CRITICAL MASS

Superstar still has power, charm

Jesus Christ Superstar
Jesus Christ Superstar

“I remember when this whole thing began, no talk of God then, we called you a man …

‘‘It was beautiful but now it’s sour.”

  • Judas, “Heaven on Their Minds,” from Jesus Christ Superstar

I’m writing this before I’ve had a chance to see the Argenta Community Theater’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, but I’ve got my tickets.

It feels strange to be anticipating anything that features the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose music I usually find as catchy as Teflon. But Superstar, the original concept album upon which the musical was based, is a touchstone for me. I wore out a couple of copies of the album in the early ’70s. I liked it better than Tommy, the Pete Townshend rock opera that preceded it by a year and, though I’ve since reversed my opinion on the relative merits of the two projects, I retain a lot of fondness for Superstar. I listened to it again last weekend. It seemed better realized than I remembered, with some great vocals by Murray Head, who played Judas, the protagonist of the piece, and Deep Purple front man Ian Gillian, who played Jesus.

The band, buttressed by Fairport Convention drummer Bruce Rowland, session guitarists Neil Hubbard (Roxy Music) and Chris Spedding (the legendary session player who produced the Sex Pistols’ early demos), is excellent. They propel what may be Lloyd Webber’s strongest melodies. The music in Jesus Christ Superstar is dynamic and complicated,with jazzy key shifts and stuttering time changes. It’s better than Evita or Cats, which sound tuneless and dull by comparison. I doubt I’ve listened to Jesus Christ Superstar more than a couple of times in the past 30 years, but when I heard it again via Spotify, I was surprised to find I knew it. I could sing along. I knew all the words.

Those lyrics by Tim Rice, who also collaborated with Lloyd Webber on Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Evita, are only a little dated in the use of the then au courant hippie vernacular. It is charming when Yvonne Elliman, singing the part of Mary Magdalene, counsels Jesus in “Everything’s Alright”: “Try not to to turn on to problems that upset you” or when Victor Brox (alleged to be Jimi Hendrix and Tina Turner’s favorite white blues singer), as the high priest Caiaphas, intones, “One thing I’ll say for him, Jesus is cool” in “This Jesus Must Die.” (This is preceded by one of my favorite moments, when the tempo changes and a fairly obscure singer named Brian Keith - lead vocalist for two one-hit wonders, Plastic Penny, which hit with “Everything I Am” in 1968, and The English Congregation, which released “Softly Whispering I Love You” in 1972 - pounces on the line “What then to do about Jesus of Nazareth? Miracle wonder man, hero of fools” like a pocket Joe Cocker.)

The very dated nature of this work lends it a strange kind of gravitas. Superstar is very much a product of its counter cultural time, when one could encounter bonafide “Jesus freaks” in the streets of major cities. (Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” which refers to the phenomenon, was released in 1971.) There was something of a Jesus fad around 1970, part of which involved young people embracing Christ while disdaining organized religion. While anyone who didn’t live through the period may find it hard to believe, in the late 1960sthere was a real sense that the center could not hold much longer and that revolution was inevitable. Listening to Jesus Christ Superstar today evokes a weird nostalgia for a time when things seemed to be unraveling, when the end times - at least in a secular sense - seemed very much at hand.

While the show’s humanist portrayals of Jesus and Judas may not seem terrifically insightful today, both are drawn as well-intentioned human beings and it’s possible to perceive a bit of vainglorious hypocrisy in Jesus’ character - he’s written as a man capable of anger and susceptible to the lures of Mary Magdalene. It gave my then 12-yearold mind something to chew on. The question of Judas’ culpability is something best left to biblical scholars and philosophers, but to fulfill the prophecy, he had to act as he did, didn’t he? So can we say he really had a choice in the matter? Wasn’t Judas as much a sacrificial lamb as Jesus?

Again, I’m sure any first-year seminary student could make short work of the Judas portrayed in Jesus Christ Superstar, but it raised some questions about predestination and free will I hadn’t previously considered.

There’s the point in “Everything’s Alright,” where Judas breaks in to scold Mary Magdalene for her wanton use of myrrh: “Woman, your fine ointment, brand new and expensive/Could

have been saved for the poor Why has it been wasted?/We could have raised, maybe, 300 silver pieces or more People who are hungry, people who are starving/They matter more than your feet and hair”

But this outburst is rebuked by Jesus, who responds angrily: “Surely you’re not saying/We have the resources To save the poor from their lot? There will be poor always pathetically struggling Think of the good things you’ve got”

According to Mark, an exchange like this actually took place, with Jesus scolding his disciples for being indignant with a woman who anointed Jesus with expensive oil (Mark 14:3). It’s been suggested that this incident might have led to a falling out between Jesus and Judas, who was initially drawn to Jesus’ asceticism (after all, Jesus had instructed his apostles to “go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor” because “hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God.”

Or, as Judas reminds Jesus, “it doesn’t help us if you’re inconsistent.”

Later, in “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” a very human (and mortal) Jesus expresses his agonizing doubts about the whole thing, another biblically accurate event that nevertheless occasioned some criticism of the piece, mostly by people who never deigned to experience it. It’s a strong ballad that begins in an acoustic mode, builds to a storm of orchestration, recedes to simple piano and vocal, then builds again as Gillian takes us through the stages of denial, anger and acceptance.

The second half - the second album is how I still think of it - isn’t as strong as the first, despite the inclusion of the hit “Superstar” and the still-funny-after-all-these years “King Herod’s Song,” sung by Manfred Mann vocalist Mike D’Abo with the swarm and swagger of a seasoned vaudevillian. (“Prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool.”)

I had forgotten that the piece makes no definitive call on Jesus’ divinity. The Judas-sung “Superstar” comes after (spoiler alert) Judas’ suicide and before the crucifixion, which is where the story ends. Jesus dies, commends his spirit into God’s hands and - after an abrupt tape stop - the instrumental coda (“John Nineteen Forty-One”) closes out the record.

Insofar as it fails to acknowledge that Jesus was more than a rebel peacenik, some call it blasphemous. Others are still upset that it depicted Judas as something other than a demon-inspired traitor. In Jesus Christ Superstar, he’s a pragmatic and conflicted patriot who delivers Jesus to the Romans to save his people. (He accepts his 30 pieces of silver to give it to the poor.)

Superstar is not a terribly sophisticated show. Had I seen it at any other time in my life I might have been bored, confused or horrified by it. But I heard it when I did and we played the album a lot. It was, along with Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Chicago Live at Carnegie Hall, the album that got the most spins while we hung out shooting pool in my friend Steve Cherry’s father’s den. It made some irreversible tracks in my mind, and I still catch myself humming it, sometimes softly singing slightly rewritten versions of its songs to my dogs as we walk in the mornings.

It is like an old friend, someone I hadn’t consciously thought of in years but who seems to have been with me all along. I am looking forward to seeing it again.

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Style, Pages 50 on 07/28/2013

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