Jesus Christ Superstar

by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice

I only want to say that Jesus Christ Superstar was released fifty years ago this month. I couldn’t find more precise date than “September 1970”, so it might be fifty years ago today. Can’t say when exactly I heard it for the first time, but it also must have been the early ’70s and it was my cousin’s 9 cm/s magnetic tape reel. Suffice to say, I grew up on this particular version of the rock opera, needless to say, without understanding the lyrics. (Many years later, I discovered that understanding of the lyrics didn’t spoil my enjoyment of JCS at all, unlike what happened with a lot of Anglophone rock for me.) In 1980s, I had an opportunity to acquire the vinyl, and I even borrowed from my brother a princely sum, an equivalent of my monthly stipend... only to discover that the album on sale, still in original shrink-wrap, was The Original Motion Picture Sound Track Album. Which was not good enough: I was looking for the original and the best.

In the last days of USSR, I bought the double LP Иисус Христос Суперзвезда issued pirated by Andrei Tropillo’s label АнТроп, aka «Продюсерский Центр Рок-н-ролльных Приходов Единой Евангелическо-Лютеранской Церкви России». Well. The aforementioned reel, which was still around, sounded better. I had quite a number of АнТроп vinyls, invariably of low sound quality and with funny modifications, or loose approximations, of the original sleeve designs. Those were the days.

In 1995, on its 25^th anniversary, more or less, I finally got hold of a two-CD box in Leeds, England. I was surprised to learn that the copyright belonged to a body known as Leeds Music Ltd. (It doesn’t exist anymore, being swallowed first by MCA and eventually by Universal.) I still have this box (and CDs, of course).

Here are some trivia related to JCS that I was not-quite-aware of until now:

• Lloyd Webber and Rice wrote Try It And See, later recorded by Rita Pavone, for the 1969 Eurovision Song Contest. The song was rejected. Curiously, Save Your Kisses for Me, with a suspiciously similar chorus, actually won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1976.
• Both Yvonne Elliman and Tony Ashton appear on Jon Lord’s Gemini Suite. Eric Clapton asked Elliman to sing backing vocals on his cover of I Shot the Sheriff and she appeared on a string of Clapton’ albums from 1974 to 1977. Also, the Bee Gees originally wrote How Deep Is Your Love for Elliman. How cool is that?
• Apparently, it was Tim Rice who, “armed with a long, flat piece of board with another smaller section hinged on it, flapped away providing the lashes and doing the counting” on The Thirty-Nine Lashes.
• It turns out that one of my favourite jazz musicians, Kenny Wheeler, played trumpet on this recording!
• According to Something Else! webzine, Ian Gillan “nailed all of his vocals in a mere three hours”... later, he turned down the offers for the stage and film versions of JSC “but not before asking for £250,000 and demanding that all of Deep Purple be paid as well — since filming was going to keep the group off the road”.

By the way, it was Aunty Sonia who first told me the name of the lead singer.

For the last half of the century, the opera has been an inspiration for countless musicians, from Livin’ Blues (look for their 1971 rendition of Overture on Bamboozle) to this year’s all-female JCS with Shoshana Bean as Judas, Morgan James as Jesus, and Cynthia Erivo as Mary (the She is Risen vol. I is out now). Here’s to the next fifty years!