Released in America by Decca as a handsomely decorated double-LP set complete with illustrated libretto, Jesus Christ Superstar seemed to pick up where the Who's Tommy (also a Decca release) and Hair had left off, and audiences from across the age and cultural spectrum responded. What's more, the whole album sounded like the real article as far as its rock music credibility was concerned - it was played good and hard for a studio creation. Arnold, and members of Joe Cocker's Grease Band, not to mention Murray Head, Ian Gillan, and Yvonne Elliman in key singing roles), and managed to pull the whole production together into a more than coherent whole that contained a pair of hit singles (the title track and "I Don't Know How to Love Him") to help drive AM radio exposure. Serving as their own producers, the two creators got together more than 60 top-flight singers and musicians (including Chris Spedding, John Gustafson, Mike Vickers, P.P. There was at the time an American-spawned hit theater piece called Hair that utilized elements of rock music, but it wasn't as unified a work as Webber and Rice's creation, and it was less built on rock music than on pop music that referred to rock Webber and Rice's work presented a far sharper, bolder musical edge and pushed it much further and harder than Hair ever did. If its content seemed daring (and perhaps downright sacrilegious), the work, a "sung-through" musical echoing operatic and oratorio traditions, was structurally perfect for an album just as remarkable as its subject matter was the fact that its musical language was full-blown rock music. Jesus Christ Superstar had been conceived as a stage work, but lacking the funds to get it produced, the two collaborators instead decided to use an album as the vehicle for introducing the piece, a fairly radical rock/theater hybrid about the final days in the life of Jesus as seen from the point of view of Judas. It was all devised by then 21-year-old composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and 25-year-old lyricist Tim Rice. Jesus Christ Superstar started life as a most improbable concept album from an equally unlikely label, Decca Records, which had not, until then, been widely known for groundbreaking musical efforts.
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