With the stage as his pulpit, Marcus Durant is truly an enthusiastic minister of punk rock and roll. The man stands taller than the reach of God, flinging his hands through the air as though electric currents travel his fingers, howling out a half-garbled punk gospel. He alternately buckles to the ground and arches for the rafters, as his bandmates-- guitarist Rich Millman, bassist Carl Horne, and drummer Andy Duvall--fly around him with equally amazing, genre-bending talent. But Durant, the charismatic, Afroed frontman for San Francisco's Zen Guerrilla, is quite the evangelical believer, converting soul, gospel, and R&B into a classic Zeppelin/ MC5 mix that hits rock and roll like few other bands can.

Durant is a natural performer. Born in Turkey in 1967 to a black American father and white British mother, one of his earliest memories is of going to visit his great-grandmother and landing in a gospel church.

"I still remember seeing my dad flip out and drop to his knees with the power of the music," Durant tells me, "and thinking to myself that I'd like to try my hand at that. My dad was a singer, and he really cut loose. When your dad does something that's the coolest thing in the world, you want to do it better."

The Durant family bounced around England and the States while Marcus was young, with his dad taking off for Vietnam in 1969. By the time the Durants settled in Delaware in 1977, Marcus was behind his classmates, so he had to spend his fourth-grade summer memorizing an entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. To ward off boredom, he also memorized the lyrics to albums in his parents' sizable record collection, an assortment of soul and rock and roll. His father had spent time in England before Marcus was born, rubbing shoulders with Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, and his mother had a taste for the best of the U.K., from the Beatles and the Kinks to the Rolling Stones, making for plenty of heady musical material to convert the young Durant. "From those big influences, it's pretty natural for me to start some kind of music endeavor," he says.

As a young teenager, Durant discovered the holy trinity of metal, weed, and the guitar--a combination that brought him to an Iron Maiden cover band called Flight of Icarus. Durant also started really feeling the blues: "You gotta figure, my mom was white, my dad was black, so we were not treated like your average family. There was a lot of racism and prejudice, and my dad couldn't find work. I watched him getting treated like a dog. So those early memories funnel into that music," he says. "I wanted to give something back to the blues."

Durant was given his chance to repay his musical makers in the summer of 1990, when the boys of Zen Guerrilla met at the University of Delaware. What started as experiments in "long grooves and psychedelic moments" took shape over the next decade. After touring with punk acts like Butthole Surfers, the Jesus Lizard, Babes in Toyland, Hole, and Neurosis in the early '90s--and releasing material on the band's own label, Insect--Zen Guerrilla moved to San Francisco in 1995. Durant's pen-pal friendship with Jello Biafra led to early Zen material being put out on the punk icon's label, Alternative Tentacles.

In 1999, Zen Guerrilla moved onto Sub Pop and released Trance States in Tongues. Trance States lives up to its name, as the album blends psychedelic intensity with a religious rock fervor (listen as Durant testifies mightily that he's "got that fever" on "Preachers' Promise").

Three years later, Zen Guerrilla is back with Shadows on the Sun (Sub Pop), another fantastic ride through light years of rhythm and soul and rock and roll. From Durant's high-pitched screams and cries on "Barbed Wire" to the slow, grooved-out blues of "Evening Sun," to the hand claps and Stones-ish "who-hu-hu's" on "Where's My Halo," the Jack Endino-produced album kicks out some wickedly possessed jams. And Marcus Durant, Zen Guerrilla's spiritual leader, is back at the pulpit, happily making the kind of rock and roll that Baptist preachers burned back in the day as the work of the devil.

But Durant, he's just happy to be your earthly catalyst on this musical adventure. "It's a truly blissful and honest black magic that I'm feeding off of," he says with a grin.