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Albuquerque (New Mexico)

September 23, 1994

Jesus Christ Wherewithal

Deeper meanings behind the $62 million resurrection of the ancient rock opera

Story by Hank Stuever

There's this woman who follows the show from city to city, like some Superstar Deadhead, only you need to know that the cast and crew are a little spooked by her devotion, especially when she follows them to dinner at restaurants or shows up at the hotel with a camera and starts snapping away. Other times she insists she's been hired to join the production staff. "She's nuts", says the tour's publicist, who half expects the woman to show up at Popejoy Hall any minute now.

Then there's the reporter who broke down and cried when she met Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson backstage at "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Salt Lake City. It turns out her father died when she was a little girl and her mother took all the kids to see "Jesus Christ Superstar," the 1973 movie version starring Neeley as Jesus and Anderson as Judas, three times a day for several weeks.

"Three times a day, this show has baggage," Carl Anderson says, with awe. "The first thing, when she met us, she lost all professionalism and just hugged us. I say she was un-professional, but I don't mean it was a bad thing. She waited 20 years to meet us and thank us. I get that 10 times a day. At least. People come up to me and say 'Thank you' for something that happened 22 years ago."

We're sitting in a studio at KLSK-FM, the classic rock station, where Anderson and two other cast members are appearing on the morning show to promote "Superstar". Listeners are calling in to beg for tickets. The deejay says more people want "Superstar" tickets than, for example, the time the station gave away Crosby, Stills, and Nash tickets. One guy calls in to tell Anderson how he saw the touring production at Popejoy in 1972, a few days before he went to Vietnam. "Now I rent the movie for my family every Lent," the caller says. "It's become a family tradition."

"Thanks for calling, man, come see the show," Anderson says.

"We'll be there Thursday night," the man says.

"Come backstage and meet us, then. OK?" Anderson says.

There's more:  Consider the kooks, like the one-man protest movement who picketed the show every night in Phoenix. Or the member of the Historic Baptist Berea Church in Bloomfield who fired this angry missive to the management of Popejoy Hall: "We aren't at all interested in supporting a coven of faggots and lesbians who blaspheme the sinless Lord of Glory! Please remove our name from your mailing list."

Or all the people who come to the backstage door every night after curtain call, when Neeley takes his final bows in a robe so Clorox miracle white it's like he's not really from here:  Those piercing eyes framed by a sad, soft brow, the scraggly beard with a strand here and there of gray, the Texas twang that becomes a sonic scream in the garden of Gethsemane. In the pantheon of hypnotically tragic and cute blue-eyed movie Jesuses, Neeley still has it. The people come backstage and want to meet him, touch him, talk to him. They have problems, or questions, or tears, and he listens. Up close, he's small, diminutive, shy. Sometimes Ted Neeley will talk to them for hours, outside even, when the security guards have locked up the theater.

"These are the people," Carl Anderson notes, "who need to talk to Jesus. If you know what I mean."

"After all, I've tried for three years/ Seems like thirty; seems like thirty...."

It begins with the "brown album", so named for its plain, chocolate-colored jacket, the original Decca recording with Murray Head as Judas and Ian Gillan as Christ, written and produced in London by two freaks named Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and released in the states in 1970, eventually selling 2 1/2 million copies, a mere 18 months after Time magazine declared "God is Dead" on its cover. The brown album is the stuff of cellophane lamps and dorm rooms, sitting in a bean bag chair wearing padded Radio Shack headphones, when the stylus sets down scratchily on the vinyl, side one, side two, side three, side four: "My mind is clearer now...."

You can get it at any flea market, or you can have it on CD. There are a half-dozen versions: the London stage cast, the Broadway recording, the excerpted highlights, the movie version, the 20th anniversary CD. You can rent the movie at the video store, a searingly psychedelic hodgepodge filmed on the deserts of Israel, with Roman soldiers carrying machine guns, disciples in bell-bottoms and army tanks symbolizing temptation. You can hear it in strange places: "Superstar" cover songs by punk rock bands, or toned-down and hymnlike in certain churches, or "I Don't Know How to Love Him" piped in on waiting-room Muzak.

The rock opera, with much of the libretto lifted verbatim from gospel readings of Christ's final days, created a fashionable theology all its own. It is a gritty, depressing, argumentative passion play, which thrived in an age of rebellion. Wouldn't "Jesus Christ Superstar" be pass� by now, you find yourself thinking: This hippie thing, this piece of theater that never really was theater so much as a flashy rock concert, a sign of the times? You hear these guys are still out there, still singing those excruciating high notes and wonder, Jesus Christ Geritol?

Carl Anderson is 49.

Ted Neeley turned 51 this week.

Between them, they have died onstage - Anderson from the Judas noose, Neeley on the cross - a couple thousand times. They were young once, unknown singers/actors who got their break when they were cast in the Los Angeles stage production in 1972. They got screen tests for the movie, Anderson recalls, more as a professional courtesy than anything else. The movie had already been unofficially cast with bigger stars.

But they got the parts anyway. Before the L.A. production even opened, Neeley and Anderson were flown to Israel to shoot the film.

"We rehearsed for a stage production we never got to do," Anderson says. "When we started talking about doing the show now, I said that I would only do it with Ted."

A high-tech production was put together in late 1992. Its emphasis would be the singing and the music. The sets and choreography would be understated; the nostalgia value - and the Andrew Lloyd Webber namesake - would be the hook.

"We planned to be on the road a few months," Anderson says. "We just had no idea..."

Now it has been 21 months, with five months to go after Albuquerque. They have made 102 stops, returning to some cities two and three times.

Playing several nights at each stop in 2,000- to 5,000-seat auditoriums, this "Jesus Christ Superstar" has earned $62 million to date, according to industry trades. That puts it, for comparison, a mere notch below Guns n' Roses and Janet Jackson on the list of highest-grossing concert tours last year.

So something is still there.

"It still gets people to stop and think about it all," Anderson says.

He is sitting in the front seat of my car (the limousine is late picking him up from KLSK, and show-business people detest waiting for courtesy) and we are talking about God. For 49, Anderson has the hyper energy of a teen-ager. He sings spontaneously, drums on the dashboard, interrupts himself to make a call on his pocket phone.

Since "Jesus Christ Superstar", the movie, was released, Anderson has had the most visible career. He has recorded eight R&B albums, (a new one, "Heavy Weather, Sunlight Again", is just out from GRP Records) and had a No. 1 ballad, "Friends and Lovers", in 1986. Neeley has written and performed in various theater productions, and eventually moved back home to Houston. It is likely the two will always be Judas and Jesus, forever typecast in the Greatest Story Ever Told, whether on stage or in cultural consciousness.

That's OK with Anderson: "There was a time, when I was younger and playing Judas, that I considered it a stepping stone to becoming a big star. I never took time to enjoy it back then. Now it's a part of me. If I go down as the guy who was Judas...OK, then. That's fine."

He belongs to a church in L.A. called Science of Mind. It's full of people in the Industry, he says, who first congregated in hotel ballrooms and later built a church of their own. They believe in God, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, among others. They emphasize the power of positive thinking. "The way it worked, see, God sent Jesus, but there were no airplanes. So Jesus couldn't fly to Japan. That's why God put people all over the world to tell people what was happening..."

The publicist, Ann Rippey, is riding in the back seat of the car. She worries aloud that Anderson may have been too emphatic on the air back at KLSK, when asked about the handful of fundamentalist Christian groups who still protest "Superstar" as heretical. Anderson launched into a brief tirade about how, "If Jesus were alive today, he would not even be a Christian."

She worries about damage control. Anderson worries about ignorance. "I'll bet you a dime to a doughnut that the people who complain about the piece have never even seen it," he says.

"If you knew all that I knew/ My poor Jerusalem/ You'd see the truth, but you close your eyes/ But you close your eyes...."

From a letter dated Sept. 1 and addressed to Paul Suozzi, Popejoy Hall's marketing director, from Larry D. Cox, pastor, East Mountain Assembly of God in Edgewood:

"From the stand point of our congregation, ('Jesus Christ Superstar') is an attack upon the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith and the basis for our society....We will be in opposition by every means possible, from announcements in our congregation, and through our community by word of mouth and other means....Your reconsideration of this event is highly advisable and requested with the utmost regard. Thank you for your help. In His Service...."

"Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ/ Who are you, what have you sacrificed?/ Jesus Christ, Superstar/ Do you think you're what they say you are?"

The union guys have spent all day unloading the semi-trailers and assembling the black metal "Superstar" set. The band has run through its sound checks. The cast members have checked their microphones.

Carl Anderson is in his dressing room backstage, where he has unloaded his wardrobe locker and set out pictures of his wife and teen-age son. He has lighted a ceramic candle and a bowl of patchouli. He has lined his many bottles of herbs and vitamins along the makeup table. He has a teapot ready to warm his herbal tea. He puts several drops of high-powered Chinese ginseng under his tongue. His Sony boombox plays jazz. He begins singing along to the music and his powerful voice shakes the fixtures.

The cast and crew mingle about the cluttered green room, hugging each other and jumping up and down, a family that prays together stays together, checking sign-up sheets for hotel accommodations in Nashville and Washington, D.C., the tour's next two stops.

Jesus is not here yet.

Tonight - opening night - is his 51st birthday. He is coming down with bronchitis. The cast says Ted Neeley never takes a day off. The publicity people wonder if an announcement should be made to tonight's audience that Mr. Neeley is feeling under the weather so the audience will be forgivingly aware if he misses a note or two.

Carl Anderson frowns at the suggestion. "They'll never know. Ted will go out there and do it and they'll never know."

In Neeley's darkened dressing room, now just 25 minutes to curtain, his three Jesus tunics hang sublimely on a rack. A worn pair of leather sandals sit on the tile floor below. The cast strung Happy Birthday crepe paper across the room. They left him cards and presents: a grocery store Jesus candle. The publicist has fetched Neeley's requisite tequila for the evening. Carl Anderson bought him two bottles of expensive wine, a picnic basket, a piece of Santa Clara pueblo pottery and tickets to the Eagles concert in Nashville next week, begging him to take a night off, with a note satirizing a line from the show:

"On Wednesday night/ In Nashville/ I don't wanna see your ass/ In Jerusalem."

Anderson, being interviewed by a television reporter, is asked if he and Neeley can play these parts forever. Out in the house, the band is warming up with "Superstar", Judas's signature number.

"No, I can't," he says. A tear falls down his cheek and he weeps. He says he would like to be considered for a Broadway revival of the show, if that ever happens. "Every night I can't wait to go out there and do it. That's my song....I could listen to it forever, but I can't do it forever."

Neeley shows up at 8, with 15 minutes to spare, as calm and serene as Anderson is bouncing off the walls. He takes off his wire-rim glasses and begins to put on his mesh garments and tunic. He puts flesh-colored bandages over his fingers to hide his rings. He spritzes his long Jesus hair with a spray. Anderson is dying to show Neeley the bathroom, where cast members have wrapped the Happy Birthday crepe paper around the toilet paper.

Neeley laughs and holds out his hands toward the sight gag, then clasps his hands together, and smiles that smile, a gesture that reminds me of what, a priest, the pope on the balcony? The Dalai Lama? Oh no, of course: Jesus in "Jesus Christ Superstar".

Carl and Ted, Judas and Jesus. Twenty-two years. A show, and something more. When the tour is over, they'll call each other up a couple of times a year. They've stayed friends.

"I always hear from Ted when the Redskins play the Cowboys," Anderson says. "The Redskins are my team. And Ted is crazy about the Cowboys."

The two men share a private moment together before the lights go down. Neeley always whispers a one-word cue to Anderson before they go on. It is their word for the show.

The word tonight is "birth".

And two hours later - after the lights and sound and spectacle of another "Superstar", after a standing ovation, and a birthday cake for Neeley at the curtain call, with the audience singing "Happy birthday, dear Jesus, happy birthday to you" - the cast and crew steal away to the Monte Vista Fire Station for a private party. Jesus doesn't meet the people tonight. He must rest his voice.

Some of the people mill about in the parking lot for awhile anyway, not unlike church members after a particularly rousing service. There is a palatable level of nostalgia in their conversations, scratchy LPs and embraceable beliefs. These are the people who don't turn out for theater so much. They seem to be here for other reasons. After so many years, there still is, to quote the show, talk of God.