Ernie Marrs: Plastic Jesus

Dear Miss Cunningham, […]
My singing partner, George Crocarty and I - collectively "The Goldcoast Singers" - began singing "Plastic Jesus" in January of 1962 at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. After getting the words, rather awkwardly phrased, from a Cal co-ed of our acquaintance, we put them into meter, set them to an innocuous (?) melody and surrounded them with dialogue reminiscent of a radio station in Del Rio Texas (transmitter 250,000 watts, thank you, across the border in Mexico) that I remembered listening to on my shortwave radio as a small adolescent in Fresno, California. We recorded our version of the song at the San Francisco State College Folk Festival in April of 1962 (this recording is on our first album, "Here They Are The Goldcoast Singers", World Pacific Records, 1806 (release number). Eventually, "Plastic Jesus" became our most called for song end the major selling point of the album. It was played on radio stations (mostly F-M) all over the country -- much to the chagrin of a lot people out in radioland and particularly radio station owners. The latter forced several crusading diskjockies off the air -- among them a big gun in the Chicago record market, who quit (according to reports) rather than stop playing "Plastic Jesus”, and another dj who alledgedly belted the engineer with his crutch (temporary broken leg) when the wicked engineer cut him off the air in the middle of "P.J." because a stockholder was on the telephone raising hell. At one point a tipsy lady came after me with an empty Heineken’s beer bottle while we were singing the song in a Portland Oregon, saloon. Things like this were common during two years of singing “Plastic Jesus" to the unwashed in posh folk clubs and sleazy coffehouses all over the western U.S. and Canada. Alas, George was drafted into the army and I've come back to school and the "Goldcoast Singers" are temporarily no more (I say temporarily, because I'm working out a new
"Goldcoast Singers" now), but in our small way (Ha!) perhaps we contributed to the folklore of America (Ha! Ho!), pretentious as that may sound.

Folklore-wise, I’ve discovered that the song was originally a Negro camp meeting (if there was such a thing) song that went:
"I don’t care it it rains or freezes,
Leaning on the arms of Jesus…"
and was the themeof a religious or quasi-religious, radio show from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the 1940’s. On hearing this, some wag changed the words and twenty years later they ended up in ay hands… ED RUSH.