They All Had Their Own Story

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It should’ve happened… multiple hits, a massive career, world recognition and all the rest.

 

Norm Greenbaum

“That song of mine, I hear it all over the place,”

says NORMAN GREENBAUM, ever so slowly, in

a flat, but twangy monotone.” It helped and

destroyed me in the same moment. With that

success, I failed… it was such an influential song,

I was never able to satisfy people with anything

else I did. I never was able to write another song

that could measure up to ‘Spirit.’ It was just too special. And it was a fluke; certainly it wasn’t me. I spent

my career doing acoustic things; before and after. With that song I STEPPED OUTSIDE MYSELF AND

SOMETHING TOOK ME OVER.”

GIVE A LISTEN, the Song: “SPIRIT IN THE SKY”

Greenbaum had been marginally known as a member of Dr. West’s Medicine Show & Junk Band. They

clicked in the Midwest with their “Egg Plant That Ate Chicago.” A whole album of hippy drooling followed

with notables as “Gondoliers, Shakespeare’s, Overseers, Playboys, and Bums.”

The Medicine etc. band would rub, whack, or blow on such objects as a washboard, whiskey jug, Taiwan

finger piano, Tibetan temple blocks, and their favorite, a 1949 Buick bumper bracket.

It’s all a must to hear. Entities like these just are not created anymore.

I was given the pleasure of creating the liner notes for Norman Greenbaum’s compilation album for

Varices Sarabande.   Norman sent me copies . Sunday possibly of yet to be assured wonderments. Someday

others besides myself may get to hear “The Day They Sold Beer in Church.”