Jesus Christ Superstar

I had two possible choices for my album on actual Christmas. I flipped a coin and it came up Woodstock. I was going to do a whole work up, a 12 days of christmas joke with the punchline being "5 records of Woodstock!" (I have both the 3 record soundtrack and the double album Woodstock 2). Alas, it blows. It's not fun to listen to (unless CSN&Y singing to a nastily out of tune acoustic guitar while giving audible eq instructions to the sound guys is your idea of fun). Plus there's 9 minutes of Ten Years After hiding in there, and that's 9 minutes too many.

Executive decision, plan 9 from outer space, we're listening to the original concept album, Jesus Christ Superstar. Murray Head sings Judas. I'll even do some real research for my snarky one-liners, and properly proofread before publication.

I have a tendency to be crass, but i assure you that's not my intention here. It's a fictional rock opera about Jesus and his apostles as actual people, and every religious group you can think of has a reason to hate it, but i love it. And, when some Peruvian prison inmates staged a full production as part of a rehabilitation program in 2014, even the Catholic Church gave it a thumbs up.

There aren't many true rock operas to begin with (tons of rock musicals, but i'm being picky about semantics today), and Andrew Lloyd Webber's is at least as good as Tommy; maybe not quite as good as The Wall, but what is?

You know who else liked it? Liked the whole idea of sticking a rock band inside an orchestra? Saw it in London near the end of his life, and wished he could have created something like it? Dimitri Shostakovich. Now there's a guy who knows a little something about writing operas certain people might get upset about. I bet Shosti would have adored Metallica's S&M as much as i do, too.

I have the original album with Ian Gillam and Murray Head, the former from Deep Purple, the latter a Chess afficianado enthralled by the nightlife of Thailand (that's a complicatedly obscure musical joke, if i do say so myself ;) ). I like the movie version too.

I like the story because the characters have real depth, they are motivated by their own sense of what is right and fight against what they perceive as calamitous. No one is inherently good or bad. There's no actual protagonist/antagonist structure, everyone gets swept along in the inevitable plot. It's really a much broader statement about the nature of political power itself. You take a mortal man, and put him in control...

Shut up Dave Mustaine, this is my puppet show.

Musically, this thing is phenomenal, and whole books could be written about how well it's composed and how deftly Webber handles aria/recitative/chorus in a rock context. The real power though, is that it's not an imitation of anything. He takes all the real compositional insights of late 60s psych-rock and seamlessly blends it with the crazier side of classical music. You can hear Bowie or Spirit or any of the other icons in it because Webber isn't faking anything. It's exactly what you could ever want an academically crafted rock opera to be.

... and with that, from my family to yours on this 4th day of the solar new year, have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy Gregorian Calendar New Year, and may our quest for more and interesting scratchy old platters of polyvinyl chloride bring us joy and comfort and amusement as we continue to argue about our current crop of potential political proselytizers. Peace on Earth, now let us feast.

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