Half Captain Beefheart, Half Teletubbies

Oral actually came from, and always kept one foot in, an older tent show tradition, and though he went into TV and used it as a money-raising tool with a vengeance, he was always a lot weirder, and, I suspect, considerably more sincere in his beliefs than people like the bullying demagogue Falwell or Jim and Tammy when they were on their crusade to make everything nice-nice.... As a Pentecostal, Oral spoke in tongues, praying every day with his wife in a mysterious, divinely inspired language that was half Captain Beefheart, half Teletubbies, usually delivered in the lyrical tones of someone who's just caught his dick in his zipper. Oral, who gave himself over to God after he had been divinely cured of what some back country sawbones had diagnosed as a terminal case of TB, was ten years into his preaching career when he found that he himself had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead with his right hand. Oral, who wrote autobiographies like Li'l Wayne drops mixtapes, was given to reminiscing about the many times that he resurrected dead people at his live shows. You might wonder what the dead people were doing there, but it seems that, perhaps because of his awesome charisma, adults and children had a startling tendency to breathe their last while he was onstage. Oral once explained that he hated to show off like that but that having someone drop dead in the middle of a show can be very distracting and that he found it necessary to resurrect them so that he could continue to deliver the Lord's word.