Rock 'n' Roll

David Crosby, the lead singer for Crosby, Stills and Nash., became one of the most successful rock musicians of all time. But even at nearly 80 years old, Crosby could not stop hitting the road and promoting his music. He was worth over $40 million. And his wife did not want him to travel, but his entire sense of significance was wrapped in his music.

In a film about his life, Crosby expressed a lot of regrets. “People ask me if I got regrets,” he said. “Yeah, I got a huge regret about the time I wasted being smashed. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of dying. And I'm close. And I don't like it. I'd like to have more time—a lot more time.”

Crosby tells his interviewer that music “is the only thing I can contribute, the only thing I got to offer.” Then toward the end of the film, he raises the volume of his voice and the intensity of his delivery with these summarizing words: “The one thing I can do is make music. Myself. So, I'm trying really hard to do that.” His interviewer asks, “To prove yourself?” Crosby responds, “That I'm worth a [expletive].”

Here's the most famous place you've never heard of. It's St. Peter's Church Hall in Liverpool, England. It looks like a typical church gym except for the heavily-timbered cathedral ceiling and missing basketball hoops.

St. Peter's was having a church social with a local music group performing. During a break in the music, Paul, a 15-year-old guest, played songs on the guitar and piano impressing the teen band leader, John. A few weeks later, John Lennon invited Paul McCartney to join the Quarrymen, later known as The Beatles. That first meeting was July 6, 1957 - a historic place and moment in music but nobody knew it.

The Liverpool Museum reflected, "That meeting didn't just change the lives of John and Paul, it was the spark that lit the creative (fuse) on a cultural revolution that would reverberate around the world."

St. Peter's Church Hall is a temple where two music greats met. The stage from the hall is almost an "altar" since it was moved to a museum in Liverpool.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Altar; Worship - Christians also worship at an altar, but it is exclusive to New Testament believers (Heb. 13:10); 2) Temple - The New Testament names three places as the Temple of the living God on earth: 1) The physical body of Christ (Jn. 2:19; Matt. 26:61; Mark 14:58); 2) The church, the body of Christ (1 Cor. 3:16-17); 3) The body of the individual believer (1 Cor. 6:19).

Rock and Roller Benjamin Budde grew up a small-town country boy in Ohio in a Christian home. He often heard the gospel and remembers asking Jesus into his heart on several occasions, but it wasn’t out of genuine faith.

What he wanted, more than anything, was to be special. He loved music and viewed it as his ticket to belonging. When his church needed a bass player, he was quick to fill the part. But eventually, he started to jam outside of the church, where people drank alcohol and smoked more than cigarettes. Before long, he joined in this new lifestyle. Learning about the drug-fueled exploits of his favorite musicians, he figured that drinking and drugging would help him become a more creative songwriter.

After turning 18, I got in trouble with the law for drinking, which got me kicked out of the church band. That was when I started playing in bars and nightclubs. As the shows grew bigger, so did my habit of drinking and getting high.

As I turned 20, my life began turning numb. On Christmas day, we found out that my mom had breast cancer, and nine months later she died. On the day of her funeral, I got a bag of dope and a bottle of whiskey and jammed all night, wondering how my Jesus-loving mom could have suffered such an unjust fate. I cursed God for it and decided I didn’t want to believe anymore.

By now his addiction was raging out of control. For nearly 10 years, he was popping pills, consuming whiskey like water, and snorting or smoking anything that would get him higher. Budde was in the process of losing himself, his friends, and eventually almost everything he had. It was hardly unusual for him to fall off the stage during a show because of his drugged stupor.

He met Arthur Williams, a blues harp player who had performed with some of the greatest blues legends like B.B. King and Muddy Waters. Through him he met and opened for legendary Chuck Berry, credited by many as the father of rock and roll.

I was over-the-moon excited to meet these icons. But the experience changed me in ways I didn’t expect. As I looked into their eyes, I somehow realized that music wouldn’t ever fill my emptiness. Meanwhile, my addiction deepened. Almost every night I blacked out and woke up in my own filth.

At the bottom of this downward spiral, I called a longtime friend, Missy. I told her I was sick. She spoke life into me! Sharing the gospel, she told me that Jesus has a plan and purpose for my life, but that I needed to quit drinking and drugging.

Lying on a borrowed couch in an apartment with no electricity, he looked through the only thing left from his childhood—a green tub of odds and ends. There sat his mom’s Bible, with the cover her handwriting all over it.

I started reading my mom’s Bible, turning to the Book of Proverbs because that’s what my dad would read to us growing up. Many passages grabbed my attention. “Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?” (23:29). That was me, for sure. But the verse that really stopped me in my tracks was Proverbs 4:19: “The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble.”

I cried out to Jesus, and he saved me. He also started changing me by the power of his Spirit. This didn’t happen overnight … but by God’s grace I avoided falling back into addiction. Meanwhile, God gave me a greater desire to pray and read his Word. Missy and I have now been married for 11 years, and I’ve been free from drugs and alcohol the entire time.

Editor’s Note: Since accepting Christ, Benjamin and Missy have been blessed with the opportunity to do outreach ministry together, in part by hosting a Night of Hope, a concert geared toward helping people facing all types of addiction. Benjamin is also the author of War a Good Warfare: Fighting the Battles Within .

Peter Townshend is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. For over 50 years the band has been widely considered as one of the most influential and important rock bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. In an interview in The New York Times on his life and accomplishments, Townshend is honest about the meaning, or lack of, of his life’s work and the work of other notable rock musicians:

The massive question was: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth? Are we disenfranchised, or are we able to take society over and guide it? Are we against the establishment? Are we being used by it? Are we artists, or are we entertainers?

Townshend admits that rock music has provided no substantial answers to the needs and questions of recent generations:

Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish.

What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who … rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Joe Walsh, the lead guitarist for the band Eagle's, was asked to describe the worst part of success:

The worst part of success is that a lot of things come along with it that you didn't really know you were gonna get in the package. There are distractions: Money, drugs, women, partying. You get a royalty check, and you go get a new car, and then you party, and then you get high—and then you forget what got you there in the first place. It's all ego stuff. When you're young it's really easy to lose your perspective, which I did, really losing sight of who I was. I started believing I was who everybody thought I was—which was a crazy rock star. You know "Life's Been Good," that story. It took me away from working at my craft. Me and a lot of the guys I ran with, we were just party monsters, and it was a real challenge to stay alive and end up on the other end of it.

The interviewer then asked, "So many of your friends from that era—like Keith Moon and John Belushi—didn't make it. What do you think caused you to survive it?" "Don't know," replied Walsh. "I wonder every day. People often ask me if I believe in God and I kinda have to, because I'm still here. I had not planned on living this long, and here I am."

In a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, rock legend Bruce Springsteen said that his broken relationship with his father lives on in his songs. For example, in the song, "Adam Raised a Cain," the younger Springsteen sings about the father who "walks these empty rooms / looking for something to blame / You inherit the sins / You inherit the flames." The songs were a way of talking to his silent and distant father. Springsteen said,

My dad was very nonverbal—you couldn't really have a conversation with him. I had to make my peace with that, but I had to have a conversation with him, because I needed to have one. It ain't the best way to go about it, but that was the only way I could, so I did, and eventually he did respond. He might not have liked the songs, but I think he liked that they existed. It meant that he mattered.

The past, though, is anything but past. Bruce Springsteen admitted his yearning for what he calls "Daaaddy!"

My parents' struggles, it's the subject of my life. It's the thing that eats at me and always will …. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose …. [The musician] T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about "Daaaddy!" It's one embarrassing scream of "Daaaddy!"

Then gesturing toward the band onstage, he said, "We're repairmen—repairmen with a toolbox. If I repair a little of myself, I'll repair a little of you. That's the job."