Conversations to An End: The Rev. Into Rock

Darryl Duer is a United Methodist minister at a church in Glendora, New Jersey, the birthplace of Tangzine 8 years ago. Equipped with a passion for preaching and leading a congregation coupled with a unique fixation on music from Van Morrison and Bob Dylan to Low and the Flaming Lips, Duer is hardly your typical preacher behind the pulpit.How many preachers do you know would send a sympothy card to someone he learned did not own Astral Weeks? Or a Christmas card in July to someone for recommending a Danielson Famile record?

He recently fielded some questions from his office on the Black Horse Pike on the very subject of his undying support and passion for rock music.

How would you say your passion for ministry and the scriptures compares to your passion for music? How does music, no matter what the format, and spirituality actually go hand in hand?

I gave my heart to Jesus during a song. All the blather the preacher was doing was far too intellectual to be moving. But the strains of "just as I am" won me over.Music is a spiritual collective, gathering in all that matters and somehow making sense of it.Ever notice how the New Testament didn't have a new set of Psalms? It's cause the laws and the prophets needed completion.The music was never inadequate.Someday the church will play the music that matters to the people, like the Wesleys did."Scattered black and whites" from Elbow comes to mind. Then things will change.

Do you find it difficult talking to many of your parishioners about the music you listen to, explaining that you went to a smoky bar on Saturday night to see a band play? Do you think it's a norm for pastors to have such a zeal for music outside of the church?

I think my parishioners would be shocked to know the large variety of places I go for music sake.The ones that know me best have an inkling or two that I'm up to that stuff, and they embrace me.They know Jesus, and they have some idea about the pull of the concert scene.As I've gotten older, I've stopped going to concerts on most Saturdays in order to be on top on Sunday.  

I think about 90% of my out of church-life activity is out of the norm.Listen, I stacked equipment for the Ramones in the early seventies and wasn't old enough to get into the bar they were playing out in New Brunswick.Concerts and especially club scenes is my DNA now.It's interesting though, I just saw Dylan in Wilkes Barre and ran into an area pastor who asked me to promise I wouldn't tell anyone he was there.Amazing, isn't it?

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is one of your favorite records. How would you say that album still speaks to you and what is the difference you find listening to it now as opposed to when you first heard it? What other records would you say are like that?

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is my favorite vocal album of all time. It transcends. It's gushy emotionally, yet it walks upright. He gave the church culture the expression "Born Again" for its vocabulary, and the song "Astral Weeks" could have been the tipping point for the entire Christian Rock event. Larry Norman once told me that he listened to Astral Weeks and then wrote the seminal work "In another Land". The album is a song cycle, and it brings together the ingredients of folk andpassion with a cast of characters, lyrical trickery that still amazes me. For instance, at the end of one of the songs, he starts repeating "Way up in the heaven", but at the end he's saying "We are gonna happen". It's romance, it's your youth, face down in wet grass. It summarizes Whitman and makes you feel like Dickinson when she wrote "First the chill, then the stupor, then the letting go."  

The beautiful things about the listening now is that I see my children and my wife weaved in to the songs, where once it was only me and the vague set of Van's imagined characters. It also means a lot to me because it has a distinct Garden District New Orleans feel that radiates from its soul. If anybody reading this doesn't have that CD, please. Please.

Looking at the current state of the music industry, from the mainstream pop acts all the way down to the most obscure indie band, how would you say things have changed since you were a teenager?

Everthing is way overhyped now. It started with bands like Velocity Girl, and from that point about ten years ago I've been down on NME. Trying to find an album's that worth its weight from start to end is really hard. There's so much out there. And to tell you the truth, I am amazed at how good the really good bands are. For instance, INTERPOL is way past the best of Joy Division. The new Beck (Sea Change) is a monster. The Clientele are new and amazing and completely retire the bands that have the critical juice for their style, bands like Television and Wire. I loved the Langley Art School reissue. Elbow is great. I like Doves.

  
What about this notion of a current rock and roll revival, bands like the Strokes, Hives, White Stripes et. al. bringing back that early '80s post-punk sound? Surely, you have experienced a bit of de javu listening to the rise of these bands in the past year.

You know, I was in Miami when the Strokes were there and didn't go to the show.
I may have made a mistake there.  I really have little to go on.  I'm always listening for something new, something to make its way into the car CD player, but I feel like I've heard this stuff before. It's polished, though, and quite good some of it.  The first albums that made an impact for me were early '70s pop rock. Stuff like Elton John's Empty Sky and Born to Run. Music didn't really start for me until I picked up "Love will tear us apart" from Joy Division. From there, the needle was in. In fact, I haven't found the same enthusiasm as I did in those days listening to the early Cure and OMD records. And I do mean records.

How do you feel about bands like Low, Pedro the Lion, the Danielson Famile, and the Innocence Mission, groups that all profess deep spiritual beliefs and yet don't necessarily use those beliefs as a platform?

Low I have great respect for, tho I haven't picked up all their work and so the jury's still out.The early returns are favorable. That song, "Over the Ocean" still hangs as being a centerpice for my life soundtrack. Pedro the Lion I like, and his attention to darkness is important. What I mean is they seem to know the sweet things about God's sovereginty and Love without turning it into a piece of ear candy. Let me pause here and tell you the whole entire Christian Music Industry is a corrupt bloody lot and I hope they say hello to Wilson Phillips on their way to hell. Anyway, Pedro takes risks, like Damien Jurado seems to from time to time, and I applaud that greatly.

Of course, Danielson is an immense idiosyncractic musical genuis.  His "chopping block" is the best Presenting-Christ Album I've heard. It's not for everyone, but aside form Jesus, who is?

The innocence mission are the most compassionate, soft-spoken and warm music thing I know of.  Karen looks and sings like my wife is.  Their album pictures of unfeigned and unencumbered youthful play, albeit nostalgicized, are eye heroin to this 40-ish white preacher who wants to move the whole flock to Carlisle and get lost looking for the farm the innocence mission live on.  Or maybe it's a castle?You asked about them spiritually.  Well, they all use their stuff to promote the very friuits of the Spirit.  Daniel's a little more take it please than the rest of them, and Low is sometimes very subtle,but I can handle their presentations. It's all genuine, that's for sure.

Speaking of platforms, do you think musicians and bands that reach a certain level of prominence have a duty to use their clout in the music world to give back either by donating money or promoting awareness to a particular cause? U2 is often noted for their philanthropy, but are they just unique?

What I'd like to see is the bands that have a lot of money start giving back to their fans.  I saw U2 on TV the other night and he thanks the fans for the nice life's they've given them, and he thanks them for spending their hard earned cash and waiting in the rain.  Hey Bono, what about a free concert?  Remember that great line in the poem about Yeats, "He became his admirers". Perhaps Bono, whom I love and will be eternally grateful for his One Tree Hill", ought to give a little back to the fan.  Something more, say, that a new Christmas Greatest Hits package with just one or two real keeps.  Just an opinion from the Glendora Barfly father, leaving mother with the three youngest, and taking the fourteen year old to the Interpol show at Gasoline
next week.

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