Brendan Calling

An Early Jerry Falwell Memory

Back in 1984-1985, I was in my first hardcore band. We went through a number of name changes before we decided on Nerve (our guitar player Chris Shea came up with that one).

One of my best friends at the time, Kelly Bray, was our singer, though the two of us wrote songs (to this day, the only genre in which I can sing and play bass is country/bluegrass music: I have no idea how Paul McCartney and Sting do it, especially Sting).

Before I posted the previous entry celebrating the demented old fucker’s demise, I sent out an email to all of my friends, rejoicing. Kelly wrote back, and reminded me of one of the first songs he ever wrote for Nerve, “$alvation is $pelled With a Dollar $ign”.

“Jerry Falwell
He’s our man,
He makes money for the lord,
By healing people he gets bucks,
Send your money and get saved.
Salvation starts with a Dollar $ign!

Give your money to the Lord
Give so he can spread his word
A 10, a 20, or a 50
Organized religion’s fuckin nifty!

We were all about 14 or 15 at the time, and even taking into account the heightened political consciousness of the 1980s hardcore movement, I think this is pretty mature stuff. We were only 14, and already onto the right-wing’s little religion scam.

Goodbye and good riddance to Jerry Falwell, blowfly on the turd of life.

3 Responses to “An Early Jerry Falwell Memory”

1. jess wundrun Says:
   May 15th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

   I post verbatim this cherry from Falwell’s obit over at Yahoo.com:

   Largely because of the Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, donations to Falwell’s ministry dropped from $135 million in 1986 to less than $100 million the following year. Hundreds of workers were laid off and viewers of his television show dwindled.

   Boy that makes me feel all sad. A 35 million dollar drop in a single year. I hope the 100 mil served him as some sort of consolation.

   Liberty University was $73 million in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, and his “Old Time Gospel Hour” was $16 million in debt.

   By the mid-1990s, two local businessmen with long ties to Falwell began overseeing the finances and helped get companies to forgive debts or write them off as losses.

   So much for personal responsibility eh? Wrote off debts as losses? Perhaps Falwell will go to the section of the afterlife reserved for all the other welfare queens.

2. Brendan Says:
   May 15th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

   How much you wanna bet Liberty University collapses in the next year? As someone at Booman tribune commented, “liberty university is almost surely a financial house of cards”.
   Let’s hope so.
   Good riddance to bad rubbish.

3. dlauthor Says:
   May 15th, 2007 at 4:04 pm

   I’m really hoping that somewhere, right now, there’s a tadpole that’s just squirmed out of an egg, and is thinking “what the fuck?”

   Also, it’s gay.

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