Norman Greenbaum
Going up to the spirit in the sky. I heard this song on 97.9 the other day and had to look it up. It totally rocks, especially the reverbed sting at the end of the verse. But when I heard it on the radio, while it sounds old, I just assumed that it was some modern rock inspired christian thing. Turns out it is a one hit wonder all the way back from 1969!! The wiki entry is awesome: “after watching Porter Wagoner on TV singing a gospel song. Greenbaum later said : “I thought, ‘Yeah, I could do that,’ knowing nothing about gospel music, so I sat down and wrote my own gospel song. It came easy. I wrote the words in 15 minutes.” … In fact, the line “Never been a sinner, I never sinned” runs counter to the Christian concept of sin.”
I love it. It did sound a little odd to me, and if it really was old (and theologically correct) we would have been singing it in church when I was growing up. I mean we sang Cat Stevens every Easter. (Yes, I was raised in the wild by hippies.)
But back to this song. The guitar sound is so awesome, and was apparently generated by a home made effects box with a lot of homage to Jimi Hendrix. And the VIDEO!!!! Oh my good lord. The little flashes of the cross and the beach. The james bond backup singers. The trippy back and white matting. ALL DONE ON SUPER 8!!!!! I can’t even imagine how much thought and effort had to go into that drug induced extravaganza. Super 8 only came out four years earlier, so all those special effects had to be hand done, and all that fast switch MTV style cutovers had to be done by hand.
Theologically unsound, hand-built guitar effects, trippy gospel video, tons of effort on everything except for actually writing the song. I think I like it.