In the winter of 1987–88, Negativland found themselves in a position which will be familiar to most people who have been in bands – especially in these days of diminishing record sales and tightening label budgets. Escape From Noise, their first album on a ‘proper’ label – SST Records – was a hit. It wasn’t Slippery When Wet or the La Bamba soundtrack, but in comparison to the group’s previous four self-released LPs, it was doing pretty well. There were good reviews, sales were up, and that combined with daytime plays on mainstream college radio made the members start to think it was time to take this show on the road. They were going to go on tour.
That’s where the problem started. As this was their first attempt to play live outside their immediate neighbourhood, and SST Records – despite a back catalogue that could boast such cult classics as Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime by The Minutemen – had no money for tour support, it soon became clear that the nationwide tour they had booked was going to run financial losses that none of the band members could afford. It’s a familiar problem. But how they responded to the situation was anything but industry standard.
About a year earlier, one of the group’s founder members, Richard Lyons, was in a Bay Area thrift store when he came across a record with the wonderfully off-the-wall title If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? This album, a privately pressed recording of a sermon by the Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, presents a kind of southern Baptist apocalypse, a feverish future narrative in which communists take over America and set about brainwashing its citizens. In one particularly fiery passage, Pirkle foretells of loudspeakers throughout the country broadcasting the same message over and over again: ‘Christianity is stupid! Communism is good! Give up!’
Lyons and the other members of Negativland were immediately taken by the peculiarly musical quality of Pirkle’s voice. “Not just what he was saying, but how he was saying it,” as the group’s Mark Hosler would later say. They knew right away “we’ve got to make him the vocalist for a piece.” Backed with a dirge of thudding four-four beats and crashing guitars – “brainwash music” as Hosler would put it – Pirkle’s chant became the hook to the biggest anthem on Escape From Noise, ‘Christianity is Stupid’.
Fast-forward to the beginning of March 1988: Lyons is working nights as a security guard. Two weeks earlier a teenager named David Brom in Rochester, Minnesota had chopped up his family with an axe. The story was still all over the newspapers. An article in the New York Times had made brief mention of an argument over a cassette tape that Brom had been listening to that had somehow offended his deeply Catholic family.
Bored at work and depressed about the prospect of having to cancel the upcoming tour, Lyons tosses off a quick press release quoting a fictional “Federal Official Dick Jordan” who had supposedly ordered the group to cancel all concerts pending an investigation into the role their song ‘Christianity is Stupid’ may have played in the Brom murders. At first nothing happens. But gradually the story is picked up, first by some underground zines and a local arts mag, later CBS News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and National Public Radio…
Read the rest of my article on Negativland’s Helter Stupid at RBMA.