I'm in a plane 35,000 feet above Philadelphia with He Is, the hottest up-and-coming rock band in the United States, and we're all about to die.
"Get on your knees!" lead singer Thomas Plant yells to a comely blonde in front of him. But this isn't an orgy, and she isn't a groupie. Plant kneels down in front of her and they clasp hands together. Eyes closed, lips barely moving, the two pray silently as turbulence rocks our little charter plane. The other members of the band crowd around: guitarist Jimmy Marshall, bassist Mike Townshend and drummer Lila Joplin fall to their knees beside Plant, and suddenly all are praying in unison. Then the rocking stops. Plant stretches his hands out above his head. "Thank you Jesus," he whispers.
Thomas Plant wasn't always a devout Christian. In fact, until two years ago, all four band members were in far different places than they are today.
"I don't like to talk about this kind of thing," Plant says as he fiddles with the 20-pound diamond encrusted cross that hangs from his neck. "But yes, the truth is that I used to be a male escort."
A visit to Big Ones Male Escorts, where Plant used to work, is disturbing. Large glossies of nude and semi-nude men grace the walls, some depicting Plant. In one, his formerly long blonde hair covers the crack of his buttocks, exposed over the top of his jeans as he bends down in front of another male. A plaque underneath reads "Vic and Jon." Plant, I am given to understand, is Vic. I ask the owner, a small woman named Kaitlin, about the former employee. "Oh, sure, I remember Vic," she says. "He was popular with the women and the men. Oh, he loved felching. He used to tell me about it all the time. 'Kaitlin,' he'd say, 'I love to felch.' From women, from men, he'd felch. Here, look at this." Kaitlin pulls out a crumpled note that Plant once left her. "Kaitlin," it reads, "can you get me some more women who are into felching? Jesus Christ, I love felching." That reference is the only encounter with God to be had at Big Ones.
Today, Plant looks far different than he did in his Vic days. His hair is closely cropped and dyed black, and his entire body is clothed. Even when the weather outside is warm, he wears jeans, boots and a long-sleeved shirt. He seems to withdraw a little when I ask him about his conversion. What could possibly have brought him from that den of iniquity to his current spot at God's right-hand?
"Well, it's like this," he says. "One day, particularly hard-up for cash, I was felching from a 300-pound woman with a body odor problem. I looked up, and above her head, Jesus appeared, wearing a crown of thorns. I got up, got dressed and left, leaving the money on the dresser. I haven't looked back."
Now, Plant's past helps inform many of his lyrics as he fights to keep other souls from losing the path to the Savior. On the band's first hit, "I Love Him," Plant sings about his experiences. The chorus that so many teens fell in love with is, "I used to be into felching/ Now I can't even stand belching/ My God, I Love Him."
Mike Townshend rolls up his sleeves and shows me the red pockmarked scars that run up and down his arms, his legs, his penis and between his toes. When he speaks his voice is soft and shy, though he doesn't speak often.
"Yeah, I used to use insulin recreationally. It started out innocently -- a doctor misdiagnosed me with diabetes. But after a couple weeks, I was hooked. Even when the doctor told me he had been wrong, I just couldn't stop using it. I got this crazy rush every time I shot that insulin into my veins, and I couldn't live without it."
Townshend had been on the fast track -- an investment banker on Wall Street with an apartment on New York's Upper East Side. Unfortunately, the price of illegal insulin and the repeated unexcused absences from work took their toll. "I was involved in some shady dealings -- my bosses looked the other way, for the most part, but when my involvement in the Martha Stewart/ImClone thing was discovered, they had no choice but to fire me."
Once one of the masters of the universe, Townshend was forced to begin working at a record store in Greenwich Village. "It was a terrible job," he says now, "But it paid the rent, and I could steal CDs and sell them elsewhere for my insulin money."
It was at that record store that Townshend first met Thomas Plant. "There was this guy who would come in every week or so, looking for the newest Christian rock. I thought that was a little weird, no one came in looking for that kind of thing, so I struck up a conversation with him one day. He told me he was starting a band, and asked me to come down and watch a rehearsal. I figured I had nothing better to do."
Townshend went to the small studio apartment Plant had rented as studio space, where he watched the band rehearse. "When I heard the first notes of 'I Love Him,' I fell to my knees. I didn't know how to play a note, but I knew I had found my calling."
"It's a dark part of my history that I'd really prefer to keep under wraps," says drummer Lila Joplin, "but in response to your question, yes, I was a teacher of non-abstinence based sexual education for a couple years."
In fact, until just a year ago, when she got a call from high school friend Plant asking her to join the band he was forming, Joplin was a high school gym and sexual education teacher in Hamden, Texas.
Joplin is looking down into the Bible she has on her at all times as she speaks. "I'm really ashamed of some of the things I did. I mean, teaching teenagers ways to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases -- it's horrible." Her voice begins to waver and crack, and her lower lip trembles a little. "I once even... I once even taught my class how to properly roll on a condom, using the banana from my lunch as a prop." She begins to cry now, and motions me out the door. "Please, I don't want to talk about this anymore."
A little research confirms what Joplin doesn't want to talk about: she was, for five years, a sexual education teacher. In fact, she was an award winning sexual education teacher, receiving a commendation from her school district for her innovative methods in teaching the proper methods for used condom disposal.
A few days after our first discussion, Joplin is ready to talk again. "It was, ironically, that award that brought Thomas and I back together. He happened to be in Texas looking for a record deal when he saw my name in the paper and decided to give me a call. It was Thomas who gave me the courage to leave my life of horrible sin behind me. When I think about all the teenagers I have aided in the pursuit of healthy and fulfilling sexual relationships outside of marriage..." She pauses. "It's just horrible. I know I'll burn for all eternity because of it."
The whole band has a tortured history, but perhaps no one has experienced anything as terrible as has the oldest member of the band, 40-year-old guitarist Jimmy Marshall. He Is's manager, Lieutenant Moulton, refuses to let me talk to Marshall at all, and it's not hard to pick up from earlier news stories why.
In 1995, Jimmy Marshall, then known as the Reverend Robert Smith, was arrested on child pornography charges. The youth minister in a California church, Marshall was caught after parents became suspicious of the frequent youth retreats to an establishment known as "Nancy's E-Z Boudoir Photography." One mother called the police, who staked out the studio and witnessed a frightful scene: Marshall directing and photographing a naked performance of the classic ballet Swan Lake. After watching and taking notes for more than an hour, the police moved in and arrested Marshall and his assistant. Marshall pleaded no contest to all charges and was sentenced to 10 years in a medium-security prison in Oakland, California.
It was Thomas Plant who managed to get Marshall out of prison on a work release program. "After my conversion, I joined a prison pen pal program. I struck up a friendship with Jimmy, and it was clear to me that he could not survive in prison much longer. It was awful -- they made him participate in the prison theater program. I mean, how much of that can one man stand? I had to get him out of there, and I knew that with his help, He Is could be the band it is today."
Last Thursday night, I watched He Is take the stage at Philadelphia's Electric Factory while a crowd composed largely of adolescent girls screamed shrilly. The show was electric, powerful and thrilling. As the show came to an end, Plant walks over and looks at me. "You know, there are some days I miss that sweet felching rush. But if I can't have both, I'd give up felching for Jesus any day"
