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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is Get On to My Cloud, episode 24.

[0:16] Tim Rice: I'm recording this podcast in October 2020, exactly 50 years after the studio album of Jesus Christ Superstar was released. That was the record that launched the careers of Andrew Lloyd Webber and me. So I thought this was a good moment to thank many of the people who contributed to his success, many of whom I'm still in touch with half a century on.

[0:37] Tim Rice: At this point, I should mention that I have already thanked them personally at various stages in the past five decades, but further and continuing acknowledgement of their outstanding inputs to JCS cannot be overstated. In the course of these podcasts, which have now staggered to episode 24, I played several tracks sung by this wonderful original cast, notably Murray Head, Judas, Yvonne Ellerman, Mary Magdalene, and Barry Den and Pontius Pilot. But there were many others who made superb contributions to the record's success.

[1:07] Tim Rice: A company of terrific contemporary rock vocalists supported by one of rock music's most accomplished and respected bands, Joe Cocker's Grease Band. Here's one of the great rock vocalists singing the role of Simon the Zealot, who attempts to turn Jesus' cause into a political revolution, Johnny Gustafsson.

[2:25] ♪ Musical number: "Simon Zealotes" — performed by Johnny Gustafsson ♪

[4:32] Tim Rice: You can hear the late Johnny Gustafsson belting out the first ever version of Simon Zealotes. The backing vocals on this track and others on the LP, long player for younger listeners, were a pretty hot bunch in their own right, including PP Arnold, Madeline Bell, Leslie Duncan, Sue and Sonny, and Kay Garner, plus the Trinidad Singers, a London-based choir led by Horace James.

[5:04] Tim Rice: Johnny Gustafsson was an original member of Liverpool's legendary Big Three beat group, and later in the Mersey Beats, who had several chart hits in the mid-60s, including the top ten entry, I think of you. He subsequently played bass with a variety of heavy outfits, including Atomic Rooster, Quator Mass, and a four-year stretch with Roxy Music. He also played with Ian Gillen's band. He came to us, recommended by the Grease Band. The Grease Band seemed to know everybody in the early 70s rock scene. Without them, I shudder to think where our less than hip contacts might have got us.

[5:39] Tim Rice: They in turn had been suggested by Murray Head, who I'd met way back in 1966 when I was a management trainee, i.e. office boy, at EMI Records. I got to know Murray and his band, the Blue Monks well in the following years, and when we got the green light from MCA Records to record one song from our insane new project Jesus Christ Superstar, Murray and the Grease Band were the perfect fit.

[6:03] Tim Rice: It was a success of that single, Superstar, Almost Everywhere but the UK, that persuaded MCA to commission the recording of the entire work on a double LP. Fortunately for us, the Grease Band were not required by Joe Cocker to hit the road with him in the first part of 1970, so they signed up for the full Monty with us. The Grease Band consisted of Bruce Rowland, drums and percussion, Alan Spenner, bass, and Henry McCulloch and Neil Hubbard, guitars, augmented on our album by non-greasers, Peter Robinson, piano and keyboards, and a former member of Murray Head's old band, the Blue Monks, Chris Mercer, on sax.

[6:43] Tim Rice: Their performance was consistently scintillating, intense and exciting. Operating in a permanent haze of marijuana from dawn to dusk, their attitude to the project changed from friendly tolerance to genuine enthusiasm, with Bruce in particular taking a great interest in the overall master plan and making many invaluable arrangements suggestions. They'd probably never worked with two such determinedly straight producers before, and although we politely rejected all their offers to partake of their inexhaustible supply of dope, I was certainly fascinated by their tales of life on the road they'd played at Woodstock, and of the rock and roll lifestyle that we had never sampled firsthand.

[7:25] Tim Rice: I'm sure the Grease Band could never really understand how we could be making such a hip record without any of the correct cultural, i.e. drug, qualifications. Maybe if we had turned on, the record would have sold 14 million in its first year rather than a mere seven. Sad to say, Bruce, Alan, and Henry are no longer with us. Henry is perhaps best remembered for his stint in Paul McCartney's Wings, and he was also a member of Spooky Tooth. Bruce was drummer with Fairport Convention for a while. All three were top-flight session players in constant recording demand once the Grease Band were no longer a viable combo.

[8:00] Tim Rice: Neil Hubbard, still very active, has performed with a string of celebrated outfits, including Juicy Lucy, Bluesology, BB King, Kokomo, and Roxy Music. Peter Robinson, keyboard wizard, led his own band Quatamas, and has arranged, produced, and written countless film scores and albums. Chris Mercer was also a member of Juicy Lucy, and we turned to him six years after Superstar to play on Evita on I'd Be Surprisingly Good For You, when his solo then matched his dynamic work on Damned for All Time on Jesus Christ Superstar.

[8:34] Tim Rice: We were lucky to work with them when they were a tight fighting unit, and their superb musicianship meant that Superstar, the original album, is a bona fide rock album. Nonetheless, it never makes any of the lists of the all-time best rock albums, not even the 500 best, or no doubt the thousand best. Am I bitter and twisted about this? You might say that, but I could not possibly comment.

[8:57] Tim Rice: One key performer on the album, not from the Murray Head stable was Mike d'Abo. Mike's long been one of my closest friends, not least because he's a fine cricketer. Perhaps, like many of us, slightly past his sporting peak, but still capable of flighting a ball with skill and guile. In 1970, he'd been signed by MCA as a solo artist, performer, and songwriter, having recently left Manfred Mann, where he sang lead on many of their biggest hits, notably Mighty Quinn. So he was on the spot and on our label.

[9:28] Tim Rice: We jumped at the chance to audition him for the one off musical moment of King Herod, which we decided to make a song that was both sinister and comic. Or rather, Mike was auditioning us. Would he like the song? He did, and delivered a majestic performance.

[9:52] ♪ Musical number: "King Herod's Song" — performed by Mike d'Abo ♪

[12:37] Tim Rice: Get out, you king of the Jews! Get out of my life! At the end of King Herod's song, Mike adlibbed "Get Out of My Life," which was a perfect conclusion to the vicious scene. A few months later, Mike's spur-of-the-moment phrase was singled out as the best line of the entire work by an American Christian reviewer. It was the very essence of the entire show. I was highly praised for pointing out that we are all determined to push Christ out of our lives. Only I hadn't. Mike d'Abo had. The couplet that always got the big laugh was, of course, "Prove to Me That You're No Fool, Walk Across My Swimming Pool," and has even found its way into several books of 20th century quotations. I always regret not being able to come up with an equally good couplet for the final verse, since "Feed my household with this bread, you can do it on your head," is rather an anticlimax, not to mention a weak reuse of a breadhead rhyme already used earlier in Jesus Christ Superstar.

In stage productions, King Herod's song is sometimes the only scene that directors get wrong. It's very often played to camp and goes way over the top, so the sinister aspect of the number gets lost. Recently, in New York, there was a big new production of Superstar for television, starring John Legend as Jesus. Herod was played by Alice Cooper, and he, for my money, played the role perfectly, with humor, menace, and arrogance. Scantily clad girls and boys dancing around a debauched Herod doesn't really work. Although I must admit, most audiences seem to be happy with total lack of subtlety.

[14:15] Tim Rice: I've spoken before on Get Onto My Cloud about Yvonne Ellerman and Barry Denon, and of course Murray. But the title role is, to put it mildly, crucial. At the beginning of 1970, with a project looking like a runner, sessions being booked, we still had no idea who was going to sing the role of Jesus. MCA had no one on their books who would fit the role. The year before, there'd been a completely ludicrous story without a scintilla of truth that John Lennon had been approached, was considering the offer, but would like Yoko to play Mary Magdalene. Fortunately, the story went away again, but our lack of a Jesus didn't. However, the odd mention in the press that these two unknown guys were working on a musical about Jesus, the title role not yet cast, attracted a bit of attention, and Tony Edwards, a music entrepreneur who was just about to relaunch Deep Purple with a new lineup, including former episode six singer Ian Gillan, got in touch.

Tony came to see Andrew and me with tapes of one of his clients, whose voice was much closer to that of Andy Williams, rather than to the kind of wild vocal gymnastics we were after. Once Tony realized this was a rock score rather than a Broadway one, he returned smartly, with a tape of Deep Purple's forthcoming "Child in Time." We hadn't heard Ian Gillan's voice before, but it only took a few seconds for us to realize that he was right up our alley, just as Tony Edwards had very quickly realized, probably more than we did, that Superstar was a project with enormous potential. Ian thus got the part of Jesus and a royalty. He deserved every penny.

[16:21] ♪ Musical number: "Gethsemane" — performed by Ian Gillan ♪

[21:25] Tim Rice: Ian Gillan, with what remains for me the defining version of "Gethsemane" on record. He never performed it on stage, primarily because ever since recording it, he's been in huge continuous demand with various incarnations of Deep Purple and the Ian Gillan band. Deep Purple broke really big with their album Deep Purple in Rock, the first to feature Ian as vocalist and Roger Glover as bassist in the summer of 1970, just a few weeks before our Superstar album was released. So many people were vital elements in the recording and ultimate success of our 1970 album, including Brown Brawley and his team at MCA UK, and many of the staff at Olympic Studios in Sunny Barnes. It was a pretty good summer.

There were plenty of musicians and singers who did their stuff on one track or another, including such heavyweights as Chris Spedding, Mick Weaver, Carl Jenkins, Victor Brox, Brian Keith of Plastic Penny, and Paul Davis of Gracious. But one bloke deserves special mention. Our engineer-in-chief, Alan O'Duffy, a tall, then-bearded, softly spoken Irishman whose commitment was total beyond the call of duty. We were working with what then seemed state-of-the-art technology. We proudly and erroneously asserted on the sleeve that we'd used 16-track tape, although we actually used a 16-track recording machine. Tape itself does not have pre-assigned tracking. And Alan's mastery of every knob, plug, and fader was crucial.

He also had considerable musical know-how and a fascination with the angle my version of the story was taking. We discussed words and music with him as much as we talked about the nitty-gritty of recording technicalities.

[23:04] Tim Rice: The album did extraordinarily well around the world, notably in the United States, where it was the biggest selling album of 1971, just edging out Carol King's Tapestry. Her album stuffed us in the Grammys, however. In many ways, despite many magnificent theatrical stagings of the work, the album still remains the definitive interpretation for me. It retains its driving energy, its melodic strength, and the power of the performance after half a century, and I dare say, totally immodestly, the people will still be listening to it long after we've gone. My grandchildren will anyway. As a counterpoint to that arrogance, I would like to finish with the capsule review by a chap named Robert Christgau, who is considered a doyen of rock reviewers.

Despite having a name that includes that of our title character, Mr. Christgau, or maybe Christgar, was not impressed, and I'm glad that I did not notice this review at the time. Jesus Christ Superstar, Decca, 1970. Outsiders since Pat Boone have had the dumb idea that rock and roll means projecting the kind of sham intensity that the worst kind of opera lover is a sucker for. And here's more rock musical is too kind. Tommy, in which real rock and rollers pursued a grandiose dramatic concept, was risky enough, but set semi-classical, twice removed melodies amid received, over-rehearsed rock instrumentation and all the verb and spontaneous power which is the music's birthright, gets crucified. C minus. Thanks, Bob.

[24:50] Tim Rice: That was Get Onto My Cloud, episode twenty-four, written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Holmes.