Josh T. Pearson looks a lot like Jesus, if Jesus came from Texas. He is a tall, broad-shouldered, magnificently bearded, twill-and-cowboy-boot-rocking dead ringer for the Son of God. Some years ago, he was the singer in a band called Lift to Experience. They released just one record – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, a terrifying, glorious augury of death, destruction, exodus and apocalypse – and promptly suffered death and destruction of their own before melting back into the Texan desert.
One chilly morning last August, Pearson and I were sitting outside Cafe Charbon in Paris, where he now lives, drinking black coffee and orange soda. Every fifth car that drove past sounded its horn. Drivers would lean out to wave and shout, “Jay-zu! Jay-zu!” One of them shouted something I didn’t quite catch. “What was that?” I said. “Ah think he said ah look like Karl Marx,” Pearson drawled. “Happens more in Spain. Franco an’all. Here, they mostly stick with Jesus.”
Pearson was born in Denton, just northwest of Dallas. His hometown was named for its founder, a Methodist Episcopal preacher, lawyer and volunteer captain of the Texas militia, John Bunyan Denton, who was killed fighting the Keechi tribe and, after two exhumations and several years in a box in a local man’s basement, buried nearby. Historians praise Denton as an eloquent orator and fine leader while admitting they know little about his life. No pictures of him exist. It is said that, while Denton and his wife were separated early in their marriage, she killed a man in Arkansas. She was put on trial for murder, at her own insistence without a lawyer, until Denton appeared in the courtroom, out of the blue, to defend her, anonymously. The judge and jury had no idea he was her husband, until in his summing-up he cried, “Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the defendant. Scan that pure face and behold something dearer to me than life, and more precious to me than all things else under the blue canopy of heaven. Need I tell you that she is my wife?” The courtroom exploded, the sheriff cried for order and the jury returned an instant verdict of “not guilty” without even leaving the box. Captain and Mrs Denton returned to Texas and raised six children, one of whom, Ashley, was also acquitted of murder at the age of 22 before becoming a justice of the peace, a lawyer and finally a doctor, running the State Lunatic Asylum in Austin and attending to governor Francis Lubbock himself on his deathbed. Such was the largeness of life, and the omnipresent rumble of death, in that unforgiving landscape.
Pearson’s father was also a preacher, in the fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal church. Josh has said of his childhood, “The apocalypse was very real – it was just around the corner.” When he was four, his father began to follow the controversial Faith Movement evangelist Kenneth Hagin, who preached literal adherence to Mark 11:24: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” (Hagin may have been an eccentric, even by the standards of America’s reliably bonkers evangelist community, but when he died in 2003 his son took over a congregation of 8,000, while his ministry, whose website resembles that of a multinational corporation, claims to have distributed over 65 million copies of its own “inspirational” books through its publishing arm, Faith Library Publications.) Pearson’s father refused to work, determined to prove that through the strength of his faith alone, God would provide. Facing starvation and homelessness, his mother packed her bags, grabbed Josh and his sister Shoshana and left.
It takes an extreme combination of drunkenness and callousness to raise the topic of fathers with Josh Pearson. Last August, in Paris, I told him that I had not seen mine for seven years. Pearson considered this for a moment, then said gravely, “It took me a long time to forgive my father.” A few years earlier, he had told the Austin Chronicle, “I had this father who really felt he was serving God in the best way possible, yet wouldn’t provide for his own young. But I could still see God blessing his life. I had a crisis of faith. What I had known growing up to be the presence of God left my body. And I wigged out, because it was all I had known from a very young age.”
It was amid this emotional chaos that The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads began to take shape. After singing in the church choir as a child, Pearson picked up a guitar. One day, while working as a ranch hand just outside of Denton, he retired to his room and started to sketch out every chord, every beat, every breath of the 11 songs on the record. He assembled a three-piece band – Josh “the Bear” Browning on bass, Andy “the Boy” Young on drums and himself (he was “Buck”) on guitar and vocals – to execute his carefully mapped-out vision.
“My music is my connection to God now,” Pearson has said – and what a connection. His lyrics draw heavily from Paradise Lost, Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” and St Augustine’s “Confessions”, but the Old Testament seems to be the hottest-burning fuel for his vision. “The stories are some of the greatest ever written,” he told the Austin Chronicle. “Men wanting to rape angels. Daughters too drunk to procreate. God redeeming man by killing his son.” Amid clashing, woozy guitar and rattling cymbals, the record opens with a rapid-fire monologue:
“This is the story of three Texas boys busy mindin’ their own bidnis,
When the Angel of the Lord appeared unto them saying, ‘When the Winston Churchills start firin’ their Winston rifles in the sky from the Lone Star State,
Drinkin’ their Lone Star beer and smokin’ their Winston cigarettes,
You know the time is drawin’ nigh when the son shall be lifted on high.’
We told them that didn’t sound very Sunday-go-to- meetin’.
‘What did you expect?’ they said. ‘When God calls the crippled, deaf and blind to lead the children of Israel to the Promised Land.’
‘The children of Israel?’ we asked.
‘Don’t you boys know nothin’? The USA’s the centre of JerUSAlem.’”
A maelstrom of guitar, bass and snare pounds out a nervy rhythm before slipping into an ominous wash of feedback, like the eye of a hurricane. Pearson, now with a velvet-soft croon, floats above the turbulence. The album swells with yearning and desperation, recounting the band’s “mission impossible to lead the troops out of the enemy’s hand into the Promised Land”. God offers angel wings to any man willing to forfeit his life in return. A “stupid ranch hand in a Texas rock band, trying to understand God’s master plan”, makes a deal with the Almighty to spread the word of the Texas-Jerusalem crossroads, in return for “a smash hit, so I can build a city on a hill.
“And He said, ‘Son, I will if you will.’ I said, ‘My sweet Lord, it’s a deal.’”
The record ends with a thunderous, feedback-heavy 29-minute hymn to the apocalypse. “Tell your mother you won’t be home for Christmas this year,” Pearson intones. “Say you’ve headed south for the Promised Land. And with gun in hand.” It was, of course, only coincidence that it was released just before September 11, 2001.
“There’s gonna be two hits,” Pearson sings softly, like a prophet devastated by his own vision. “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, is fallen. You’ll see it before you hear it, sound takes some time to travel. When the noise reaches your ear, you will know and you will fear, the end is near… When America falls, the world will fall with her.”
Bella Union had released the record in the UK. Simon Raymonde, the label’s founder and former Cocteau Twins bassist, remembers travelling to SXSW to see them play for the first time. “It was one of the most astonishing shows I have ever seen,” he recalls. “It was an off-piste show, a non-official show in an outdoor restaurant, a taco shack outside Austin, in the middle of the afternoon. There was a huge sense of expectation as I’d been obsessed with the demos for some time. As the band walked onstage at 4pm, a dark black thunderstorm broke overhead. The next 45 minutes, I think my heart stopped and I forgot to breathe.”
Lift to Experience were legendarily brutal live. The Boy (so named because he was under the US’s legal drinking age of 21 when recruited) played with frightening ferocity and precision; jazz-trained, he once said he envisioned every set as “The Lift to Experience at Birdland”. Sets regularly ended with the drum kit scattered across the stage, and any remaining cymbals spattered with the Boy’s blood.
The album, however, was not an unqualified critical success. Pitchfork called it a “ten-gallon prog-emo Biblical concept album” and “not strikingly original”. In interviews, Pearson compared himself to van Gogh, Michelangelo and Francis Ford Coppola, telling reporters that his ultimate goal was “to save Africa” and generally showing a remarkable gift for self-mythologising, or arrogance, or perhaps a genuine sensitivity to international socioeconomics. (Nine years later, spilling out from under a table in his Paris apartment is a vast heap of well-thumbed copies of the Economist, complete with subscriber’s labels.)
Still, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads’ critical appreciation and cult following grew, slowly and steadily. “It literally was molecular,” says Raymonde. “A force of nature.” The three men toured the US and had just arrived in Europe when Browning’s girlfriend, back in Texas, overdosed and died.
Buck, the Bear and the Boy went home and went silent. Pearson fell out with Young, sending him a parcel containing a boot and a note that read, “I’m cutting you off. Your [sic] out of my life. I’m giving The Boy The Boot!” (Last December, when he’d reunited with Young for a few UK shows, Pearson had told me solemnly that he’d been given the boot back, presumably as a peace offering. But Young said that he’d sold it long ago on eBay, for $210.36.) Pearson disappeared for a time, to a spa, or a ranch, in deepest Texas, and stopped answering emails.
He reappeared in Europe in 2005, alone but with new songs, more traditional bluesy arrangements than the previous psychedelic meltdowns. His voice sounded rawer and deeper, as though it had sustained a terrible injury and was still healing. There was a near-secret gig in a tiny, packed bar in east London, which Pearson closed with a singalong version of one of his solo favourites, “Devil’s on the Run”, from atop the bar, his boots tapping out an urgent rhythm on the bartop, his magnificent hat brushing the ceiling. After the show, he said that he was happy to be heading home, that Shoshana had just had a baby and he was looking forward to being Uncle Josh for a while.
It was only last year that Pearson’s return seemed suddenly plausible. He opened for his heroes My Bloody Valentine in Texas as they, too, reappeared after a lengthy absence. He did a few late-summer gigs in Paris, then showed up at the End of the Road festival in Dorset, where he played an early-evening slot of shaky intensity to a large, emotional crowd. A few months later, to enormous excitement, he announced that he would play at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ 10th- anniversary festival, and then London, with Young.
Many more claim to have attended those rare and legendary shows than actually braved the brutal sonic assault they delivered. Only a few songs into their last London gig, much of the crowd melted away, fingers held futilely to eardrums. Pearson hardly moved on stage, except to stare intently at Young now and again. His long body tensed and then bowed, channelling the throbbing drone emanating from his guitar. The Boy, still baby-faced, filled the stage with fearsome thrashing. To the side of the stage was Viva Seifert, drummer for the opening band and a long-time friend of Pearson’s. Her face was white as she motioned towards Young. “Those are my drums!” she mouthed; she’d let him use them for the night. She winced. “I can’t watch this.”
When Dapper Dan asked Pearson for an interview, he had not granted one in a long time. In 2004, he had given his friends at Loose Lips Sink Ships the runaround in Austin; they had flown out to SXSW four days early for an interview that never happened, and to see a performance that never materialised. Likewise, as the city lay covered in snow in early December, Pearson was marooned in Streatham, in southwest London, and I was in Hackney, in the northeast. He was utterly charming, arranging and cancelling appointments repeatedly, but we never met.
On the phone, we didn’t talk much about music, although he did ask if I had read one of his favourite books of recent years, Alex Ross’s history of 20th-century composition, The Rest is Noise. When I listen to The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, I am reminded of a passage from that book, which addresses the eternal question of what music is for, what it can achieve, and what it cannot heal:
“Reality, into which so many artists yearned to plunge, turned out to be an engulfing medium. Young aesthetes went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of ‘pure music’ now tried to find their way back in. As in Yeats’s poem, European composers embraced the subliminity of artifice, ‘to sing/To lords and ladies of Byzantium/Of what is past, or passing, or to come’.”
What is to come is, with Pearson and Young, naturally at the forefront of many people’s minds. “I think it’s beautiful that they’re together again,” says Raymonde. “Having been in a band that broke up in a less than savoury way myself, a band that seems unlikely to ever work again, it’s cool to see that Josh and Andy have moved on. In my dream world, Lift to Experience will reform and Bella Union will release the comeback album, but dreams don’t come true, do they?”
Originally published in Dapper Dan, Issue 01, March 2010.