Tag: Murray Head

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #64

Murray Head or Carl Anderson – Superstar

Growing up Roman Catholic, the Easter season was defined by food. Ash Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent and the time of deprivation (and, when I was younger, a good reason to get out of washing my face for a day or two), but it was immediately preceded by the pancakes of Shrove Tuesday. The season would end with Easter Sunday, and a bounty of chocolate and other sweet delights. Between these two high points, the lows of Lent forced you to make the significant sacrifice of denying yourself for a time certain things you loved to eat, such as pickled herring, blood pudding or head cheese. It was challenging, but I can say with absolute certainty that I never broke my Lenten vow to not eat any of these treats.

It was also marked by going to church a few extra times. My mother was pretty diligent about getting herself and her offspring to Sunday services most weeks, and there were even occasional sightings of my father at such times. Easter upped the tally, with Ash Wednesday and Good Friday added, and throughout Lent we got to hear in even more detail than usual about how Jesus died for our sins so we’d better get our acts together, and soon.

What I remember in particular about the services around Easter is the priest singing. The churches we attended often had a choir, so the man at the pulpit did not typically get involved with the musical portions of the show. At Easter, however, during the portion of the mass that covered the Passion (with Jesus’ words in red type in our little missals), the priest would sing intermittently, and this may have been my favourite part of the show. I have never been a fan of liturgical music – too turgid, utterly lacking in subtlety, and often performed by people whose ability does not come close to matching their faith – but something about listening to a priest give it that old college try because the Pope said he had to warmed my snotty little heart. The singing was usually, umm, uninspiring, but you had to respect the effort.

It might’ve been simpler if they had just played the entirety of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” for us, but it had been greeted on its arrival in the early 1970s with protests by both Christian and Jewish groups, a fairly impressive accomplishment on its own, and the Church was not of a mind to encourage us to pay it much attention. I never listened to the entire album until sometime in the last decade, though I did watch the movie late one night on our local CTV station when I was in high school. It was probably during Easter that it aired, though “Ben Hur” (a man who was not unfamiliar with Jesus) was always the movie that marked the season for me. As for religious adjacent music, my go-to was the same composers’ “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”, which I was introduced to by my junior high school music teacher and which still sounds pretty good today.

My wife, however, loves “Jesus Christ Superstar”. She has seen it on stage, watched the movie at least five times, and listened to the soundtrack many more times than that. Our local repertory movie theatre is hosting a sing-along showing this Easter Sunday, and she would fit right in with that crowd. I would probably recognize – but not know well enough to fully participate – maybe five of the tracks. On the other hand, I put “Joseph . . .” (which I had once owned on vinyl) on this weekend for the first time in at least 20 years and it instantly came back to me.

But even casual appreciators of the entire opus know “Superstar”. Originally sung by Murray Head (the casts of the earliest stage productions and the 1973 film were loaded with future pop hitmakers – Yvonne Elliman, Paul Nicholas, Paul Jabara, Carl Anderson – but Head got there first), it starts with a booming orchestral flourish, stirring up your blood, then detours to become a funk rock jam. I like Anderson’s version from the film over Head’s: it’s a lot less yelly to my ears, more subtle and consistent with the music. But it was Murray who made the charts.

Judas – who has recently taken his own life after betraying Jesus (yet seems to be coming down from heaven in the film) – questions his former friend and leader about his choices and how they lead him to his current unfortunate circumstances (that is, incredible pain as he dies on a cross). The lyrics have a humour that might be unexpected in view of the subject matter and for fans of later overwrought works from Webber, with Judas wondering why Jesus chose to show up at a time when there was no “mass communication” or asking if the stories about Mohammed’s miracles are just hype. For such weighty material, it’s an awfully peppy song: I think you’d be hard pressed (fans of Christian rock may dispute this) to find another song that makes the Crucifixion seem like a good ole time. And it does a great job of restoring Judas’ humanity after almost two millennia of being painted primarily as a villain, when any honest consideration of Scripture can only lead to the conclusion that he was playing a part that had been foreordained and without which there could be no salvation for man. If you believe all that stuff.

Whether you consider the Bible to be absolute truth, total malarkey or a mishmash of fact and fiction, its staying power – like all the classic documents of faith – is impressive. That doesn’t mean it is above reinterpretation: Christians may claim otherwise, but it is in the end a book written by frail humans, whether they were inspired by a higher power or not. “Jesus Christ Superstar”, a controversial work in its time, seems not to bother people much anymore. We certainly haven’t become more tolerant of differences in others, and a less cynical person might say it’s thanks to the power of music to bring people together. Whatever your faith, or lack thereof, we can all agree that when a song rocks, it rocks, and “Superstar” does indeed rock. For roughly four minutes, we can focus on that, and put the rest aside.

Classic Songs of My Youth Revisited #51

Murray Head – One Night in Bangkok

What do you do after selling a few hundred million records? Well, if you’re the guys in ABBA, you write a musical about chess. (Sure you do.) Actually, they did.

So, a confession here: I have never liked ABBA. By that I mean that I don’t think I had ever, with intention, played one of their songs. I would let them play on when they came on the radio, or as part of a compilation, or on a playlist. I have probably even spontaneously sung along, and I’m certain I danced to some of them. But I had never once said to myself, or to anyone else, “You know what would sound great right now? How about a little ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’?” They never created music that appealed to me. It’s okay: they did just fine without my support.

After the band split up in 1982, the two female members, Agnatha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad (under the name Frida), had minor pop hits – “Can’t Shake Loose” and “I Know There’s Something Going On”, respectively – that I sort of liked, or at least wasn’t super irritated by, possibly because they didn’t really sound like ABBA. Meanwhile, the male band members, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, moved on to, among other things, “Chess”, on which they teamed up with Tim Rice, who’d made his name with Andrew Lloyd Webber on such musicals as “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “Evita” and, my favourite from the duo (thanks to my amazing junior high school music teacher, Miss Beaupre), “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”. Before mounting an expensive stage production, as both a fundraising device and sort of proof of concept, the decision was made to release an album of the songs that would likely be in the show. And to sing one of the lead roles, the call went out to Murray Head.

This was not new to Head: he’d been part of a similar approach with “Jesus Christ Superstar”, on which he sang the part of Judas Iscariot. For “Chess”, he was cast as the Bobby Fischer-esque American grandmaster. Early in the second act, the former champion, who lost his world title in act one, takes in the nightlife of the next host city as a journalist. And he celebrates this in “One Night in Bangkok”.

I can’t really say Head sings “One Night in Bangkok”, nor do I want to equate it with talk singing, because what he is doing here is really talking musically. (Wikipedia calls it a rap, and whoever wrote that should have their editing privileges revoked.) It isn’t because Head couldn’t sing: just check out “Superstar” for solid evidence to the contrary. So this was an artistic choice, and it absolutely works, giving a sardonic creepiness to the performance. Rice delivers some great lines – I would give even money that I could sing the whole thing from start to finish, and that’s because zingers like “the queens we use would not excite you” are lodged in my brain. It’s a Thai pop culture journey, with nods to “The King and I”, Buddhism, martial arts and ladyboys. Over it all stands Head, commenting on the corrupt and disreputable setting for “the ultimate test of cerebral fitness”. All of this is to an upbeat tempo – this was a top ten dance hit – that has the synth sheen that was found on 95% (my non-authoritative and unverified guess) of the pop music released in that era. And the video is pretty slick, too: Head has the kind of cool that doesn’t look ridiculous in a white suit.

So, yes, I still love this song, and can’t see that changing anytime soon. But this brings me back to its co-writers and ABBA: why didn’t I care for them? Outside of the music, I was definitely irritated by the suggestion that they were even more successful commercially than my beloved Beatles. But I also never gave them a serious listen either.

So I checked out one of their albums, 1976’s “Arrival”, which is the only one in Acclaimed Music’s top 3000, at #852 (though four singles off the album are also ranked in the top 10,000 songs). A few of the unfamiliar tunes were slick and didn’t really distinguish themselves in any way. But there was much to like here. I caught myself bumping my hip to “Dancing Queen”, some sort of muscle memory from my barely pubescent earlier self let loose on a sweaty junior high school gym turned Friday night dance floor. And now that I’ve really listened to it, “Knowing Me, Knowing You” is pretty cutthroat when it comes to what happens at the end of a relationship, and damned heartbreaking. “Dum Dum Diddle” is silly fun, and “Money Money Money” shows that Andersson and Ulvaeus were writing stage-worthy songs long before “Chess”. The title track is an instrumental save for some aggressive humming, and it had me imagining a “Braveheart”-esque race across an open field to battle. And “Happy Hawaii” ends the record with a fun tune that wouldn’t have been completely out of place on a pre-“Pet Sounds” Beach Boys record (and also feels like a bit of counterpoint to First Class’ 1974 hit “Beach Baby”).

So, my final conclusion is that I should maybe listen to more ABBA. And maybe more Murray Head, too. (“Superstar” is pretty awesome.) The lesson I take away from this is that I need to keep an open mind. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I think I need to go listen to “Knowing Me, Knowing You”.