999,798: Merrill Womach - Happy Again; 999,799: Motorhead - Them Not Me

One of the dirty little secrets of really, really devout Christianity is that many of those folks have the same fascination with the dark, the freaky, and the macabre as the rest of us degenerates. Sure, none of them are consciously aware of it, and they’ll shy away unless it’s wrapped in the proper moral and spiritual message. Having been told how to put a positive spin on the apparent horror in front of them, though, they can gawk away to their hearts’ content, secure in the knowledge that they are not being seduced away from virtue by Satan, and don’t have to feel guilty because they are thinking the correct thoughts in response.

The Book of Job tells the tale of a bet between Satan and the vengeful Israelite version of God, in which God tortures one of his happiest and most faithful followers to prove that Job will never renounce Him. Quite why a supposedly omnipotent being is so emotionally insecure is never explained. But this story is the starting point for most Biblical explanations of why bad things happen to good people – we don’t fucking know, and we just have to accept that we can never know His ways, and shut up and deal with whatever shit He dumps on our heads, without ever renouncing our faith in Him. (There is also the White People Alternative, which holds that bad things never happen to good people, because good people always follow the correct set of rules and never give Mean Sky Daddy a reason to punish them. As a result, everyone exerts total control over every aspect of their lives, and everything bad is probably your fault. But I digress.) So, desperate for heroes to fulfill this preconceived narrative about dealing with disaster, America gave rise to a small cottage industry of gospel musicians who overcame horrible injuries or physical handicaps to sing the praises of their Lord.

Merrill Womach is a dude who had his entire face burned off in a plane crash in 1961. Helpfully, there is an after-crash photo in the gatefold of his 1974 album Happy Again, to illustrate the full extent of God's test of Womach's faith, and also to freak the fuck out of you. A trained singer, Womach had been working as an undertaker, and started a company which provided music for funeral homes. Womach had his face (mostly) rebuilt through numerous surgeries (his doctor is also pictured on the back cover), and returned to singing several years later. He became an inspirational story on the gospel circuit, and released a steady stream of albums on small labels from the late ‘60s through the early ‘80s.

To hear Womach sing the title track of that album, there are no traces of his accident. He performs with the same obvious training and technique you might hear in the vibrato-heavy croons of ‘50s and ‘60s pop singers (the ones who bore NO RELATION to rock OR roll). In fact, you can almost hear him fall a little behind the beat at times, as he strives to make sure each extended note has had the proper technique applied to it.

The real weirdness comes in SEEING Womach. Though it’s remarkable how far he’s come since that gratuitously graphic crash photo, he has still clearly been the victim of a horrible injury. Yes, thanks to his religious faith, Womach has been able to maintain his optimism even after all that’s happened to him, and I doubt that I would be able to do the same, were it to happen to me. But to watch Womach walking around the burn unit of a hospital (in the clip below), patting everyone on the shoulder, performing a sunnily optimistic song called “Happy Again,” everything about his lyrics and his mannerism suggesting no room for doubt at all about how things will turn out for the best…and then to behold the sudden crashing zoom into Womach’s face about 1:05 in…oh dear goodness. Perhaps I am naught but a jaded cynic, but to me, any devout Christian who can convince themselves that their interest in Womach is pure – without a trace of circus-sideshow rubbernecking – is painfully unaware of what it means to inhabit the mind of a human. You cannot NOT react. Your primitive instincts have programmed you to make split-second perceptions to avoid danger, thanks to millions of years of evolution (ah, there’s the disconnect!). I don’t care how inspiring or admirable or sympathetic you find him – when you first see him, you are still gawking in horror, just like the rest of us reprobates, and thanking God it wasn't you.

When your thought system devotes itself to repressing rather than recognizing the subconscious (in all its spiritually dangerous uncontrollability), it is much more difficult to peer beneath the surface of the media product you’ve assembled, read the subtext, and notice when you are forcing or undercutting your message. Even apart from jarring zooms. All of Merrill’s little fist pumps remind me of a crazy guy I once saw on a busy street corner, holding religious signs, trying to witness for Jesus by dancing around with his eyes shut and his face raised to heaven in what he clearly imagined was an expression of joy, but which was so self-conscious that in practice, he came off like someone you’d kill if he so much as looked at your children. Now Merrill doesn’t look crazy, but wow, is he trying hard to sell you on this one. This is not a man who’ll be admitting anything negative, either to you or to himself, even if the real song in his heart is one called “Crippling Post-Traumatic Depression,” because that might kill the miracle. There’s also the fact that every patient in the burn ward looks better than Womach, and wouldn’t appear to need much reassurance – at least, not once they’ve seen Merrill.

Leave it to Lemmy to find the purest expression of this darkest schadenfreude in the delightfully frank “Them Not Me,” a track from Motorhead’s 1997 album Overnight Sensation. “Did you see the accident, the road is red with blood/Funny how it makes you feel really, really good,” he gurgles to open the song, with the kind of fearless honesty that American religion just can’t seem to muster, and a clear-eyed focus on what is instead of what should be. The verses are all about traffic accidents, and when you consider the sheer volume of automobile-related injuries and fatalities, it does make you wonder if America might be a better place if our economy didn’t rely so heavily on that shit. NOT THAT THE CORPORATE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WILL ALLOW YOU TO READ THESE SUBVERSIVE SENTIMENTS!!!! I expect a well-funded smear campaign to be waged against me if this blog’s readership ever climbs above 500. Anyway, the point is, you will learn more about real life from Lemmy than you will from churches, schools, television, and Bazooka Joe wrappers combined.

Notes on the video clip: It’s from a half-hour documentary on Womach, He Restoreth My Soul, which – as noted on his album cover – is indeed a “color motion picture”! Certainly a strong selling point for anything released in 1975. It was directed by the Rev. Mel White, who would later come out of the closet and become a prominent advocate for gay rights in the evangelical Christian community. White’s son, Mike, would go on to a successful career in Hollywood, writing the screenplays for School of Rock, Nacho Libre, The Good Girl, Chuck and Buck, and – somehow appropriately – Dead Man on Campus.