Jesus Rocks The World Seminar and Lecture

 

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Rocks-World-volumes-Contemporary/dp/0313377707/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2G6KC9CMBA4GH&keywords=bob+gersztyn&qid=1636414959&sprefix=bob+gersztyn%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-1

Jesus Rocks The World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music, volumes 1 & 2, by Christian rock music historian Bob Gersztyn is an amazing story. It begins with the counter culture hippies of the 1960’s merging their psychedelic visions with their straight laced church going counterparts to create what came to be called, “The Jesus Movement,” which gave birth to Jesus rock. It tells the story of how Jesus rock became CCM, which expressed different manifestations of Christianity through rock & roll. Some of its artists, like Bob Dylan and U2 perfected the genre and made it mainstream. It also tells the story of how Jesus rock revitalized the dead Protestant church in America and Western Europe during the 1960’s and ultimately impacted Western pop music through the previously mentioned artists and hundreds of others. It is the story of how Western Civilization packaged and disseminated it’s ideological, philosophical and spiritual ideals to closed and adversarial societies, including the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European Communist satellite states and the current Islamic Jihadist states.

 

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What people are saying about “Jesus Rocks The World:”

“Bob Gersztyn’s history of Jesus Rocks the World is a welcome addition to the very slim canon of serious histories on contemporary Christian music. In addition to his thorough research, Bob’s interviews and photography skills make this a special project, one that scholars and fans alike will find valuable in the years to come.”
—Robert Darden, Associate Professor, Journalism, Public Relations and New Media, Baylor University

“The history of contemporary Christian music has its roots in the earliest days of rock ’n’ roll, when pioneers such as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and many others funneled the euphoria of the black Pentecostal worship service into their music and performances. The ‘Jesus Music’ of the early 1970s and subsequent ‘contemporary Christian music’ of the 1980s and onward continues the lineage where rock music and Christian spirituality have combined. And Bob Gersztyn has done a masterful job of documenting this much neglected lines of the rock ’n’ roll ancestry in his work.”—David Di Sabatino is an Emmy-nominated documentarian whose film Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher played on PBS and received critical acclaim. He is also the compiler of The Jesus People Movement: An Annotated Bibliography and General Resource.

“It is wonderful to read such a thorough and insightful book on the subject. I am captivated by Bob Gersztyn’s account of so many people whose stories wove together to change hearts forever. But I was truly impressed at the lengths to which he was willing to go to look into the face of God’s work through Christian music and follow the story wherever it went—even to me.”—Marsha Stevens-Pino, Founding Member of Pioneer Jesus group Children of the Day and BALM Ministries.

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jesus-rocks-the-world-2-volumes-bob-gersztyn/1114677923?ean=9780313377709

“Bob Gersztyn has written the history of a counterculture to the 60s counterculture where the spirit of the time met the Holy Spirit and the rock of the age was transformed by the Rock of Ages.”
—Don Cusic, Professor of Music Business, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

“Jesus Rocks and Gersztyn Rolls Out the True Jelly Donut of the Soul.”—Hugh Romney a.k.a Wavy Gravy, Poet, Humanitarian, Peace & Personal Empowerment Activist, Woodstock MC and Author of Something Good For A Change.

“While I’ve dismissed Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) as Christian cheese, Robert Louis Gersztyn convinced me to give this musical genre another look-see. Through his photos and commentary, I found myself transported back to the sixties for a front row seat to witness the growth of this worldwide cultural phenomenon.”—Becky Garrison, Author of Jesus Died for This?

Biography

Rev Bob Gersztyn served as an inner city pastor in North East Los Angeles, California, during the 1970’s when he was part of the Jesus movement and the music that it produced. Over the proceeding decades he worked as a freelance photographer and journalist documenting both secular and Christian pop music for major music and religion publications, like Blues Revue , Guitar Player, LIVE and the Wittenburg Door magazines. His photographs, articles and interviews dealing with the connection between music and religion have been published in dozens of periodicals, ezines and books. “Jesus Rocks The World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music, volumes 1 & 2,” is the crowning work of over forty years of research, that involved the documentation of the spiritual side of rock & roll. It is the story of how both the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches took advantage of the new genre of rock & roll to revitalize and reinvent themselves for a new generation of worshippers.

 

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Contact Bob Gersztyn for more information and scheduling at:

Phone: (503)363-0404

Email: bobgersztyn@gmail.com

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Carolyn Arends

 

 

The first time that I saw Carolyn Arrends was in 1996 when I was covering a Jefferson Starship concert in Portland, Oregon at the

Aladdin theater for a Deadhead publication called Duprees Diamond News. She was the opening act and I knew nothing about her, but

as soon as she began to perform I sensed something different about her music. By the lyrical content of the songs and the musical

presentation I concluded that she was a Christian and talked to her briefly during intermission before Jefferson Starship came on. My

suspicions were confirmed and I became a fan. Since that time she’s released 10 albums and written 3 books.  Her official website is at :

http://carolynarends.com/about/#sthash.wcV3DbRl.dpuf

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/bob%20gersztyn

Roman Catholicism and Rock & Roll

The Protestant church sometimes claims credit for Jesus rock, but the truth of the matter is that the older version of Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism actually beat its Evangelical brethren to the proverbial punch. The first round was fought by a Roman Catholic seminarian by the name of Ray Repp who was a pioneer in helping with the implementation of the Latin Mass into English, in the USA, during the mid 1960’s, after Vatican II permitted it. He used the then popular folk music genre of that time period, to record his 1965 album the Mass For Young Americans. Decades later Christian rock stars as diverse as Phil Keaggy and Undercover recorded his songs. In 1967, a garage rock surf music band from California, called the Electric Prunes recorded the entire Roman Catholic Mass in Latin, as a rock opera and it was released on Reprise Records in 1968. Future famous record producer David Axelrod was hired by Reprise as the album’s arranger and producer. The next year one of the album’s cuts, Kyrie Eleison was featured in the hippie cult classic film, Easy Rider.

The year 1969 was the year that the Roman Catholic church officially sanctioned the use of rock & roll as a liturgical form of music. Chess records vocalist Minnie Ripperton was the lead singer of an experimental rock group called the Rotary Connection who performed the first officially sanctioned Roman Catholic Rock Mass. The event took place in Milwaukee, Wisconson at the Liturgical Conference National Convention in 1969.

One of the bands that emerged out of the 1960’s folk scene and became pioneers of the brand of country/folk/rock that groups like the Eagles and Outlaws became famous for was Mason Profitt. The backbone of the group was 2 brothers, Terry and John Michael Talbot, who used their music to express their spiritual searching which finally culminated in their first Jesus rock album in 1974 titled The Talbot Brothers.

By the end of the 1970’s John Michael Talbot became a Franciscan monk, while he continued to record albums that bridged the gap between the Roman Catholic and Protestant brands of Christianity. He established the only Roman Catholic hermitage for monks in the U.S.A.  officially sanctioned by the Papal authority in Rome. The dozens of albums that he’s released on both Sparrow and his own Roman Catholic label, Troubadour For The Lord have sold millions of copies around the world. Then there’s Tony Melendez and Dion Dimucci and others that I’m either forgetting or didn’t know of. So in conclusion, even though Ray Repp and the Electric Prunes beat Larry Norman and Love Song by 2 and 3 years they didn’t get theologically hung up about it. The thing about Catholics that is different from Protestants concerning rock music has been their attitude towards it. After all it was Protestants that created the Christian rock genre as an alternative to secular rock.

Rock & Roll and Religion

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzr_GBa8qk

Rock & roll and religion is like oil and water to some, who see foot tapping beats as the entrance of the highway to hell. Then to others the combination is as natural as peanut butter and jelly, as mega churches build massive cathedrals with worship bands that have recording contracts. Ever since Alan Freed coined the term rock & roll and Ike Turner and Bill Haley recorded “Rocket 88” and “Rock Around The Clock,” there has been controversy about the place that rock & roll should have in the life of a Christian. One guilt-ridden musician once asked me if I could see Jesus playing an electric guitar, to which I answered, “Yes, He could have put the parables to music and sung them to the crowd.”

Before there was rock & roll there was Black gospel which was the flip side of Blues. Many of the early gospel singers during the early and mid 20^th century played both genres and in some cases were even ministers with churches. One of the earliest gospel rockers, and certainly the most successful was Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was born in Arkansas in 1915 and her mother was a COGIC (Church of God in Christ) minister. She began performing in church services at the age of 4 and continued to do so in a traveling gospel show. She married a COGIC minister named Thomas Thorpe in 1934 and after divorcing him, used a variation of his name for her stage name.  She was signed to Decca Records and in 1938 she performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of John Hammond’s Spirituals To Swing concert. Her performance was controversial, since at the time women didn’t play guitar and gospel had never been incorporated with blues and jazz in public performances before secular audiences previously. Then she regularly performed at Harlem’s Cotton Club with Cab Calloway. Sister Rosetta’s popularity continued to soar and she was remarried before a crowd of 25,000 people in Washington D.C.’s Griffith Stadium in 1951. Afterwards she performed a gospel concert in her wedding dress.

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s popularity continued to soar until she recorded a blues album in 1953 and then fell out of favor with her main audience, church going Christians who considered blues the Devil’s music. Her popularity rose again by the time the 1960s brought the rock revolution and a fascination with its primitive music roots. She performed with both gospel and blues stars like James Cleveland and Muddy Waters. Tharpe continued to perform until her death in 1973 at the age of 58, but her legacy lives on in her recording and the proliferation of her performances on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeaBNAXfHfQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzr_GBa8qk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR2gR6SZC2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrhjgt-_Qc

http://www.biography.com/people/sister-rosetta-tharpe-17172332

http://www.amazon.com/People-Get-Ready-History-Gospel/dp/0826417523

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Rocks-World-volumes-Contemporary/dp/0313377707

Spiritual Rock & Roll Journalism

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Bob%20Gersztyn

U2 is a four man Irish rock band that began in the late 1970s when four teenage friends started to play together after school in Dublin. Lead singer Paul Hewson, nicknamed Bono, lead guitarist and keyboardist, David Evans, nicknamed the Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., and bassist Adam Clayton make the quartet. Three of the four were part of an after school Christian Bible study that started as a result of the spiritual revolution that began in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1970s. Elder Irish rocker Van Morrison had already laid the groundwork for spiritually infused rock and roll a decade earlier. Their first two albums were sold in Christian bookstores and they headlined “Greenbelt,” Great Britain’s oldest Christian rock festival before they hit superstardom.

 

 

2.      Elvis Presley was a frustrated gospel singer who failed his audition with Cecil Blackwood’s Southern Gospel quartet, the Songfellows, because he couldn’t sing harmony. So he recorded rock & roll for Sam Phillips at Sun Records as a solo artist. However, he also recorded  gospel albums and even used gospel groups like the Jordanaires and the Imperials on his albums and in his live shows. In 2002 he was inducted into the “Gospel Music Hall of Fame,” along with Larry Norman and Keith Green.

 

3.      Larry Norman is considered by many to be the father of Jesus rock, since his first solo album, “Upon This Rock,” on Capital Records was released in 1969. He was a talented singer, songwriter, and performer, who also started his own record label and discovered and nurtured many early Jesus rockers. He lived here in Salem for the last 20 years of his life, until he went to be with the Lord in 2008.

 

4.      Keith Green was another pioneer Jesus rock star who began his career as a child prodigy who performed since he was five. He and his wife Melody were songwriters with a contract that earned them enough money to live on in the 1970s, until they signed a recording contract with Billy Ray Hearn’s new “Sparrow” record label. They used all their royalties from songwriting, record sales, and performances to house and feed all the homeless people that they led to Jesus on the streets of Los Angeles. Keith eventually gave his albums out for free since he didn’t believe that God wanted him to charge people to hear the gospel. He tragically died in an airplane crash in 1982.

 

 

 

5.      Ellas Bates, better known as Bo Diddley, is a pioneer of rock & roll, but his early musical education came from the church. When he was a child, during the Great Depression, his church  believed in his musical ability and took up a collection to purchase him a violin, that he studied for 12 years. Later he wanted to be a drummer, but couldn’t coordinate his hands, so instead he played guitar, with a style that simulated a driving drum beat, and ironically invented rock & roll’s primal rhythm, considered by most Christians to be profane.

 

 

6.      Bob Dylan was considered by many to be the voice of his generation in the 1960s when he wrote and sang songs that reflected the soul of his generation. By the end of the 1970s he turned his back on fame and fortune and abandoned all his groundbreaking music to perform Jesus rock for three albums. Songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Saved,” and “Property of Jesus” replaced “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Lay Lady Lay,” for a season.

 

 

7.      Dion Dimucci is a legend that was part of the 2^nd wave of American rock & roll in the late 1950s  that included Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper. The latter three tragically died in an airplane crash, but Dimucci was spared and had a stellar career that went from Doo Wop, to blues and rock to folk and finally gospel.

 

 

8.      Chuck Girard’s musical career began in high school and by the time he graduated he was the lead singer of the Castells, a Doo Wop group from the early 1960s. They had a couple of top 40 radio hits and by 1964 he was working with the Beach Boys and became the lead singer of the Hondells and had another radio hit called “Little Honda.” Musical success allowed him to enjoy life and he became an acid dropping hippie, who moved to Hawaii and lived off the land. After 500 LSD trips he returned to Los Angeles, began playing with other local musicians who were all on the same spiritual quest. Eventually Girard and four others formed “Love Song,” one of the most important seminal Jesus freak rock bands to come out of the counter culture.

 

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Bob%20Gersztyn

All of these stories and hundreds of others are covered in greater detail in my two books. “Jesus Rocks The World: The Definitive History of Contemporary Christian Music, volumes 1 & 2” is published by Praeger and available on most major book sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and even ABC-CLIO the parent publisher. However, you can find the best deal on Walmart’s web site. If you buy the book I would be happy to autograph it for you, just contact me by friending me on facebook. I also have a blog that you can connect to through facebook. If you want more information just google Bob Gersztyn and you will find me.

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1.

U2 & How One of the Biggest Rock Band’s in the World Began

All Photography ©Bob Gersztyn

All Photography ©Bob Gersztyn

U2 formed in the late 1970s, when its members, Paul Hewson (Bono) lead vocalist, David Evans (Edge) lead guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton bass, and Larry Mullen Jr. drums, were still in high school. They were influenced by the Jesus movement that impacted Great Brittan and Ireland, as they studied the Bible, prior to the release of their first album, Boy. October, the second album was sold in Christian book stores and the band was written up in CCM and other Christian magazines. The band was invited to headline the Greenbelt Christian rock festival in Great Brittan in 1981, and the song Gloria, off the album, connected them with their predecessor Van Morrison and established their ability to bridge the gap between the sacred and the profane. Gloria is a song about teenage lust, but at the same time it’s part of the Roman Catholic Mass, and both versions were incorporated. After Joshua Tree was released in 1987, the band hit a level of popularity that has only augmented over time. Over the decades they have continued to produce sonically excellent commercially successful music, with lyrics that inspire and instruct their fans to a compassionate response to the world’s problems.

Rock & Roll & Religion Class

Rock & Roll & Religion Class Flyer

The Blind Boys of Alabama

The 5 Blind Boys of Alabama came into being when the Great Depression was ending in the late 1930s, at the Talladega, Alabama School for the Negro Blind. Clarence Fountain was only 7 years old at the time that he formed the group and became its spokesperson, as they journeyed from the 20^th to the 21^st century. In the beginning they were called the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, in the tradition of the Jubilee groups that formed after the Civil War, like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. During the racially segregated 1940s and 1950s, during the golden age of gospel music they played to black audiences only.

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After the advent of rock & roll in the 1950s, gospel singers like Solomon Burke, Sam Cooke, and Lou Rawls became pop stars, but Clarence Fountain chose to continue singing about Jesus, and the Blind Boys of Alabama continued performing gospel until the present day, under the leadership of original member Jimmy Carter. Over the decades their popularity ebbed and waned, along with managerial problems, racial discrimination, and periodic successes. The 1980s saw them starring in a Broadway musical called the Gospel of Colonus, and then at the turn of the millennium, secular rock star Peter Gabriel produced their album “Spirit of the Century.” They ended up winning all kinds of Grammy awards over the next few years and were touring to packed-out white audiences. Their shows are an energetic blend of rock gospel and performance theater that clearly demonstrates to the world that Jesus can rock.

One time after a concert in Portland, Oregon, I interviewed Clarence Fountain for the Wittenburg Door, that I was a contributing editor and staff photographer for. Later I even published the interview in Blueswax, the online version of Blues Revue that I was also a contributing editor and staff photographer for.  One of the questions that I asked him was how the blues evolved from gospel music. His answer was purely theological. “That’s a problem, but I think I can narrow it down, because the Gospel was first. Gospel was in Heaven and the Devil was the chief agent in the choir before God kicked him out. Then he came on the earth and later on down the line he gave us slavery times, and then guys started talking about their babies, and how they love them and all that. I think that’s how it came about, but Gospel was the first choice, and Blues was next, and then Jazz and the rest of the music came in behind it.”