by Owen Egerton
The sound rumbled away, echoing through the desert behind him. The dark quickly covered the distant cloud. Nothing remained but a dull orange glow somewhere in the mountains. Soon the stillness returned. Hayden stayed on the ground, his hands digging into the sand up to his knuckles.
“Holy fuck,” he said.
3
DAYS
The nail won’t fail
THE FOUR AND a half years following Milton and Roy’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes’ weekend retreat were unflinchingly Christocentric. They woke up an hour before class to study the Bible and pray together, they joined Tess’s Evangelical church, Roy abstained from his tutorial trysts, and Milton learned all the songs of Michael W. Smith on guitar. They didn’t abandon their love for off-kilter horror and sci-fi films. They still forsook sleep in order to devour Art Bell’s AM radio updates on the face of Mars, time travel, and the government’s secret antigravity technology. But in all things Christ came first.
One evening the two were talking about the Grays: thin, gray-skinned, almond-eyed aliens so often featured in films and X-Files episodes.
“You think the Grays know about Jesus?” Roy once asked.
“Hey man, ‘Every knee shall bow’ means every knee.”
When Roy failed Advanced Computer Science Programming his junior year, Milton comforted him by saying “Three things eternal, Roy. God, his Word, and people’s souls. The rest is fluff.”
Milton believed this with all his heart. God was his Holy Father. Jesus was his savior and friend. The Holy Spirit was his counselor. The Bible was a perfect book filled with perfect wisdom. He crafted his life around these truths.
Sure, he had doubts. Sometimes he and Roy would stay up all night wrestling with a difficult passage or concept. But even through the doubts, he trusted. Peter had to walk on water, Abraham had to tie up his son, the children of Israel had to follow the pillar of smoke. Trust, even when doubting, was the root of faith.
In their senior year of college, Milton, Roy, and three other university students led the music for their church’s contemporary service. Milton played rhythm guitar. Roy sang, encouraging the congregation to stand, sway, sing along. The worship centered on modern hymns with a few classics thrown in, all with a rock foundation that appealed to the younger attendees. The band was good—tight and competent in execution with just enough flair and personality to keep it interesting.
One night over stacks of raspberry pancakes and black coffee, Milton and Roy wrote a song:
The bread is broken, the words are spoken
I turn away
I sold my soul, for a bag of gold.
I’ll lose my life today.
Cut me down. Cut me down. I’m sick of hanging round.
The song was written from the point of view of Judas as he left the last supper to betray Christ. They presented it to the other members of the worship team the next day.
“I love it!” said Stan the bassist. “It’s not a worship song. But it’s dark and biblical.”
“The hanging part’s cool,” said Pick, lead guitar and seminary student. “Matthew records the hanging. Acts says he fell in a field and burst open. So scholars deduced Judas must have hung himself over a cliff and the rope snapped and he fell into a field. Is there a way to put that in?”
It was Jimmy, the drummer, who came up with the lyric for the song’s bridge.
Kill the man, kill the man, kill the man I kiss.
Stan was right in describing the song as not appropriate for a worship service. But they worked out a musical arrangement and practiced it nevertheless. More songs followed, mainly from Milton: “I’m Crossing Over,” “New Man,” “Blood Brothers.” Soon the band had a complete set of original songs and a clever cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” replacing baby with Jesus.
Come on, Jesus, light my fire.
It was their pastor who recommended that they play for the church’s twentysomethings’ singles mixer. The boys christened their band Pearls before Swine, which they found delightfully biblical and sassy. As the date of the singles mixer approached, Milton found that panic was growing in him like an accelerated tumor.
“But you’ve played in front of the congregation hundreds of times,” Roy told him.
“This is different. In a service I’m playing for God. Doesn’t matter who’s there. This is a performance!”
“Just play, close your eyes and play.”
“Close my eyes?”
“Yeah,” Roy said. “You only need them to get on and off the stage.”
The show was a wild success. Twentysomethings grooving and moving and mingling, and the boys gleefully blasting away. Roy’s vocal energy and frantic jumping thrilled the crowd. Pick’s face was stern and sweaty, studying his fingers as they ran up and down the guitar neck. Jimmy’s drums and Stan’s bass were solid enough to build a house on. For Milton, the most memorable moment of that first show was when, during one of Pick’s extended guitar solos, Roy nudged Milton and urged him to glimpse at the crowd.
“See who came.”
Milton peeked and saw the people. His stomach rose in his throat as if he had opened his eyes to find himself free-falling onto a quickly approaching mound of thumbtacks. But then he spotted, dancing along with the crowd and yet somehow set apart from it, Tess. Of course, she was a church member, in her twenties and single (the baseball player didn’t last the semester), so it only made sense that she would be there, but the possibility had not occurred to Milton. She was smiling up at the stage. Milton reclosed his eyes, grinned and sucked on the moment as if it were heaven’s own lozenge.
More gigs followed. Church gatherings, a youth group ski trip, high school weekend retreats. Milton pumped out a slew of new songs. A small local Christian label, CrossRock, signed them, and the boys prepared to record their debut album. There was one hitch. They had to change the name. It turned out that Pearls before Swine was the name of a psychedelic folk band that had enjoyed some success in the late ’60s.
The boys considered calling themselves PBS until Pick mentioned the threat of receiving a cease and desist from the Public Broadcasting Service. The band had to vote on which key word to keep: Pearls or Swine.
“It’s gotta be Swine,” Jimmy said. “Pearls sounds gay.”
“No, man. Pearl,” countered Pick. “It’s white and pure and hidden inside the oyster like the believer is hidden in the world.”
It was Roy who came up with the solution. “Pearl-Swine. Cut before.”
The compromise held, and the band had a new name.
The self-titled album was released to mediocre reviews and poor sales. Outside of some local Christian radio play, Pearl-Swine was largely ignored.
“Hey, we were never doing this for the money or popularity, right boys?” Pick said when the label informed them that there was little interest in funding a second album. “It was for God. First and foremost.”
The Pearl-Swine spin was slowing to a natural conclusion, and without too much drama, the boys discussed the details of disbanding. But a call from the CrossRock label changed all that. It concerned one of their songs: “The Nail Won’t Fail.”
He took the nail, and the nail won’t fail.
He felt the wood, and he did it for my good.
He saw the spear, but he knew no fear.
Now break me, take me, make me more like you . . .
The song was doing moderately well on the contemporary Christian music charts, but that was not why the label was calling. For reasons unclear to CrossRock, “The Nail Won’t Fail” was quickly becoming a huge crossover hit in the gay club scene. Pearl-Swine’s single was being requested in gay dance clubs and bars all across America and earning significant secular radio play. CrossRock couldn’t have been more thrilled and urged Pearl-Swine to embark on a national tour.
Milton questioned the tour, the new fan base, the temptation of material success. He brought his concerns to Tess. The two circled Lady Bird Lake along Austin’s Hike and B
ike Trail. He explained the single, the opportunity, the label’s enthusiasm, and his own worries. She listened carefully, her heather hair falling over the sides of her face.
“Milton, it’s amazing!”
“I just don’t know.”
“He’s using you to touch those lost men! Amazing. I know it’s not what you planned. But that’s God. He has his own plans. Mysterious plans!” She took his hand. “I am just so proud.”
Pearl-Swine hit the road that fall.
It was a confusing time for the boys. One night they’d be doing a show for thirty kids at a Methodist lock-in and the next night they’d be performing for six hundred screaming gay men. Then there was the night of the Rainbow Faith Rally in downtown Chicago. Due to vague advertising, both fan bases showed up. It turned out to be one of Pearl-Swine’s best performances. There were conversions on both sides.
The band’s skills hardened in the furnace of touring. Roy bounced about the stage like a manic gorilla. Pick’s solos fondled the scales with the frantic passion of a young lover. Jimmy grew his hair out, letting it fly as he slammed down on the drums. Stan took on the unusual but visually effective habit of marching in place as he knocked out the steady bass lines. And every so often Milton, his eyes still closed, would fall from the stage, accidentally surfing on the crowd. The fans loved it.
But after the shows, the real temptations of tour life stalked the boys. Pick was found making out with a fifteen-year-old Baptist groupie in Saint Louis. Stan got caught smoking marijuana in the band’s van in Boston. In Wichita, the band walked in on Jimmy watching pay-per-view gay porn with a Presbyterian youth minister. All these infractions were prayed about and forgiven. Only Roy and Milton seemed to be handling the pressure.
Roy spent his free time on tour searching for used VHS tapes. He had recently learned that only a fraction of films ever made the transition from VHS to DVD. Most were left stranded in a dying format. So he rummaged through thrift stores and curiosity shops for rare copies of such films as Tales from the Quadead Zone, The Satan Killer, Maniac Cop 2.
While Roy sought VHS, Milton hunted vinyl, seeking each city’s vintage vinyl shops—musty halls of wisdom, each curated by its own hermit music connoisseur. Every town, the same pale face and bright eyes, the same shy exterior underneath which hid a cascade of words. Milton would spend hours listening to their tales coupled with vinyl wonders.
“Feel the grooves under your fingertip,” one enthusiast urged. “That’s the magic of vinyl. It’s got texture to the touch and to the ear.”
Pink Floyd, Phish, Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Beatles in mono, Dylan on bootlegs. Album after album, Milton would stare into the extravagant cover art and lose himself in the sounds.
As he listened, wildfire drops of potential made Swiss cheese of his preconceptions. Popular music could be more than verse-chorus-bridge. A song could twist in complicated arrangements like Rush’s “2112,” or be deceptively playful like Brazil’s Os Mutantes’ earliest albums, or hide its complexity in a radically simple progression like Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”
And an album could be more than a gathering of possible singles and necessary filler. It could be a complete work. A whole that has an effect beyond the simple collection of songs. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, the Who’s Tommy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
One rainy Sunday afternoon in Chicago, a used-record store owner locked the door, lit a joint (which Milton politely refused), and pulled out a stack of Beach Boys albums stretching from 1967 well into the ’70s. Song by song the store owner constructed what he firmly believed would have been Smile had the legendary album ever been completed and released.
He explained to Milton between puffs that Brian Wilson had nearly worked himself to madness in 1967 before abandoning the project to the vaults.
“Every so often someone puts out a new recording or a collection of studio tapes. But that’s not the way to hear it! To hear Smile, you have to hunt for it,” the store owner said, shuffling through the stack. “You see, they released the songs that would have been on Smile on all these other albums. Like they hid them. Like if you want to find the album, you have to put it together yourself!”
Milton was awed. A hidden album available only to the seeker with faith enough to believe in an album that didn’t actually exist. Like pages of the Bible scattered throughout a dozen paperback novels.
While pulling the records from the sleeves and placing them on the turntable, the store owner threw out strands of opinion and trivia like a one-man ticker tape parade. But once the needle touched the black, he snapped into a reverent silence.
Smile.
Opening in a cappella prayer, diving through fire, earth, water. Laughing its way through a kind of American pop symphony.
Smile burst Milton’s concept of pop. He left that record store late in the afternoon, twelve Beach Boys albums under his arm and a new vision growing in his thoughts. Why shouldn’t Christian rock aim for the heights of secular pop?
While still on tour, Milton began composing a full concept album based on the book of Revelations.
Although Milton wasn’t as familiar with the book as he was with the pageworn gospels of his New Testament, he felt sure Revelations was the right choice. The operatic power of Christ battling the Antichrist, the intensity of Apocalyptic poetry, and the undeniable commercial appeal of end-time scenarios all added up to what Milton envisioned would be nothing less than the finest Christian rock album of all time.
Plus, according to Pick, the Apocalypse was quickly approaching. So the timing was perfect.
Alone in a hotel room, night after night, Milton sucked down cups of instant coffee and pored over Revelations, soaking in the poetry, the imagery, the violent warnings, and frightening condemnation. He began outlining songs: “Break the Seal and Break My Heart,” “Devil’s Got a Lot of Heads,” “Too Lukewarm to Swallow.”
But after the first creative outpouring, Milton hit a block. The more he read, the more terrified he became. Jesus was different in this book—harsh and judging and royal. The man who had denied a crown now sat on a throne of judgment, the man who urged the turning of the other cheek now tossed the lost into a lake of fire, the man who spoke of love now inspired fear. The God who was love in “his” very nature, he had been told, now sent seven bowls of wrath to humanity.
He dreamed at night about the Four Horsemen: white with his bow and no arrows, red and his blood-soaked sword, black bringing famine, and finally pale Death with hell at his heels. He dreamed of a pregnant woman running to the desert and the dragon waiting to eat her child. He dreamed of flying bugs with human faces and mountains dissolving into boiling seas. He woke wet with sweat in his chilled hotel room and scribbled his dreams into lyrics.
But in the morning light, those lyrics seemed too dark, too violent for Pearl-Swine.
He tried using actual verses from Revelations for lyrics and found himself writing songs he would never want to perform. More and more, his distaste for the text and his questioning of God paralyzed his pen.
Milton only managed to complete one song for the would-be concept album: “Who’s Gonna Park the Car.” It fell into the underappreciated genre of Rapture rock.
The trumpet shouts, time’s run out. Jesus is arriving.
I’m not dying, more like flying. Wish I wasn’t driving.
I’m going up to meet Jesus in the stars
But who, tell me who, not you, but who’s gonna park the car. (bridge)
All those that love the Lord are going to take flight,
So make an unbeliever your designated driver tonight, that’s right!
There was a told-you-so pleasure to the song that the rest of the band adored. It was a comforting concept to believe that the universe would pull down the curtains of mystery, point out you and your friends, and say, “Yeah, they’re right.”
The band quickly added it to their regular set list and even recorded a version that was released as the first single
of the forthcoming album.
One cool summer night, Pearl-Swine performed at a church camp in Colorado for two hundred or so dancing teenagers. Toward the end of their set Roy introduced the camp’s speaker, Richard Van Sturgeon. Roy handed the microphone to a middle-aged man in a button-down Oxford shirt.
“Here you go, Mr. Van Sturgeon.”
“Hey! Call me Rich, okay? I’m not that old! Man, these guys are rocking the place, huh?” The crowd cheered. “Hey, they’re going to take a quick break, maybe slam some Gatorade. I want to take a chance to talk to you for a while. Now this whole week we’ve been talking about the J-man, and last night we talked about the cross. Big stuff. The day God died. And this morning we talked about that empty tomb. The evidence that proves that Jesus was not just some teacher, but exactly who he said he was. That’s right, the S-o-G. Son of God. Now there’s one more act to the story. The last chapter. Someday, maybe today, Jesus is coming back. He said he would, and he keeps his word. But it won’t be the same. He won’t be coming back mild and kind, no more disguise. This time he’ll be on fire, coming out of the sky. God’s gonna kick in the door of creation and come rushing in. Now the Bible says there’s going to be a trumpet. And it’s going to be loud. Heard all over the world. And anyone alive who has given their hearts to Jesus is just going to disappear. Bam! Gone! God’s going to teleport all his children into heaven. Now for some of you, that sounds great. Jesus coming back into the picture, calling his family home. Yes! But for others, that sounds kind of scary. Maybe you’ve got some stuff you haven’t dealt with. Maybe you’re not right with God. Maybe you’ve been living in his world, with a body he gave you, and totally ignoring his wishes. Maybe you’re one of those goats we talked about yesterday instead of a sheep. Maybe when that trumpet blares you’re going to find yourself left behind. Maybe your friends are gone; maybe your parents are gone. But you’re still here. It could happen right now. The Rapture. This second. Snap! Some of you will disappear in a flash. You’ll blink, and when you open your eyes you’ll be standing with Jesus. And some of you will be left here wondering what just happened, but you’ll know what happened. And about then things on Earth are going to get pretty ugly. The Bible says Satan will be in charge. Yeah. The people left will be hunted down. Some tortured; some raped. I’m not trying to bum you out; I just want to put it out on the table. Where are you going to be on that day? With Jesus or that place where Jesus isn’t?”