociopath whose actions offstage almost totally contradicted everything he spoke about on stage. That is what I found when I went down this rabbit hole. I am sorry that some wish this weren’t true and would rather believe that myself or Mr. Stonehill have gone looney tunes. But that is the only way that I can make sense of all the evidence that I found.
I get that nobody enjoys hearing about this stuff. I didn’t want it to be true either. And the evangelical Christian culture has a number of idiosyncrasies that all convince them that truth-telling of this nature is a bad thing to do no matter what the reasons. I honestly had no idea that the story held this kind of ending, and we tried just about everything we could to persuade Larry to simply come forward and answer some of this stuff. Following hard after the truth no matter where it leads you is not pretty sometimes. But the facts remain. This story is much worse than the Mike Warnke story.
You also said in the email, “I think Matt raised an excellent question. Why am I falling over to support Lonnie and throwing knives at Larry. FINALLY, someone with the right question for me. That is a valid question…one that has a very well thought out answer as well.” Can you tell me the answer and expound on it?
Very simply, the intent of these two men’s hearts were completely and utterly different. Look at the stories of Cain and Abel or King Saul and King David. God judges the intent of the heart and makes a differentiation based on that.
Lonnie was naïve in many ways. He was sort of a holy fool upon whom God poured out his spirit. He had a sincere desire to bring people to a God encounter. The sins he committed were consensual. And he paid the ultimate price for his sin by having to check out early at age 40.
I have no idea what Larry Norman’s motivation was. I know what he said about himself, but this is a very dark Machiavellian character whose wheels are constantly moving to thwart others and to hide his tracks.
(Editor’s note: we left off some important context for this question. Matt is someone that was attending a Vineyard church at the time of this article. This church was started by several California transplants (this is very common in Texas) who claimed they had been around the Vineyard movement since the beginning. When he saw the Lonnie Frisbee documentary, Matt asked around at that church about Frisbee. Everyone was willing to talk about him. Some of the stories were contradictory with each other. Most of them raised the issue that Frisbee put on a naïve appearance, but couldn’t be that way in that culture. To give a public testimony of being “delivered” from a “gay lifestyle” would put one under intense scrutiny and surveillance by those that were suspicious or jealous or both. To keep a gay lover under wraps at this time would also require a high level of “thwarting others and hiding tracks.” Its also not consensual to lie about your lover, nor was it consensual to keep that information from the people that believed his testimony (even though it was arguably ultimately justified due to the anti-homosexual attitude of the Vineyard Church). This was the basis of Matt’s question. None of this is acceptable, of course – a less homophobic approach from the Vineyard was warranted all around. It might have even changed the outcome of Frisbee’s life.)
For me as a viewer, I see Lonnie as one person with a particular set of circumstances, and Norman as a different person with an entirely different set of circumstances. The differences are vast and really the way I see it their stories do not have much in common other than they both professed Christ. What I mean by that without going too deep into explanation is that Lonnie found Jesus and wanted to be used and share the news, whereas it seems Norman found Jesus and wanted to capitalize on that and take what he wanted in the process, regardless of who got hurt. Kind of different issues, different reasons and therefore different responses…does that make sense? Can you explain from the director’s point of view if you agree or disagree, and how that affected your slant on both films?
I once told Larry that he reminded me a lot of Lonnie Frisbee. At the time, well before I had any inclination to document these lives, I meant that like Lonnie, Larry seemed to me a guy that couldn’t see his own blind spots. Larry went ballistic on me.
I think there were a few similarities that I wasn’t thinking of when I first said that.
When I first started the Larry story, I felt the stories would be very much the same. I don’t know if this is just my own personal obtuseness, but when I first spoke with Randy Stonehill, I told him how I wanted to find the parallel to King David in Larry’s life and do the same thing for him that I found in the Lonnie narrative, a man after God’s own heart that struggled with some pretty heinous sin. I remember Randy just looking at me. I should have really taken that to heart. Because it just wasn’t the same story. So I didn’t try to make it what it wasn’t. I just tried to tell what I found.
I remember being on the phone with my friend Sam from Toronto and saying to him how distraught I was that this story was so dour and dark. And he said, “You don’t even want him to be this bad.” And I didn’t. One of the things that really bugs me about the lies that are being spread about my motivation is how much effort Pamela and I put in to trying to get Larry to come on and admit some of this stuff. We were fighting for this to have a much better ending than this miasma that the family has raised. Wouldn’t it have been great to have Larry explain some of this stuff, and just say he was sorry? I mean, isn’t that what the essence of the faith is? And if what others who spoke with Larry are telling me is true, I think he wanted to do it at some points, but those waiting in the wings to take over the “family business” talked him out of it. They were convinced they were going to stop me from using the music and his image in the film. When that didn’t happen, Plan B was to slur the people that were behind this.
much better ending than this miasma that the family has raised. Wouldn’t it have been great to have Larry explain some of this stuff, and just say he was sorry? I mean, isn’t that what the essence of the faith is? And if what others who spoke with Larry are telling me is true, I think he wanted to do it at some points, but those waiting in the wings to take over the “family business” talked him out of it. They were convinced they were going to stop me from using the music and his image in the film. When that didn’t happen, Plan B was to slur the people that were behind this.
Back to your question, yes, after a while I became very aware that this was a King Saul narrative, someone who had been given a position for a short season but was taken away from them because of lack of character. And instead of regrouping or making amends, he spends his days trying to mess up the lives of the people with whom he worked all the while pretending he is doing nothing of the sort for his ever decreasing coterie of fans who are desperate to believe the bulls**t he continues to package and repackage.
The Frisbee film will continue to be an inspiration to people. Fallen Angel is a cautionary tale that will make you sad. But it needed to be done just the same. I just follow the storyline where it takes me.
Also, I was very interested to hear you expound on what you said here… “we really need to stop lumping all sins together. Not all sins are created equally…as our good Catholic brothers will tell us…as the Bible suggests (with the sin against the Holy Spirit that is deemed unforgivable).” Can you elaborate on this?
Many things point this out to us. If we are followers of Scripture, we get an inkling of it with statements like, “There are seven things the Lord hates, and six things that are an abomination.” Or like I said above, that there is such a thing as the “unpardonable sin” tells us that not all sins are of equal gravity.
Also, if we believe that reason (or common sense) plays a part in our spiritual lives, as one of the pillars by which the Spirit teaches us, then it seems obvious that jaywalking is of a much lesser gravity than is murder. Our entire system of law is governed by weighing crimes based upon intent. If you premeditate murder it is called “first degree” and carries a much more serious punishment than does manslaughter.
Evangelicals love to say that all sin cuts us off from relationship with God, and that may be true in a generic sense. But we forget to follow through on the entire picture of sin, and fail to mention that there are very different temporal repercussions. Committing adultery is not the same as cheating on your taxes by claiming that you made $75k instead of $105k. In the former, innocents could be irreparably harmed as could both marriages. In the latter, you might have to pay a fine. Are those two sins really the same? In a very surface sense, yes, you broke the law. But the gravity of those two actions are very different and they carry with them two very different repercussions.
Most parents will have come up against this situation, one where the child has done something wrong and the parent has to “get to the bottom of it.” You question the child, listen to the answers and make your judgment accordingly. A child with peanut butter smeared all over their face professing innocence poses a bigger problem than one with a clean face who admits stealing a lick.
Intent of the heart is everything. And many times, as humans, we can’t see this. That is why people are loathe to judge a situation because of the difficulty to sometimes discern what Gollum might call “tricksy” people. But we make a mockery of Jesus’s statements when we say that his line to “Judge not lest ye be judged” was advocating some amoral standoff that puts us all at an inability to say anything about what anybody does. That is just not what he is saying there.
To the contrary, Jesus’s import is that when you make such judgments, do so by remembering that you too are susceptible, that you too are human, that there but for the grace of God go you and/or me. And when you remember that you too are human, you will then be in the right frame of mind to help someone see clearly by helping them remove the speck in their eye instead of blinding them with a fist to the eye.
In our situation we watched as Larry twisted this child in the wind for years before he died, even promised him on more than one occasion that he would make things right in his will. And we were hoping for the best, that Larry would come around and do the right thing. I remember speaking with Daniel before he went and met Larry in the UK in 2008, trying to help him put his mind in the best frame of reference to deal with such a difficult situation. But for whatever reason, Larry continued to lie to this kid. And I have no idea why or what the reasons in his head were. But I do know that this behavior is so far outside the boundaries that it should raise huge questions about who he said he was. And if you think that God is on the side of the argument that we should silence this story rather than get behind a broken-hearted mother and abandoned child, then I will tell you that you are seriously deluded. And I invite you to come with me and sit in a room with Daniel Robinson and Jennifer Wallace and listen of what they experienced. God is always on the side of the oppressed and the victim. Always.
Leave a Reply