#462: The Song “John Three”

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #462, on the subject of The Song “John Three”.

Sometime around 1969-70 I wrote a song entitled I Die At the Dawn–I wrote a lot of songs about death and dying back then. It had rather vapid but sad lyrics and long instrumental stretches. Then in 1973 when BLT Down morphed into The Last Psalm, I rewrote the words, created melodies over the instrumental sections, and created Saturday’s Song, about the despair the disciples must have felt between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It was one of the rockier songs in the repertoire, and a crowd pleaser.

This is not that song.

However, that song was the impetus for something. My lead guitarist Jeffrey Robert Zurheide subsequently wrote a duet, a conversation in which a soldier orders a cross from a carpenter, and we were off and running on a rock opera about Passion Week, every song told with Jesus off stage by people who had been there. We eventually had about a dozen songs in the series, and this was one of them.

I have not recorded many of these, partly because there are several on which I would not be able to sing the soprano part, partly because I never finished writing the massive finale. There will be another that I recorded mostly because when I wrote it I had no one to perform it and wanted to preserve the intricate music. This one I wrote because it was co-written with David D. Oldham (and his friend Stephen Fredette), who insisted I make these recordings, so I included it on the first disk I made for him.

It follows the crucifixion, and sees Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus sitting outside the tomb in which they have just sealed the body of Jesus, talking about their own despair and lack of direction. The “three angry men” section is a musical variant of the original theme from Saturday’s Song (it’s in 3/4 in the original, developing into a fugue, while here it is in a syncopated 4 with harmony). The two characters sing it as a duet, and we performed it with The Last Psalm, another of the rockier songs in the repertoire. The vocals-over-midi-instruments recording of it is one of the better ones.

John Three.

So here are the lyrics.

Oh, Nicodemus, I’m asking you,
Where do we go from here? What do we do?
Joseph, I’m horrified–my hopes are crucified.
He died on a cross for three angry men,
None of whom will be blamed.
He died all alone, the cross was His throne–
The world must have gone insane.
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

Now that we’ve buried Him, where do we go?
I’d like to tell you, but I just don’t know.
If He had made it clear,
Then we would not be here.
He died on a cross for three angry men,
None of whom will be blamed.
He died like a man, with nails in his hand.
How could he stand the pain?
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

Oh, how could one day, so brief and grim,
Bring such distress to us, and death to Him?
So now we stand for Him against our fears,
But since we rose too late, we’re standing here.

We’ve gone too far my friend to turn back now.
We should go on ahead, but don’t know how.
We can’t forget Him friend.
Have we been born again?
He died on a cross for three angry men,
He died on a cross for three angry men,
He died on a cross for three angry men–
Where do we go when we know that our hopes have been crucified?

*****

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A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.