Sing Along With Jesus

This week I finally got to listen to Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection ... and it shook me up in ways I wouldn't have thought possible.

First of all, like a lot of folks my age, I was exposed to the original JCS as a youngster. My mother owned a copy of the LP and played it quite a lot. (We had one of those record players set up to play multiple platters. They were pretty brutal to the vinyl, but they were so cool nobody cared.)

I have no idea how many times I heard that album between the ages of 4 and 8, and there's no way of gauging it. Frankly, my memory was alot more absorbent in those days, and almost every word of the show ended up tucked away deep in a brainfold.

The weird thing about this is that I had no knowledge of the rock history that led up to JCS. I had never heard of Deep Purple, so it didn't mean anything to me that the role of Jesus was sung by their lead singer, Ian Gillan. (For what it's worth, I doubt my mother had heard of Deep Purple either.) I liked the album, but didn't really register what it was about. I assumed it was ... well ... Christian.

And it's not. Not particularly. It's about Christ, but it's alot more about Judas and Mary and the political crisis Christ stirred up in Jerusalem. It's cynical and humanist and dark, dark, dark. It had been 20 or 25 years since I had heard the darn thing, and it got mixed up in my head with my general distaste for Lloyd Webber's bigger shows (Cats, anyone?) and Godspell. But hearing the "Resurrection" version sent me running back to the original. Not because the new version sucks or anything. It just finally sank in for me how HARD that old record rocks! And I don't mean "rocks pretty good for Broadway." I mean it ROCKS! It's edgy, adventurous and soulful. And OPERATIC, as in "Rock Opera". The characters explore and expose their emotional states in ways you'll never read in the King James Edition. The music repeats several memorable themes as leitmotif in different settings sung by different characters ... it just ROCKS REAL HARD, mmmkay?

Article Author: John Voorhees

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