With some liturgical precision, YouTube pushed my way the following video featuring musician Murray Head, hosted by David Frost on November 15, 1969.1 Head had taken the role of Judas Iscariot on the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who already had gotten their pop cantata-turned-musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat under their belt. On Frost’s show Head saunters in sporting a svelte swimmer’s physique not quite concealed beneath a sheer chiffon chemise. There’s an unsettling tension between surface and substance in this presentation: muted tones in living color, crosses replaced by jagged Y’s forming an ebony crown of thorns.
In Superstar, Judas famously takes lead billing over Jesus (in order of appearance) in a retelling of the Passion, casting Christ as man and superman. In the opera Judas begins and ends—here, beyond the grave—as the conscience of the incautious up-and-comer Jesus.
Sometime after the release of the concept album in 1970, the pastor of our church, Bruce MacKenzie, suggested that our youth group host a listening session with the youth of a… well… rival church that in fact had recruited at least one soul from our number. I recall such a recruit explaining to me in our high school gym that Bruce wasn’t a Christian but rather a [forgotten adjective; secular?] humanist. That provides a clue as to the reception the rock opera would enjoy by the youth of this mainstream-denomination church that had become born again.
Apart from Superstar I didn’t know Murray Head, having forgotten he’d played the love interest in the next year’s film Sunday Bloody Sunday. I knew the hit “One Night in Bangkok” but didn’t know it was Head who sang—or rather rapped—it, working once again with Rice as well as the male half of ABBA on the 1984 concept album for their musical Chess from which the song is taken.
Head is the cover star of the Smiths’ 1987 single “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” in a still from his first film The Family Way. His filmography consists of fifty titles, including appearances in over seventy television episodes. Having attended the French Lycée in South Kensington as a child, Head has been able to use his language skills in several francophone films as well as on his own albums. He continues to perform live, with a 2025/2026 tour beginning next month.
The Record
I bought the original U.S. pressing of Jesus Christ Superstar, a double album, in a gatefold sleeve issued by Decca.2 It includes a 12″ x 6″ libretto dated October 1970. The vinyl record themselves appear to be a type of RCA’s Dynaflex, described as “so thin and flexible they could actually be bent nearly in half,” as demonstrated above.3 The LP’s four sides were sequenced for stacking on a “record changer,” i.e., 1/4, 2/3 rather than 1/2, 3/4.
The Reception
The New York Times’s Don Heckman panned the album, saying that the rock opera genre already was geriatric. Superstar, he wrote, was a pastiche of what was in the air, from Bach to Brubeck, from Stockhausen to (Gilbert and) Sullivan. The opera “employs rock as style and coloration […] rather than content.” As rock it’s schlock, and as modern opera, “[t]he comparison is pretty devastating […].”4
Two years ago, Ted Neeley, who portrayed Jesus in both the Broadway and film versions, reminisced about nightly protests that were held outside the theater. The production company warned the players against engaging protesters, but Neeley, a Christian who was delighted by the show’s spirituality, insisted on chatting with them. Finding that they hadn’t actually seen what they opposed, he invited them in as his guests and to meet him afterwards in the lobby. “They would go, ‘We love your show. It’s incredible. We’re gonna come back and bring our families,’” Neeley told CBC Radio.
Jesus Christ Scripture Star
Superstar was one tessera in the mosaic of my religious and musical education. Earlier, on a youth retreat, I was corrected in a bible study when I complained that Jesus was always telling people that they’d go to hell if they didn’t believe in him, with the pastor’s sons and daughter audibly laughing at my ignorance. Bruce had brought along a stack of bibles and passed them around only for us to find that many if not all were different translations with differing renderings of passages we nearly knew by heart. This was in the era of Good News for Modern Man, which had been published in 1966, and of course I was aware of that “New Testament in Today’s English Version,” but I didn’t know that, over the ages, dozens of translations had been issued in the English language.5 Thirty years later Bruce introduced me to John Dominic Crossan’s work on the historical Jesus, and by association the Jesus Seminar’s translation, which ranked the probability of Jesus’s utterances, and which was excoriated as being flawed at best.
A couple of days ago, biblical scholar Dan McClellan , whose motto is Data Over Dogma, posted an answer to the question, “What’s the best translation of the Bible?”
The LP label and libretto for Jesus Christ Superstar actually point to a single passage from scripture. It’s the final track on the album and follows “The Crucifixion” in which Jesus’s last words, pulled from several gospels, are spoken atop a Stockhausen-ian and Ligeti-an abstraction that critic Heckman had panned. “John Nineteen Forty-One” is a brief, lilting, string-heavy orchestral piece bidding one to consult the Good Book.
41 Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid.
This verse (from the New Revised Standard Updated Edition praised by McClellan) doesn’t even afford Jesus burial, let alone resurrection.