After suffering many years with major ailments, Larry Norman died on Sunday. As a member of People in the late ’60s, he introduced the world to the concept of Christian rock under the guise of the band’s psych and prog rock. On his seminal solo release, Only Visiting This Planet (1972), he presented a song whose title became his career-long motto: “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”

Norman started the Solid Rock Record Company as an old-fashioned collective: a record label, a management company, a production service, and in many ways a ministry. He helped put out albums by artists such as Randy Stonehill and the band Daniel Amos, but not without some controversy — like so many of his contemporaries, Norman was at odds with both the church and the secular music world.

The mainstream market often rejected Solid Rock’s artists for being too biblical, causing their albums to be sold mainly in the burgeoning Christian bookstore market. However, because a lot of the music was evangelical in nature, the same artists were assailed for “preaching to the converted,” and worse, because the music was rooted in rock and blues, many churches rejected all of it outright as being “satanically deceptive, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

(more…)