Andrew Lloyd Webber - Moog Synthesizer, Musical Direction, Orchestration, Organ, Piano, Producer, Vocals
Tim Rice - Choir/Chorus, Producer, Vocals
Ian Gillan - Vocals
P.P. Arnold - Vocals
Annette Brox & Victor - Vocals
Victor Brox - Vocals
Michael d'Abo - Vocals
Mike D'Abo - Vocals
Paul David - Vocals
Paul Davis - Vocals
Barry Dennen - Vocals
Yvonne Elliman - Vocals
John Gustafson - Vocals
Murray Head - Vocals
Brian Keith - Vocals
Patrick Arnold - Choir/Chorus
Tony Ashton - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Peter Barnfeather - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Madeline Bell - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Brian Bennett - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Lesley Duncan - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Kay Garner - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Barbara Kay - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Neil Lancaster - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Alan O'Duffy - Choir/Chorus, Engineer, Vocals
Seafield St. George - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Geoffrey Mitchell - Choir Master
Harry Beckett - Trumpet
Anthony Brooke - Bassoon
James Brown - Horn
John Burdon - Horn
Joe Castaldini - Bassoon
Keith Christie - Trombone
Jeff Clyne - Bass Guitar
Les Condon - Trumpet
Alan Doggett - Choir Master, Conductor, Moog Synthesizer
Ian Hamer - Trumpet
Ian Herbert - Clarinet
Clive Hicks - Guitar
Neil Hubbard - Electric Guitar
Horace James - Choir Master
Carl Jenkins - Piano
Frank Jones - Trombone
Bill Le Sage - Percussion
John Marshall - Drums
Henry McCulloch - Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar
Andrew McGavin - Horn
Chris Mercer - Tenor Saxophone
Anthony Moore - Trombone
Douglas Moore - Horn
Peter Morgan - Bass Guitar
Paul Raven - Vocals
Peter Robinson - Organ, Piano, Electric Piano
Bruce Rowland - Drums, Percussion
Terry Saunders - Choir/Chorus, Vocals
Chris Spedding - Guitar
Alan Spenner - Bass Guitar
Louis Stewart - Guitar
Chris Taylor - Flute
Steve Vaughan - Guitar
Mike Vickers - Moog Synthesizer
Brian Warren - Flute
Mick Weaver - Organ, Piano
Alan Weighall - Bass Guitar
Kenny Wheeler - Trumpet
Jesus Christ Superstar started life as a most improbable concept album
from an equally unlikely label, Decca Records, which had not, until
then, been widely known for groundbreaking musical efforts. It was all
devised by then 21-year-old composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and 25-year-old
lyricist Tim Rice. Jesus Christ Superstar had been conceived as a stage
work, but lacking the funds to get it produced, the two collaborators
instead decided to use an album as the vehicle for introducing the
piece, a fairly radical rock/theater hybrid about the final days in the
life of Jesus as seen from the point of view of Judas. If its content
seemed daring (and perhaps downright sacrilegious), the work, a
"sung-through" musical echoing operatic and oratorio traditions, was
structurally perfect for an album; just as remarkable as its subject
matter was the fact that its musical language was full-blown rock music.
There was at the time an American-spawned hit theater piece called Hair
that utilized elements of rock music, but it wasn't as unified a work
as Webber and Rice's creation, and it was less built on rock music than
on pop music that referred to rock; Webber and Rice's work presented a
far sharper, bolder musical edge and pushed it much further and harder
than Hair ever did. Serving as their own producers, the two creators got
together more than 60 top-flight singers and musicians (including Chris
Spedding, John Gustafson, Mike Vickers, P.P. Arnold, and members of Joe
Cocker's Grease Band, not to mention Murray Head, Ian Gillan, and
Yvonne Elliman in key singing roles), and managed to pull the whole
production together into a more than coherent whole that contained a
pair of hit singles (the title track and "I Don't Know How to Love Him")
to help drive AM radio exposure. What's more, the whole album sounded
like the real article as far as its rock music credibility was concerned
-- it was played good and hard for a studio creation. Released in
America by Decca as a handsomely decorated double-LP set complete with
illustrated libretto, Jesus Christ Superstar seemed to pick up where the
Who's Tommy (also a Decca release) and Hair had left off, and audiences
from across the age and cultural spectrum responded. Teenagers who
didn't know from Jesus, opera, or oratorios liked the beat, the hard
rock sounds, and the singing and bought the album, as did parents who
felt that the record offered a chance to understand some aspects of this
youth culture around them, and especially its music -- and so did some
more forward-thinking clergy and theologians, who saw any opportunity to
spread the word about Jesus where it wasn't previously going as
intrinsically good.
The result was a chart-topping LP followed in short order by a Broadway
production and, a little later, a multi-million-dollar movie (oddly
enough, the original double LP created barely a ripple in England in
1970 and 1971, though there was eventually a British stage production
that went on to become what was then the longest-running musical on
London's West End). And all of this acceptance and embrace in America
took place scarcely five years after an innocent observation by John
Lennon concerning the relative popularity of the Beatles and Jesus, made
in England but reported in the American tabloids, had led to protests
and a media boycott of the band's music and their 1966 tour across the
Bible Belt. Jesus Christ Superstar, by contrast, passed through the
border and Southern states without any controversy, speaking volumes in
the process about what had happened to American society in the interim.
The original release was also the first "event" album of the '70s,
presaging a brace of generally less successful efforts in that
direction, ranging from Lou Adler and Lou Reizner's orchestrated version
of Tommy (Pete Townshend's rock opera basically blown up to Jesus
Christ Superstar dimensions) to the soundtrack All This and World War II
and Leonard Bernstein's Mass. The original double-LP set was released
on CD in the late '80s in a decent-sounding double jewel case/slipcased
edition re-creating the artwork from the LP, and in 1993 it was also
reissued in MCA's gold-plated audiophile Masterdisc series with altered
cover art. Another re-release, using an upgraded analog-to-digital
transfer, this time in a slim double jewel case format with the original
booklet reproduced in miniature, was mastered in exceptionally vivid
fidelity. Each CD edition has sounded good, however, and was an
improvement on the LP edition, but the 1996 release offers beautifully
crisp fidelity with a close, loud sound on all of the instruments, but
especially the bass -- it still rocks, and the singing of Gillan, Head,
Gustafson, and Elliman still stands out.
