The Mystery of Jesus Christ Superstar

I remember when I was exposed for the first time to the whirling, swirling, emotional journey that is Jesus Christ Superstar (hereafter, JCS). It goes without saying that it didn't matter what my religious background or convictions were. With JCS, religion never mattered, because great music is great music, and a great story is a great story. The characters were so well wrought, and the storyline moved forward so skillfully, that I wonder if even devout Christian listeners of JCS were tempted to forget that they were hearing a story derived directly from religious narrative, and got just as caught up in the humanness of the characters as anyone else might.

As a youth of 14 or 15, one aspect of the record that compelled me to listen to it over and over again was the interaction between the characters. (I listened not to the film soundtrack, but to the original "album musical," known as the Brown Album, and only years later did I learn that the Brown Album was not connected with an actual performance of JCS, and many of the singers never even stood in the same room with each other during its making.) Thinking back on it now, I realize that JCS is an album made up of conversations. Judas and Jesus, the high priests with each other, Simon and Jesus, and on and on. The soliloquys - Mary's "I Don't Know How to Love Him" and Pilate's "Dream" - are as much with the audience as with the characters themselves, and Jesus's "I Only Want to Say" is, of course, with God. Judas's opening "Heaven on Their Minds" is a plea for being listened to (but Jesus "won't listen..." laments Judas), and it's nicely book-ended with "Superstar," in which Judas, in spirit, asks Jesus questions that most mortal people would like to ask, but cannot, about Jesus's motives and prominence. (It also brings to a climax the general motif of the questioning of Jesus by the high priests and Pilate.)

I started with the "album musical" version, the one with Ian Gillan, Murray Head et al., known as the Brown Album, and my copy was a taped cassette derived from my friend's borrowed LP. (I obtained a second-hand copy of the vinyl album years later.) Only when I was in my twenties did I see the film, and I recall that it did not particularly impress me. Classical music listeners know what it's like to fall in love with the first performance of a piece that they hear, and to refuse to warm up to any other. So it was with me and the JCS film soundtrack. Ted Neeley's Jesus just seemed too weak-voiced for me, the Priests and Herod were way too caricatured, and the whole thing was badly mixed - it sounded as if the actors just sang their lines over the Brown Album's backing tracks, and their vocals, besides being too loud and "dry" (recorded too up-front and without any reverberation or ambiance), also seemed poorly synched: it felt like each line came in a second or two too late. (It still feels this way to me.)

Now, it turns out that my girlfriend L. also discovered JCS at a young age. (This indeed was one factor that drew us together.) But the album entered her life at the age of ten; far earlier than it did mine. On a long drive to a family gathering in New Jersey, we sang nearly the entire book in the car. We knew, and sang accurately, not only all the words, but the particular inflections of the singers as we remembered them from the record. Each of us had the same aural memory of how many of the lines were sung. But for some reason, other lines we remembered differently. There were even some textual differences. I asked L. if she had listened to the film soundtrack as a kid, not the original album musical. No way! she said. It was always the Brown Album.

Around the time of my and L.'s discovery of our common interest in JCS, and our rediscovery of JCS itself, I got interested in Bible history. I'm like that. Hearing an old record, seeing an old film, or reading an article in the newspaper will inspire me to pursue some scholarly subject obsessively. I'll start with Wikipedia, then buy books, then rent films on the subject for weeks until my appetite for it feels satiated. (This habit has actually helped me a great deal as an academic and a History teacher; I adopt obsessional interests suddenly and arbitrarily, but I often feel compelled to read up on these interests until I have a fairly well rounded picture of the state of knowledge about them.)

This time, my interest in the the Bible led me to Edmund Wilson's book of essays by about the Dead Sea scrolls. A great deal of the book is devoted to questions of textual transmission. I was fascinated by the question of the differences in wordings between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text, by the so called "Synoptic Problem" (the mystery of why three of the four Gospels of the New Testament are so similar - did they stem from a, now lost, common source?), and how the Dead Sea scrolls points to a new timeline of Jewish/Christian holy writing, in which Old Testament books, Apocrypha, and Gospels form a continuous, evolving tradition, rather than two discrete traditions separated by a gap of several centuries. When I read about these things, I actually saw in my head little men in caves huddled over parchment scrolls, copying texts by candlelight. I imagined them making little errors as they wrote, errors which then became preserved for all time, to fuel the scholarly mysteries of the future.

My interest in this history bubbled as something else important was happening: L. and I were setting up home in our new apartment. As teachers, we came home each weeknight too exhausted to do much work, so, after the major items of furniture were put in their places, the secondary tasks of putting up pictures and assigning storage places for linens and such had to wait for the weekends. One Saturday we spent cleaning, unpacking, and putting things up, and we decided to put on Jesus Christ Superstar. Though I now have a copy of the Brown Album on vinyl, and L. has the film soundtrack on CD (which she has almost never listened to, being also a fan of the original album musical), we decided it would be fun to forgo these and put on L.'s taped cassette of JCS: a ninety-minute TDK Maverick cassette ("high reliability" it says on the shell) taped by her in July 1978. We know this is when it was taped because this date is handwritten on the paper slip inside the tape box; the other side of that slip is colored with a brown crayon, apparently in imitation of the album cover, with the words "JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR" written in both pencil and pen, and a small cross drawn underneath.

Would this thirty-one year old cassette tape work? At first, we hesitated to put it in the deck. Besides the fact that the sound of old cassette tapes tends to decay, cassettes themselves seem to age poorly: the little reels develop friction and start to resist turning on the spindles, until the delicate ribbon of tape stretches or snaps. If we slipped this cassette into the deck and hit play, would this precious object from childhood be broken forever?

To our relief, and delight, when the tape began playing, the reels turned without resistance, and after four or five seconds, the opening rumble of the overture began, then the fuzz guitar playing the doom-laden opening notes (to the melody of "Good Caiaphas, the council waits for you..."). By the time it got to Murray Head's Judas singing "My mind is clearer now..." we got up and went back to our work, as the tape played happily.

But after about twenty minutes, something odd happened. After the Priests finished their "Jesus Must Die" song, the song "Hosanna," that opens side 2, sounded different. The voices rested more loudly in the mix and sang much more staccato than I remembered. When Caiaphas came in singing "Tell the rabble to be quiet, we anticipate a riot..." his voice had changed. Instead of the cello-voiced Caiaphas of the album (Paul Raven), this Caiaphas was more like a giant bullfrog. Plus, he had an American accent. By the time Jesus came in ("Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd...") and it was not the rich voice of Ian Gillan but the thin wiry voice of Ted Neeley, I knew what was going on. We were hearing side of the film soundtrack, not the album musical.

I told this to L., who was incredulous. How could that be? she asked. This tape was made directly from her vinyl copy of the album musical - "you know, the brown one with the two angels on it - I taped it myself!" she said. She added that she had never even owned a copy of the film soundtrack before someone gave her the CD of it, many years later. But I knew my JCS Brown Album, and I knew that thought we had just heard side 1 of the Brown Album, we were now hearing side 2 of the film soundtrack. To prove it, I stopped the cassette and put on side 2 of my vinyl copy of the Brown Album. Sure enough, my old familiar Caiaphas came in singing "Tell the rabble to be quiet..." followed by Ian Gillan singing "Why waste your breath..."

L. was horrified. Understandably. This cassette was a childhood artifact, and childhood artifacts are among the most intimate artifacts a person can have. To learn that it wasn't what she thought it was, that it was corrupted in this bizarre way, was a shock. And it wasn't only that the cassette was not what she thought it was. For years, this was the JCS that she listened to and memorized: the words, the sound of the instruments, the inflections of the voices. Suddenly, she was faced with the fact that this music that had formed such a prominent place in her life, had all along been a JCS with an inexplicable mix up. And how could she not have realized that from side one to side two the actors' voices had suddenly changed? Her eyes began to tear, and I felt all the closer to her, because such a revelation would frustrate and sadden me as well, but it would not, I imagine, sadden most other people.

But as we were feeling these feelings and attending to them, I couldn't control my urge to investigate. What was on the rest of the tape? I fast-forwarded to the end of side A, flipped it over and pressed play. After a few seconds began the picked guitar notes of "The Last Supper." But it was again the film soundtrack, not the album musical. I started formulating a picture in my mind of what could have happened during the making of this cassette, and announced to L. my prediction that side 4 would finally return to the album musical. Why? Double albums used to be pressed with sides 1 and 4 on one disc, and 2 and 3 on the other. This was done to accommodate record players with spindles that held multiple discs and automatically dropped them on the platters as they played. You could experience the modern luxury of listening to sides 1 and 2 of a double album without having to get up from your easy chair. Then you could get up and flip both discs over at the same time, put them on the spindle and once again sit passively for forty-odd minutes through sides 3 and 4. (Once these automatic spindles went out of fashion, double albums began to be pressed with sides 1 and 2 on the first disc and 3 and 4 on the other. And, of course, nowadays, who wants to sit still for forty minutes through anything at all?)

So I suspected that thirty-one years ago, there had not been one, but two JCS double albums, one of the musical and one of the film. Somehow the second disc of each one, containing sides 2 and 3, had been swapped. The resulting cassette was what historians of textual transmission would call an interpolation of two diverse sources.

I fast-forwarded the tape. Sure enough, side 4 began with Murray Head, the Judas of the original album musical, singing "Damned for All Time." So the theory was correct that the second disc was swapped. But the question remained, how did it happen? L. insisted that her family never owned the film soundtrack. I asked L. if she could have lent the record out to someone who then mixed up the discs. She had no memory of lending it out.

The next morning, L. called the one person in the world who could shed some light on the situation: her sister. She explained the whole story to her (it took some time), and asked if she had any idea if the family's JCS discs were ever switched. L.'s sister is three and a half years younger than she, and therefore was only seven when the tape was made. Not surprisingly, she could shed no light on the mystery, and seemed minimally interested in it anyway. The family's record album itself, of course, is long lost.

I, meanwhile, did some internet searching, hoping I might find testimonials of some kind of glitch in the record-pressing plant that might result in a double album having one disc each of two different recordings. (Such glitches are not unknown. An example is the Pink Floyd double album "A Nice Pair", which was meant to contain the band's first two albums, but included an opening track wrongly taken from a third album.) But I found no complaints on the internet of mixed JCS albums: so far as I know, there has never been a JCS double album issued with mixed discs from the album musical and the film.

So whenever we listen to JCS, or get the film on Netflix (which we recently have done), we continue to enjoy the music, the story, the characters, the conversations and the conflicts. But the mystery of the bizarre cassette recording remains, a private little mystery to be added to the much greater mysteries of the Synoptic Problem, the Dead Sea scrolls, the Septuagint and the Masoretic text.