I Love Jesus Christ Superstar

I continue my week of Jesus obsession with this clip from the 1973 movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. It's not my favorite song. That would of course be Simon Zealots. But in terms of 70's feel, cool rocked out guitar, and pure staging genius in what was a sometimes tedious and embarrassing film, it's about as good as it gets.

Superstar played a huge role in my life. As a 10 year old self-proclaimed atheist, Rice and Webber's 1970 Broadway musical resurrected something akin to religious feeling in my barren little heart. It didn't hurt that the record had been banned by the Catholic Daughters of America, and was thus forbidden fruit. I listened to it in my friends basement across the street. Later, I'd buy the cheat book and learn all the songs on my little plastic kiddie organ. By then, my mother had largely given up.

Every Lent, the kids at Saint Mary's School would be herded into the lunch room day after day to watch some horrible movie in several parts about the crucifixion. It was your basic passion play sort of thing, designed to help kids appreciate just how much Christ suffered for their sins. One year, Sister Donna, a young, hip nun who was therefore somewhat suspect, played Superstar for us instead. At 11, I considered this a major blow against the forces of repression. Sister Donna was right. My mother was wrong.

When the 1973 movie made it to TV, mom made her last Custerlike stand. My sister and were watching the movie in the living room with our dad. Mom came in, watched enough to be offended by the sexiness, and made some sort of feeble protest. We all laughed. She left the house and we kept watching.

I still have every bit of it memorized. When I was around 20, the little studio where I briefly took guitar lessons tried to stage a production, and I was to sing the Simon Zealots song. I'd been singing along with it since I was ten, and had it nailed. We never took the thing to stage, or moved much beyond the first few practices.

During the time I lived in Boston, the music scene would come together every year on Easter to do a knockout version of the musical in the basement of the Middle East Cafe in Central Square. I went whenever I could, and this remains one of my most memorable live music experiences. I saw a full stage production once and was utterly disappointed because they'd forgotten this was a ROCK opera. The Middle East show put the rock first and the opera last. It was sublime.

The Indigo Girls did a Superstar album in the late 90's, and it's the only thing I've heard that comes close. The vocals on the original album, with Ian Gillian of Deep Purple in the role of Jesus, are really impossible to beat, but on a few songs they manage, and on most, I actually prefer the rocked up arrangements. The Indigo's Superstar finale, with it's heavy funk flavor, is amazing. People will still be reinterpreting this thing 100 years from now. It's that kind of a record.

Young, Gifted, and Miserable

I wasn't exactly a socially gifted kid. Prior to starting school, there was one playmate other than my sister, and she was more Terry's friend than mine. I don't recall making any friends in kindergarten. I was overweight and crew cuts were out of style, even for six year olds. There might as well have been a big "L" branded on my forehead. I did, however, always get to be the grocer in our pretend store. I could make change.

In the summer of 1967. I remember finding a button on the ground that sparkled with 3-D reflective circles and said "Have a Ball." This I thought, was the coolest thing ever. My mother took it away. I asked what was wrong and she said, "Haven't you ever heard of a double-entendre?"

School for me was all about social embarrassment and standing out as a sort of a super nerd. I have two defining memories of first grade that capture the period nicely. The first is sitting in Sister Bernice's classroom at night awaiting our turn to go on for the Christmas play. I was stripped down to underwear, keenly aware of being fat. I had been cast as a plum pudding. I would wear a brown sack that resembled a bean bag chair and do a little plum pudding dance. But my mother had forgotten the tights that would complete the costume, and I was to wear the little girl's who sat next to me. She complained that I would stretch them out. My crying only added to the humiliation.

The other was the night that Sister Bernice called my parents to tell them I had attained a near perfect score on the Iowa Basic standardized test. My parents were thrilled. I was a genius, they said. Then my mother tickled me and wouldn't stop until I cried.

This evidence of high intelligence worked against me throughout grade school. My refusal to color within the lines was a major issue, as was my tendency to drift off in class.

Second grade was where it pretty much all went to shit. Mrs. Fahrendorf was on a mission, and there were numerous conferences with my mom. I didn't pay attention. My desk was messy. My penmanship was poor. Penmanship, in Catholic schools, is a very big deal. I was a voracious reader and skipped over all the little kid lit to stuff like encyclopedias and the Hardy Boys. I read the entire box of Agatha Christie paperbacks my mom kept in the basement.

I started to dread school, but home wasn't much better. My dad was gone most of the time to his new job that he hated with New York Life. I defeated him at chess when I was nine and it sent him into one of his red-faced tantrums. My mother was deeply unhappy, but beating my sister and I over small things always seemed to cheer her up. I was a bed wetter. This humiliation added morning beatings to the routine.

Ominously, I have no recollection of third grade at all. Not where the classroom was. Not the teachers name. Not her face. Nothing. By fourth grade, I was labeled as bright but lazy. Myself and a girl named Margaret were always the last ones standing for spelling bees, but my grades were low average and I was the last kid to memorize the multiplication tables.

That year, my parents borrowed money from my grandfather and bought an insurance agency in Madison, South Dakota, a small town about sixty miles out of Sioux Falls. My mother went to work along with my dad. She hadn't worked since she'd been a Conoco girl, pumping gas in shorts during the War. It seemed to agree with her. She was the secretary, but her real job was to try and get my OCD dad to his appointments on time. This was maybe a 50/50 proposition.

Summers and weekends, we'd make the trip to Madison with them. We'd hang out in the lobby and read and play, walk around the teeny downtown, or go to the park a few blocks away. There was a lot of sitting in the car waiting for our parents to complete sales visits. When school was in, we'd make our own dinners, watch TV, and go to bed. The freezer was stocked with Morton pot pies, Swanson TV dinners, and fish sticks. Mom and dad would arrive home anywhere between nine p.m. and two in the morning.

Money was desperate and family life was tense. My sister and I both had bank accounts in which we deposited part of our allowances and learned of the miracle of compound interest. Our parents zeroed these out and took the coins from our piggy banks as well. There were no apologies, and that was the end of our savings accounts.

By fifth and sixth grade, we started to go wild. We'd never had any real freedom before, so our newly unsupervised lives felt like a gift from heaven. We started inviting local teens in to drink, and would call Madison to hang up. If they answered, we'd know we had another hour.

My sister and I would take my mom's car on joyrides with our friends. I started to shoplift for fun several times a day. I eventually got caught, and they called my parents at work. No charges were filed. After that, I mostly stopped

By then it was the early seventies, and the counterculture was in full swing in Sioux Falls. My mother was a member of the Catholic Daughters of America, which blacklisted Jesus Christ Superstar over the Mary Magdalene heresy. I listened to it obsessively in my friends basement across the street and to this day can hear it clearly in my head from beginning to end.

We'd ride our bikes to the New World Rising head shop over by the K-Mart and I'd lay on the slanted floor of the black light room and look at the velvety colors of the posters. This was a time when even the K-Mart had a hippy shit section where you could get your incense and beaded curtains and lava lamps and such. But New World Rising had cooler art, bongs behind the counter, and smelled like sandalwood.

One poster of two elephants fucking read, "Don't switch Dicks in the middle of a screw. Vote Nixon in '72."

Smoking and drugs began in fifth grade or so. I learned that if you sprayed Pam cooking spray into a bread sack and inhaled, you would get an intense body-buzz and slip into a hallucinatory dream state. Glue and gasoline did the same thing, but Pam was our favorite.

One afternoon, my sister and I came home from school for lunch and started huffing Pam with some friends. I was laying on the kitchen table when she grabbed me by the hair, which made me want to kill her. She grabbed a knife, and I tried to knock it out of her hand. I laid open the side of my wrist down to the tendon. We called an ambulance, and I got ten stitches to close it up at the local clinic. I still have a horseshoe shaped scar.

I told the nurse I'd been washing dishes and a glass broke while my hand was inside of it. They sent in the social worker. Her huge and glacially blue eyes were magnified by her glasses. Those eyes became the whole room. She asked me to say what really happened.

"I was washing a glass when it broke. I told you."

I knew how to lie. You just stared right back and stuck to the story. Nothing to it.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Air Force Years: Part Four

By the time I was trying to get myself kicked out of the Air Force for drug use, I had moved to a house in nearby Waltham that was shared with three of my Airman buddies. We dealt enough pot to keep ourselves in supply. There was Mark the D&D guy, a trombone player from Florida named George, and an underground music junkie named Ron who turned me on to Captain Beefheart and Eugene Chadbourne. I'd ride my bike the four miles to Hanscom Field. Sometimes I'd walk.

Ron and I rode our ten speeds up to his hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire, where we partied with his acid casualty brother who still lived with his mom. We hardly saw her. She was either working or sleeping. We dropped windowpane for the ride back and did Manchester to Waltham in less than four hours. One of my peak experiences that summer was playing Frisbee on acid throughout an afternoon thunderstorm.

That was when I started playing guitar. I auditioned for and got the part of Judas Iscariot in a community theater production of Jesus Christ Superstar, but rehearsals ended once the promoters ran out of money and decided the drummer was an asshole. That was also the summer that I flirted with Scientology. The Church decided I was an immature and emotionally unstable genius, and convinced me for awhile that spilling my guts while hooked up to an e-meter was a fun way to pass the time.

In the fall I moved back to the dorms and fell in love with Cindy in Military Pay. She was cute, more than a little wild, and going through an ugly divorce. Though just 5'1, Cindy could out drink any of us. She was the kind of drunk who could be in a blackout and, to most people, appear more or less sober.

My drinking circle started to call itself the Ten Percent Club, and a friend who worked in the public relations office made us all framed certificates for our walls. The name came from a speech that the new Squadron Commander, Captain Tony Stankovich, made while we were standing in formation outside the dorms. He said that ninety percent of the squadron was doing a great job.

I started getting into regular trouble for doing stupid, impulsive things. I got into a screaming argument with a mechanic at the base auto garage, and rode a rolling chair down the sloping paved sidewalk by the dormitories and broke the thing. I received several reprimands.

My friends and I rented a Cape Cod vacation cabin owned by the Air Force and I got into a drunken fight with Cindy that involved smashing handfuls of spaghetti and meatballs into each other's faces. Later, when we tried scrubbing the tomato sauce from the walls, the paint came off as well. The Master Sargent in charge of rentals was not pleased.

The most serious incident involved assaulting a server at Patriot Dining Hall with a tossed salad.

We arrived back from the Cape in time for a basketball game between travel and military pay. I decided to play the mascot, and pulled together my Captain Cosmic outfit, which featured a plastic space helmet with prominent antennae, aviator sunglasses, skin tight red sweat pants, army boots, and a purple satin cape. I'd steal the ball, heckle the players, and occasionally retreat beneath the bleachers to neck with Cindy. After an hour or so, I rushed to lunch before the dining hall closed.

As I proceeded to the serving line, I was feeling very much in character. I surveyed the various offerings on the steam table and placed my order.

"Give me the plutonium buds and the some of that Venusian fried rat." I meant by this that I desired the mashed potatoes and chicken.

The server, an Airman Bickford, was unamused. Some heated back and forth ensued and he told me to get out. I screamed fuck you at the guy and hurled my little plastic bowl of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes over the glass. He dodged, and the bowl clattered harmlessly across the tile floor.

The following Monday, I was called in to see the Squadron Commander and given my first Article 15. For several months I arose early to pull weeds and such before going to work.

While I've somehow lost the paperwork, I can still remember part of Bickford's written complaint word for word. "His behavior was bizarre and unnormal, and if this is what the Air Force represents, then it gives me no pride in being here."

Cindy and I, who had taken to calling in sick together so we could drink, moved to an apartment in Waltham and made plans for marriage. Our relationship became increasingly stormy, and I started having gruesome dreams about being buried alive. One weekend, we hosted a keg and listened to Patti Smith's Radio Ethiopia over and over. One of my friends put me on the spot about announcing our marriage, and I couldn't bring myself to say the words.

Things dragged on for awhile, but that was really the moment the relationship died. Shortly after, Cindy was ordered into detox. Our break up was part of the cure, and she immediately rebounded to some guy she met in AA. The news threw me into a highly-agitated state of depression that felt like it would never end.

I was taking classes at night at Boston's Northeastern University and reading Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. The play revolves around a group of drunks who basically live in a bar and have an unspoken agreement to pretend that their pathetic and useless lives are going somewhere.

As I sat alone on the floor of my dorm room deconstructing the play onto index cards, Harry Hope's bar came to life as a metaphor for my own situation. I used to tell myself I wouldn't live to see thirty, but at twenty-one, I already felt old and tired. I decided I was done. The decision was like flipping a switch.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two