I started reading Jesus Sound Explosion after attending a reading a few weeks back. It’s the memoir of Mark Curtis Anderson, a Twin Cities native whose father was a pastor and therefore grew up incredibly entrenched in the evangelical world. When I talked to Mark at the reading he clearly wanted to distance himself from the evangelical world he writes about with humor, but he also didn’t completely distance himself from faith. He talked about attending one of the local ‘church-but-not-that-kind-of-church’ churches, House of Mercy (or at least he plays in the band).

Anyway, the book is great. I just read this passage about the Billy Graham movie The Restless Ones (which you can watch online!) and couldn’t resist posting it:

Billy Graham and his people made a movie, The Restless Ones, that came to Galesburg theaters around 1967. The restless ones were living and breathing proof of what jazzy music could do to a life. The restless ones hung out in bars, smoked, drank, played pool, and drove souped-up Ford Mustangs and motorcycles far too fast. Then someone died in a very bad highway wreck, and this sure made everyone think.

Or maybe that was a different Billy Graham movie. Maybe every Billy Graham movie that I saw during childhood has merged in my memory and become The Restless Ones. They all had the same ending: everyone accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior and lived happily forever in the hereafter. Except for the foolish guy who died in the car accident. But he was the one who made everyone think. He died for their sins, and all things worked together for the good.

Dad brought home The Restless Ones soundtrack one afternoon. The title song had a lite-rock beat and a bunch of men and women singing verses about the wretched lives of the worldly rebels. At the end of each verse, they’d blurt out “the restless ones” in a way that reminded me of another jazzy music song I’d heard, the Batman TV theme. I don’t know what happened to the record, but the song in my head goes something like Running and running and drinking and smoking in the bars: The Restless Ones! Driving and driving their motorcycles and fast cars: The Restless Ones!

I played the song over and over, bouncing along with the beat, imagining the terrible places where the restless ones lived their lives and died their deaths.
(pages 15-16)

Sadly, The Restless Ones LP isn’t one of the few I walked away with when the BGEA relocated.