�There�s so much shit in Jerusalem, you�re bound to step in some of it� -an ancient albino

The first thing Tom O�Horgan did when he got the cast of the Broadway production of �Jesus Christ Superstar� together in the rehearsal studio was have Jeff Fenholt, a, would you believe, college singing major?? strip down to his Fruit of the Loom and smear avocado honey all over him. Then he had the other players, refugees all from an entity known as �the cast of �Hair�� (a long long time ago, 1968 I believe it was, this friend of mine John Prescott was the p.r. man for Michael Butler and his job was to send �the cast of �Hair�� to press parties so the columnists could all report the next day, �And the cast of �Hair� was there sampling the delights of� whatever; but anyway:), get down on their paws, blindfolded, and surround Fenholt and lick the honey off him. For as it was written, there came a blind man unto Jesus, a Galilean, who knelt before him and said, �Restore my sight, if thou art truly the Son of Man,� and Jesus answered, saying, �Lick mah decals off, bay-ay-buh!� And the Galilean arose and licked His decals off and the heavens opened before his eyes and there appeared before him in a ring of fire, a certified check drawn to his order on the account of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers in the amount of $4.8 million dollars and he cried out, saying, �Now that�s what I call total theater!�

�What does rock music have in common with ka-ka?� I asked myself, sitting there in the orchestra of the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York City in the midst of 1,580 matinee mommies watching a bunch of clumsy hippies in New Testament Dr. Dentons singing into hand-held ropes. I was, I reflected, the only human present who had not arrived in a chartered bus.

Reminded me of the last time I'd been the only human present who had not arrived in a chartered bus. We had driven to Spearfish, South Dakota to see the Black Hills Passion Play featuring �Josef Meier, Internationally Renowned Christus Player.� Now you�d think every once in a while in a play about The Greatest Story Ever Told you could get a rise out of the audience, at least when they hammered the nails into Josef Meier, Internationally Renowned Christus Player, right? But the only time there was a noticeable stir in the crowd was when a camel appeared stage right, led by a young Spearfishian in a burnoose, badoomped stage left and, precisely at stage center, deposited a pyramidal load of camel ka-ka. It was, believe me, an epiphanous moment.

I fantasized, now various Townspeople of Jerusalem filter on stage and they all amble across the stage, which of course is a Full City Block Long, for the benefit of busloads full of bozos who�ve never even seen a city, let alone a city block, and they all either step in the pile of ka-ka or they scrupulously avoid stepping in the pile of ka-ka — Roman tourists walkin� by lifting their togas, tsking �Why can�t those Mithra-damned kikes on the Sanhedrin put up some �CURB YOUR CAMEL� signs?� and all of a sudden Josef Meier, Internationally Renowned Christus Player trucks in from the wings, bugaloos down Broadway, hmmm, what have we here, a pile of camel ka-ka? And as the crowd looks on in wonder and disbelief, Joseph Meier, Internationally Renowned Christus Player determinedly walks toward it, yea, verily, right on it, and past!

I mean, if he could walk on the water, right?

Look at it this way. The byways of the ancient world must have been awash with manure gutter to gutter. Now comes this dude, some say He is the Son of God, and people rushing up to Him all the time getting down on their hands and knees looking to kiss the hem of His garment. Well, you don�t think do ya, that every time someone kissed it he got a mouthful of camel s,hit?

End of fantasy.

Anyway, the camel does his number and galumphs off stage. Next thing, enter stage left an even younger Spearfishian, carrying what appears to be an ancient Judean silent butler. He marches decorously to stage center, scoops up the camel ka-ka, and exits right.

By now there are undoubtedly those among the multitude of Creemites who are asking themselves, what does rock music have in common with camel ka-ka?

I�m glad you asked me why I asked myself that.

The official religion of a bunch of decadent punks who had only 151 years left to rule the world ...

What rock music has in common with camel ka-ka is that the Black Hills Passion Players threw in the camel as nothing more than a verisimilitudinous sight gag — �Gee, ma, look, a real camel!� �Yes, Junior, and Our Lord once walked a byway very much like the Full City Block we bozos see before us now, and have no doubt that He was as real then as that camel is now.� But they stopped short of proposing the camel as an organic constituent, of the passion, of using it to make a dramatic point about the nature of the life of Christ, in that the moment the camel did what camels will do, it was �Whoops, Norbert, send out the kid with the silent butler.�

Well, the �rock music� in �Jesus Christ Superstar� is used just like the camel in the Black Hills Passion Play — as a gimmick to make the story seem more �real�. But the music isn�t proposed as ^n organic constituent of the passion either. It�s just another cheap passion play sight gag — -only this one, they make you take it in the ear. The notion that Jesus might have actually related to something approximating rock music is as foreign to the conceptualizers of �Jesus Christ Superstar� as the notion that Jesus might have actually related to something approximating camel shit was to the Black Hills Passion Players.

Tim �n� Andy based their extravaganza on Bishop Fulton J. Sheen�s Life of Christ, which understandably takes the Gospels as gospel. If they�d done a little digging into biblical scholarship — a lot to ask I guess considering they only spent two man-years composing their magnum opus about a biblical incident — they�d have discovered that before the Roman emperor Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. to codify his newly-adopted secret-weapon of Christianity so he could begin to turn it into the state religion, there was a body of biographical material on Jesus called the �Gnostic� gospels which had wide currency. The central passage of the most important of these texts — the Acts of John, attributed to the author of the Fourth Gospel :m was, in fact, read aloud before the tsking bishops at Nicaea, who gave it the old holy Roman thumbs-down and consigned the Gnostic gospels and their adherents to the flames. We�ve still got the minutes of Nicaea, though, and the section of the Acts of John that was read into them gives a glimpse of the Jesus who was lost when Christianity ceased to be the �counter-culture� of the Roman Empire and was twisted overnight into the official religion of a decadent bunch of ponks who themselves had only 151 years left to rule the world but dogmatized a version of the savior of humanity which sent the West into the tailspin of the Dark Ages, from which it is arguable we haven�t quite emerged yet.

� �Before I give myself up to them,� � He is said to have said on the eve of His crucifixion, � �let us praise the Father in a hymn of praise, and so go forth to meet what is to come.�

� �Then he bade us make a circle, holding each other�s hands, and he was in the middle. And he said: �Answer me with Amen.� After which he began to sing a hymn of praise:

� �Glory be to thee, Father,�

�And we all, going around in a ring, answered, �Amen.�

� �Glory be to thee, Word!

Glory be to thee, Grace!� — �Amen.�

[Imagine these lyrics being sung, not to Andres Webber�s mock rock but to, say, Mick Jagger�s �Midnight Rambler�. . . ]

� �I will be freed, and I will free!� — �Amen.�

� �I will be wounded and I will wound!� — �Amen.�

� �I will be begotten, and I will beget!� — �Amen.�

� �Grace paces the round.

I will blow the pipe,

Dance the round, all!� — �Amen.�

� �To each and all it is given to share in the dance!� — �Amen.�

� �He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event!� — �Amen.�

� �So as you respond to my dancing, behold yourself in me, the speaker. And when you see what I do, keep silent concerning my mysteries. You that dance, ponder what I do, for years is this passion of humanity that I am about to suffer.

� �And thus, my beloved, having danced with us, the Lord went forth . . .� �

Anybody who has ever spent Sunday morning in a black gospel church or heard the Rev. C.L. Franklin — Aretha�s daddy — starting to preach in a Martin Luther King-ly I-6een-to-the-mountain-top prose sonorities and peaking in Otis Redding-esque got-to/ got-to/ got-to/ got-to/ melodic glossolalia can intuit how when Jesus gave that sermon on the mount he might well have wound up his rap sounding somewhat more like Brother James Cleveland than Brother Norman Vincent Peale. Why assume up front that the Son of God was not at least as multi-faceted a talent as the son of Sammy Davis Sr.? If you were God and you wanted to catch people�s attention and run the truth to them in Roman-occupied Judea even if it cost you your son, who would you have begotten for the job, the guy who did the English-language dubbing for Max von Sydow?

Doin� the Aramaic funky chicken

Look at it this way — if you were feeling glimmerings of apostolic consciousness, do you think the peak would be in the direction of lickin� the dude�s decals off blindfolded or getting down with him and doin� the Aramaic funky chicken?

Forget Webber and Rice — they�re just a pair of very lucky hacks who were prepared to trade on the so-called �alternative culture� in hyping their toy passion play but far from having the imagination to present an �alternative� Jesus Christ to the Billy Grahamized zomboid who always looks like he�s been spending too much time in the ultraviolet machine the toilet-seat snaps up into to be sanitized, fielded a whining masochist who doesn�t exude enough mammal juice to get the rest of the cast to look in his direction, let alone give an idea of the voltage your aura would have to be rated at before you could think seriously about saving humanity.

No, it�s that Gnostic Jesus who interests me. Even before I lucked into the Acts of John I was thinking Jesus must have been running some kind of medicine show — what was all that healing if not the flashiest �tell-ya-what-ahm-gonna-do� number in history. Let�s say He really could make the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear? Could He have relied exclusively on the likelihood that the people he touched would spontaneously mime their cure so eloquently that the crowd could figure out what all that to-do was down by the lake shore? Did lifelong blind people know what they were supposed to look like when all of a sudden they could see? Judas says in �Jesus Christ Superstar,� �Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.� Not so: Israel in 4 BC had theater, and the theatrical technique you�d use to communicate to masses of people that you could all of a sudden see for the first time was mime. So I thought Jesus must have moved with a troupe who went through the gesticulations of being cured for the benefit of those far back in the crowd. �But that would have been dishonest,� streetsinger David Lannan, who on occasion gets the lame to take a walk himself, said to me once. No it wouldn�t, I said. Look, if Jesus could cure people, stories about it would have been shrugged off as rumor unless he could demonstrate it. And the only way he could demonstrate it to large numbers of people would have been by using actors. Besides, the excitement of seeing people faking being �cured� would induce real spontaneous cures back there in the shekel seats. The only way anybody can cure anybody without sophisticated medicines is by the power of suggestion, so if Jesus marshalled and orchestrated the power of suggestion better than anyone before or since, that doesn�t make him a charlatan it makes him a great physician.

But while I rapped this down I was thinking O.K., that�s how Jesus related to people beyond the range of his nonexistent p.a. system, but how did he relate to people within earshot? And I realized it had to be as a musician, since being a musician in the sense of Bob Dylan or Otis Redding is the densest, the most economical way of communicating to people who can hear you. I mean straight-rappers can be beautiful but you know when you hear Dick Gregory that there�s something he doesn�t have the vocal and athletic ability to do that if he did it would be very heavy like, they�d have to take him off the lecture circuit for openers, right? — Lenny Bruce was uncomfortably near it before he was snuffed.

And then I thought, OK, now what would be the highest form of communication Jesus could use with people who were close enough for him to touch? It would have to be some kind of dance, right? Like when John Sinclair said �fucking in the streets� and ■ what it really meant was dancing is fucking and fucking is dancing, unless somebody�s going around measuring inches of penetration. And at the height of the dance, �sporting in the thousand petaled lotus with my lord,� the utter interpenetration of consciousness . . .

So you can imagine how I felt when I read in the Acts of John about Jesus wailing about the truth and boogying with friends, discovered that there had been a powerful element among the early Christians who believed that Christianity was about wailing about the truth and boogying with your friends.

There, I thought was something worth being thrown to the lions for: Christianity as rock and roll!!

Then comes 325 AD when the bread-and-wine Christians take over the Roman Empire and vamp on the rock-and-roll Christians once and for all.

Wouldn�t there be a great rock musical in the possibility of Jesus Christ as a musician who ran The Word, the cosmic boom-shacka-lacka-lacka to the people, summoned them to return to the eternal full-tilt boogie, the dance abandoned and forgotten, the tribe of the Hebrews successively done out of their aboriginal everything-is-everything religion by Moses �n� Monotheism, Hellenization and Romanization, the messiah a rock and roll station you could tune in to and have your life saved by rock and roll?

You don�t think it�d come off too much like the story of John Sinclair�s life, do ya?

Oh well. As the real Jesus Christ Superstar said, just before he got in the helicopter to give that free concert at Golgotha even though all his friends knew He knew it�d be the end-all bummer, �He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event.�

Amen. '

And remember, kids, don�t forget to reconvene the rites!!!