Christopher Owens: “I didn’t know anything about the world”
There are, it transpires, many things that Christopher Owens can quote by heart. Most psalms of the King James Bible (“the first pop songs, by the way”); passages of Shakespeare; and extended sections of his favourite musical, Man Of La Mancha.
“I get goosebumps every time I watch it,” he says, before going on to recite almost all of “The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” and run through the film’s full plot and key dramatic scenes, all in order to illustrate the sonic root of his band Girls. It’s a typically elaborate diversion in Owens’ intriguing journey from cloistered cult child to revered cult rocker.
“I grew up on the road, kind of, and I feel a little weird when I’m not,” Owens says, detailing his youthful travels around Europe and Asia, and life in the Children Of God cult. “They became obsessed with the fun they had,” he says, referring to the practice of “flirty fishing” which saw members sleep with over 200,000 people in the 1970s and ’80s. “The liberation of nightclubbing and showing people God’s love through sleeping with them. I think there were a lot of people that did it genuinely thinking they were out there showing people God’s love. And then nobody worked, so you had to eat somehow, so why not get a donation? A lot of men probably thought, ‘Wow, that was God’s love’, or at least felt loved. I don’t think it was all bad.”
The group did face accusations of child abuse and exploitation, however. “The children started to become old enough to maybe be complicit or be in some sketchy situations,” Owens says. “I like to call the Children Of God, us, the children, because we were just born. We had no choice, you know. The adults were full of themselves at this point and became authoritarian. I sort of see my peers and myself as the actual innocents, the real children of God.”
Leaving the cult at 16 while based in Slovenia and following his sister to Amarillo in Texas, he says, left him socially and culturally adrift for several years. “When I got [to America], I had to get the kick in the face of what that really was. I didn’t know anything about the world. People wonder where I went to high school. Oh yeah, of course I went to Amarillo High. I just started lying and trying to fit in. It was such an acrobatic feat to learn how to know which CDs were cool at a party. How to survive as an American is fucking far-out to learn sliding on your fucking ass at 16.”
Finding a wealthy mentor, Stanley Marsh 3, introduced Owens to new worlds of art and literature in his late twenties. He recalls, at Marsh’s suggestion, making fake street signs bearing quotes from best-selling novels and cementing them into the streets of Amarillo. “They looked exactly like the stop signs in town, and they’re made from the same material, and you could not get them out. They would say, ‘I should have kissed her more’ or ‘I’m a hot dog’.” When Owens struck out for San Francisco on his own, “[Marsh’s] actual response was, ‘It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of you’.”
Girls made Owens an indie hero, but his subsequent solo career stalled until he was plucked from what he calls “a whirlpool going down” by a new manager. He ends by revealing that there’s a full album’s worth of Girls songs which have never seen the light of day. “I’m thinking about maybe doing that in the future.”
