Poor Man's Blues

Glenn Kaiser, who turned 58 this year, has been around the block more than a few times—including quite a few of them in downtown Chicago, where he lives as part of the Jesus People USA community (JPUSA), a community he helped to found in 1972. Kaiser, who grew up poor in Wisconsin, has long been one of the pastoral leaders at JPUSA, and now works with many of Chicago's poor and homeless through the ministry's homeless shelter, Cornerstone Community Outreach.

Glenn Kaiser

And oh yeah: He plays a mean guitar. And sings the blues.

Kaiser was one of the original Jesus rockers, gaining fame decades ago as frontman for Rez Band, which formed in 1972 and broke up in 2000 (though they've had a couple reunion gigs since). For much of the last decade, Kaiser has split his time between Glenn Kaiser Band and his solo albums, focusing primarily on the blues—which, he's quick to remind anyone listening, he was playing long before he turned to rock music. (See our 2005 interview with Kaiser about singing the blues.)

His new solo project, Cardboard Box, really brings the blues home for Kaiser. Including songs with titles like "Unemployment Blues" and "Urban Hobo," the album is an ode to Chicago's poor and homeless, with bluesy licks and lyrics that help the listener step into the shoes of those who live on the streets. Kaiser will donate most of the profits from the album and touring to Cornerstone Community Outreach.

CT spoke with Kaiser about the album, his own history with poverty, and the 40th anniversary of the Jesus Movement.

You've been singing the blues for a long time, and I can't think of a demographic that lives the blues more than the homeless and the poor. So was this kind of a natural transition for you?

Yes, it was. And I grew up actually playing blues as a young kid before I played rock, so the music style is very real to me. I lived in a working class suburb of Milwaukee, and bands I was in related that. My family was poor; we were on welfare for probably four years. I had a lot of friends in the inner city, and poverty was literally right there on the street. So from the beginning, I not only experienced poverty, but saw a lot of it.

And today, with our shelter, Cornerstone Community Outreach (CCO), I have conversations with the people, finding out where they came from and how they ended up poor, without a job, or homeless. It's been an eye opener over the years. And all that morphed into lyrics. I told my wife, Wendi, that I had written a bunch of songs about the street, being homeless, and the poor. She looks at me and says, "You should do a benefit CD for the shelter." And it was like dominos in my head—bang, bang, bang. It made complete sense. So we decided to take 70 percent of the net for each download, from each CD, and from touring, and put it right into CCO, right into the shelter.

It's a pretty stripped down album, sparse instrumentation. Is that an intentional choice that just represents the subject matter?

Yes. I've been doing a lot of solo shows lately, a lot of acoustic stuff. I've fallen in love with cigar box guitars. I have a guitar that some guy sent me made out of a bed pan. And I've found objects that I've made into two- and three-stringers. I built one little guitar, a three-stringer, out of a wooden desk filer for papers. I took two of those, turned one on top of the other, stuck a neck in it and three machine heads and created a guitar out of it.

With one of his cigar box guitars

I've got some great instruments. But there is something about the issue of being poor, of living in the street, of found objects—of God and me taking stuff that would be thrown away and making something cool out of it. God does that with our lives, so there are a lot of metaphors that are all connected.

Having grown up in poverty, do you see yourself in these songs?

Yes. It's easier to know what that life is like when you've been hungry, when you struggle to survive, when you're ostracized because of the clothes you're wearing, when you've been looked down on because of the economic side of the tracks that your family lives on.

And now, in our shelter, we have vets from Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, they've returned home. A lot of their marriages are shot; many of them are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Many are really messed up—physically, emotionally, spiritually. They've come through some incredibly hellish experiences and now they can't find work. These are folks that have really given up their lives for this country—men and women who have served.

All of that figured into my thinking, what I feel, what I write, and what I experience. When you know what it's like to be shown the service entrance, you know what I mean? I'm never going to be an African American living in the South. I'm never going to be a Vietnam vet coming home and being spit on. I'm never going to experience a lot of that kind of stuff. But I was close enough to it and experienced enough of it.

Take a song or two from the album and tell me what the story is behind the song.

"Loading Dock" is about the areas in Chicago around lower Wacker Drive; there's so many homeless people down there, sometimes just because there's warm heat coming up out of a grate. There's also a reference in the song to somebody who's died, and they held hands and they prayed. The idea that people who are homeless are somehow, all con-artists and thieves and drug addicts just isn't true. Some are, but a whole lot of folks are just plain old-fashioned poor. Many of them have mental illness. But they all find places like that, and they congregate and cuddle up against the cold. It's a group of people, but also an area of town, that we have a heart for.

"Opportunity Dance" is about a number of people who have come to faith in Christ at the shelter. They've realized that not all of humanity judges them because they don't have food or a home. They're used to people looking down their nose at them. On this song, I'm really trying to put myself in the place of a homeless person, a person that sleeps in the park, that cannot find work. I meet these people all the time at the shelter. We don't pressure them to attend church or listen to the gospel. But a lot of them do come to our church, which is about three blocks away.

Cornerstone Festival is having a big Jesus Movement reunion this year with a lot of old Jesus rockers, including Rez Band. Are you excited about that?

Yeah, very much so. We've been rehearsing, and I think we remember most of the songs!

I assume you'll be seeing some of these other musicians for the first time in years.

That's absolutely true. I bumped into Phil Keaggy down at Ichthus last year, and we had a long chat. I think the last time we saw Randy [Stonehill] was at another festival, and I chatted with him. A couple of years ago, I saw Bob Hartman and John Schlitt [of Petra] at a festival in Norway. Every now and then we bump into these folks on the road; otherwise, it's kind of rare to see them.

Cornerstone's celebration marks the 40th anniversary of the Jesus movement, back when TIME magazine put the psychedelic Jesus on the cover. What has been the movement's lasting impact on Christian history in America?

I say this not just because Jesus People USA was in the middle of it or because I'm directly involved, but because it's just plain old fashioned true: If you do the math, and if you think about an entire association of churches like Calvary Chapel, the Vineyard, and on and on, so many things happened in those few years, from the late '60s to the early '70s, that when historians look back at the last century, the Jesus Movement may end up being considered a more significant move of God in terms of people coming to Christ under biblical faith, as well as renewal among the poor. I think you'll find it was more significant in the long run than Asuza Street or the Wall Street revivals. The Jesus Movement was the third Great Awakening, in a lot of ways.

What is not happening now in 2011 that was happening forty years ago?

I think there are two answers to that, or at least two sides to the answer. The first is an innocence about the Jesus Movement and the newly converted brother or sister in Christ, who very simply and very honestly talked about what Jesus was doing in their life, quoting Scripture not by rote or to win an argument, but to win people to genuine biblical faith. There was real, practical sharing; that was probably a lot more common than it is today. And the other side of the answer is that both in the culture and among Christian people is the growth of the internet and more, and how that has affected the way we communicate. I think sometimes we're so worried about offending people, that we at times don't share the simple good news. I mean, John 3:16 and17 are still there. And we need to not be afraid to quote those verses and to back them up with our lives.

On the other hand, I think the evangelical church is better than it's ever been in terms of Matthew 25 commands of caring for the poor, and the James 1:27 command of caring for widows and orphans. It's that issue of personal holiness that continues to nag us. That's the kind of stuff that I still talk an awful lot about.

There also seems to be a lot of incivility—Christians yelling about stuff, coming across in the media as hateful and judgmental.

I couldn't agree with you more, and I think "incivility" is a perfect word to describe it. Jesus freaks weren't running around screaming like that. We were giving thanks. We understood grace. To this day, when I hear "Amazing Grace," I'm like, "Yeah, that's me. I need his mercy and grace as much now as I ever did, when I first came to Jesus when I was 18. I'm 58 now; I'm down the road here. And I still love it.

Anything else you wanted to add?

Getting back to the new album—my whole heart was to get people inside of what it truly is like to be poor and be homeless. It's not the same exact same issue as racism, but there are an awful lot of folks who make huge and pretty scary judgments about homeless people. Even many Christians do this when they see a particular person on the corner with a shopping cart full of bags and rags. But that's somebody's grandma, somebody's grandpa. That's a human being that Jesus died for. And if we're not careful, Christians can be as bigoted on the social and cultural end of things as they unfortunately at times have been with race. So I'm really trying to plant a flag here and say enough is enough. Get inside the heart and the head of people who are living in the park and in the street and wake up a little bit.

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