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It's quite a feat. I admired and enjoyed it right away. Such an attempt, nonetheless, is bound to have a lot going for and against it. It's been such a long time that Jesus had a big hit that the pull on our sentiments is extreme. The Bible is a great Golden Oldie, an undisputed classic, and some folk still dig it.
But people think a little differently now, and who do you know that reads anymore? We obviously need a new medium and a new style to sell the old message. I know there've been J.S. Bach and guys like that, but that was hundreds of years ago. It isn't exactly hit material. You recall, too, how Jesus bombed on the silver screen -- something more than a miracle was necessary to pull off his masquerade as Jeffrey Hunter.
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As a rocker. Who could have imagined that Rock, given its groiny, jive beginnings, would become so incredibly elastic that anyone would choose it to retell this spiritual odyssey? And that's what's going against Superstar too. A kind of incredulousness. Where do they get off fucking with the heaviest subject around? When I got it in the mail I laughed -- surely a Kafka scene. All my anticipations were ungenerous. I remember first sitting down to it, my face poised with a fixed smirk, the better to meet it on its own inevitably preposterous and/or pretentious terms. I was wrong. With certain qualifications, the music makes it through and through. It does what it does perfectly. It's what it's doing that's maybe questionable.
So what can you expect?
1. It's serious.
2. It sticks to the story but originates and in part reupholsters a text to "tell it like it is" (was).
3. A swift overture that gets the show right off the ground with a brilliantly gaudy collection of themes in a smorgasbord of styles. The ear is fed so quickly that you've got no time to consult your taste for possible complaints.
4. It's perfectly played and sung and engineered -- an unwavering professionalism.
5. Mythic overhaul and tuneup: the "relevant" Christ.
6. Some direct Mooging.
7. About as much religious flavor and fervor as the collected works of Jerry Lee Lewis, Superstar is basically a superior musical anchored by a very tight and together conception and a handful of successful show tunes. A beautifully organized package, full of the bluntness, immediacy and flash of entertainment formulae -- but not profound or disturbing.
8. A tenor solo -- just when you're thinking "sure would be a goof to hear a nice tenor solo 'bout now."
9. Quite simply: a project fraught with disaster, sensationally brought off. The mind can scarcely for a moment escape admiring that. They're doing it, they go on doing it, it's done, and it ain't a travesty.
10. Happiness and fun. In this reworking of a great agony, the agony seems to have been misplaced.
11. The Last Supper as occasion for a funny pot-song (Spiro Agnew: note).
12. Judas' problems upstaging Jesus' problems -- part of the updating process. The traditional villain shows his "human" side. We all love anti-heroes.
13. Superslickness refined to a razor edge that cuts, gets to you.
14. Yvonne Elliman, who's something to fantasize about. She slices through the layers of inspired ersatz and truly catches your heart. She gives her all on the two sumptuous melodies she has and achieves an erotic intensity and fragility that's really convincing.
15. A union of music and text full of wonderful invention.
16. As implied, a bunch of very hummable tunes (those especially lovely pop up rather often -- and you're glad they do). You'll be hearing them soon on your local talk show sung by one nonentity or another.
17. An unusually sustained theatricality, unusual for recorded rock, in any case. The drama of the situation is captured and delivered.
18. Pleasure at how it gathers momentum where you might expect some coasting (side two). This is the side I'll play when I'm not up for the whole thing. Here the music consolidates its strength and reaches a peak of vitality.
19. A careful, witty libretto. I find the following, for instance, oddly irresistible: "Christ you know I love you/ Did you see I waved?"
20. During "Crucifixion," a weakly audible Lennie Tristano-ish piano accompaniment. Listen closely -- that cat's wailin'.
21. An ideal gift for Mom & Dad do they shouldn't call what you listen to degenerate anymore.
22. In my case, a record so thin it warps when you breathe on it.
23. It's not serious.
Hard to say whether Superstar represents a step forward or not. Does it promise something or merely consolidate existing tendencies? Is it a sign of cultural revitalization or another instance of our deathtrip? The equivalent of our big hotels, or a true, fresh sprout of life? I'd say it was more show than substance. The poetry and the passion of the occasion of Christ's last days are not carried over. We get instead a stylish exhibition whose polished charm manages to amuse and distress our skin but misses bone and marrow by a long shot. Its tastefulness and wholesomeness and ease on the ear don't strike one as outgrowths of Webber and Rice's version of life or deepest feelings, but as a strategy of sorts. The variety in the music -- from a jabbing intensity to a ravishing loveliness, from monolithic grandness to sophisticated, quirky asymmetries, from sharp-bouncy-bright to swelling and massive -- is exciting, but works against a total impact. The subject requires a greater austerity, or firmness of mood. As is, it is too "groovy" to succeed on the deepest level. (It may just also be an elaborate gag -- you know, facetious. "Wouldn't it be a gas to.. It'll be a coup, blow people's minds." If that speculation is sound, then the subject was chosen precisely for its unsuitability to the intended treatment, for its audacity potential. A notion similar to making a musical out of Little Caesar or The Iliad or, indeed, what Webber & Rice first thought of themselves -- the Cuban Missle Crisis). If it sold enough copies at Christmas, I can see Ed Sullivan presenting it live from Las Vegas. And I suspect the music is semi-geared to make possible that kind of a fulfillment.
For good or for worse, my guess is that despite its limitations, it'll have enough clout to bail out this sagging musical period in the minds of many of us rockheads who've been sitting around waiting for something extraordinary to happen. This is it.
- Jack Shadoian, Rolling Stone, 3/4/71.
Bonus Reviews!
 Further reading on Super Seventies RockSite!: |
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
Writers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice set several precedents with this album. First, it is a pre-stage studio version, and it topped the US charts upon release. Second, it is the first show to successfully put rock music in a theatrical context (Hair is really a pop/show-music pastiche, not rock). Third, it is a "sung-through" musical without spoken dialog, technically an operetta. Fourth, though musicals had turned more serious at this point, writing a show about Jesus Christ from the point of view of Judas was about as daring as you could get. It succeeds in all ways. In addition to the title song (a #14 hit sung by Murray Head), it includes "I Don't Know How to Love Him" by Yvonne Elliman.
- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
The sublime pairing of Andrew Lloyd Weber's powerful music and entertaining lyrics written by Tim Rice was "breathtaking," declare disciples who annoint this grooving, moving masterful concept album the grandaddy of Broadway rock operas. Featuring some of the funkiest bass lines ever and songs where every word counted, this soundtrack evokes all the fire of the musical. Still a few nonbelievers fret it's a formula, like a Grisham book: "not bad, just not all it was cracked up to be." * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
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