** update **

Now including lyrics to Nightmare #71!

Nightmare #71, from "So Long Ago, The Garden," 1973

Last night I had that same old dream, it rocked me in my sleep.
It left me the impression that the sandman plays for keeps.
I dreamed I was in concert on the middle of a cloud,
John Wayne and Billy Graham were giving breath mints to the crowd.
I fell through a hole in heaven, I left the stage for good,
And when I landed on the Earth, I was back in Hollywood.

The California earthquake tore the land in half;
While San Andreas cleared her throat, I heard Sue Nami laugh.
The ground began to tremble, the land began to sway,
and people in the other states they were glad they'd moved away.
Suddenly California just floated in the breeze,
while every state that wasn't sank down into the seas.

Soon I saw Atlantis rumble and rise high,
and the great egg of Euphrates came down out of the sky.
Out stepped Shirley Temple with Guy Kibbee, who was dead,
and that communist Bill Robinson, who Shirley called "Black Red."
They had a marionette of Harpo Marx, they said it was an inside joke,
but when I honked his horn, he came alive, and these were the words he spoke:
[huge sound of huge car horn, much bigger and louder than Harpo's usual horn — "aw-WOOOOOO-GHAAaaaaaaa"]

"With the continents adrift, and the sun about to shift,
Will the ice caps drown us all or will we burn?
We've polluted what we own, will we reap what we have sown?
Are we headed for the end or can we turn?
We've paved the forest, killed the streams,
Burned the bridges to our dreams,
The earth is bursting at the seams
And in pain of childbirth screams
As it gives life to what seems
To either be an age that gleams
Or simply lays there dying.
If this goes on will life survive? How can it?
Out of the grave, oh who will save our planet?"

I said, "I'm pleased to meet you, I always thought you were a scream."
He said, "Have you ever thought of having Helen Keller in your dreams?"
I said, "Errol Flynn dropped by, but he tried to steal my girl,
Then she ran off with Ronald Coleman, who said something about a new world.
Now I'm stuck with my own cooking, hey I'm lonely can't you see?"
He grabbed my leg and said exactly eighty nine words to me...

... count 'em...

"Let the proud but dying nation kiss the last generation.
It's the year of the pill, age of the gland.
We have landed on the moon, but we'll clutter that up soon.
Our sense of freedom's gotten out of hand.
We kill our children, swap our wives,
We've learned to greet a man with knives,
We swallow pills in fours and fives.
Our cities look like crumbling hives.
Man does not live, he just survives.
We sleep 'til He arrives.
Love is a corpse, we sit and watch it harden.
We left it oh so long ago in the garden"

The strings snapped briskly then went slack.
The marionette lay dead.
While Hoover played with the motorcade, the body slumped and bled.
The man who held the camera disappeared into the crowd,
and I said, "The hope of youth, fictitious truth, lays covered in a shroud."
Then up walked Elmo Lincoln, who said, "I beg your pardon,
But we left it oh so long ago in the garden.
In the garden.
In the garden."

— Larry Norman, 1973

** update **

Added, a brief Larry Norman playlist:

Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? is a song covered by the band I played with back in collidge

Nightmare (#71) features a lovely free-form, surreal lyric that captures some of the early-70's worries about the future... some of which are being recycled even today....

Larry's final message to any of his followers who care, has that typically loopy twist in it.

Naw; you probably don't know who Larry Norman was. But I remember, and I remember what his music sounded like in the context of the late 60's and early 70's. His recordings, which frequently sounded as if one or two open mikes were placed in a garage with a band, the tape left to roll while the song was counted off, played, and wrapped up, remain my personal standard for How To Record A Band. The chemistry was palpable.

    Roll on — let that tape keep rollin'

RIP, bro.