Today in History: Jesus Christ Superstar album released
The album would later lead to the smash-hit Broadway musical of the same name.
On this day in 1970, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who would go on to become the most successful composer-lyricist team in modern theatre history, released a double-LP ‘concept’ album called Jesus Christ Superstar.
From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, it was common for original cast recordings of successful Broadway musicals to find their way to near the top of the pop album charts. Hit shows like West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Funny Girl, among several others, all spun off million-selling albums during this era, but by the late 1960s, the pop album charts had been decisively taken over by rock.
Jesus Christ Superstar was the third musical written by Lloyd Webber and Rice, following on The Likes of Us, which was only staged for the first time in 2005, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which saw only limited performances in various English churches between 1968 and 1970.
Superstar grew out of Tim Rice’s long-time fascination with Judas Iscariot, whom he perceived, not as a craven betrayer of Jesus, but rather as a dear friend struggling with the implications of Jesus’ growing celebrity. Although the musical would later find broad support among leaders of liberal Christian churches, it was nevertheless too controversial to gain the financial backing necessary for a stage production. Lloyd Webber and Rice therefore chose to package Superstar as an album first.
Then, as now, Lloyd Webber and Rice had their detractors in the critical establishment. Writing for The New York Times, critic Don Heckman questioned whether this new ‘rock opera’ deserved praise, either as rock or as an opera. “As rock, it leaves much to be desired,” he wrote. And in relation to 20th-century operas by the likes of Stravinsky and Gershwin, Heckman argued, “The comparison is pretty devastating”.
Nevertheless the Jesus Christ Superstar album spawned a Top 40 single in versions of “I Don’t Know How To Love Him” by both Yvonne Elliman and Helen Reddy, and it shot all the way to the top of the Billboard album charts in early 1971, paving the way for a smash-hit Broadway opening later that year.
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