If you have a little time to spare, brothers & sisters, I’d like to rap with you a while. The subject I have in mind might just fry your skull, so brace yerselves for impact and adopt crash position: the LP I’m about to lay on you is credited to..wait fer it…Webber/Rice!

“AAAAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGG!!!!!”

Hey hey hey! ‘AAAHHHGGG’ is right. Every fool knows that ‘Webber/Rice’ is a guarantee of quality music like ‘Tesco Value’ is a guarantee of good eatin’, ie: ain’t no guarantee at all. But JCS is some whole other bag. This ain’t ‘Cats’. JCS is smarter than the average musical, Boo Boo. Ever wondered what a double LP concept album about Jesus by Chicago Transit Authority would sound like? 

‘Course you have! And I’m here to tell you that the JCS soundtrack IS that album! First thing you gotta dig is that this is one of dem early seventies ‘ROCK MUSICALS,’ so it figures that there’s a fairly even split between ROCK and MUSICAL, with all that implies…there’s a whole lotta mannered singing, the vocals are mixed way higher than the music on most tracks (frustrating when the under-mixed music is frequently so great) and there’s a fair amount of stock broadway showbiz ramalama which I guess you’ll either skip or secretly dig as a guilty pleasure, personally most of it I can take or leave, but the jazz-age vaudeville a‑go-go of ‘Herod’s Song’ is certainly a blast. I guess the bottom line here is that the clever-clever method of choppin’ and changin’ genre & time signature every two minutes really ain’t all that different from what you get on B,S & T’s first three LPs, and there are very few jazz-brass-psyche rock albums from this era that don’t contain a fair few duff tracks so it ain’t really that big a deal. Now we got that outta the way, let’s take a look at JCS’s best bits. This is The News. 

.1. Overture: The first track, and from our point of view I guess THE track: a super-heavy instrumental which comes on like the pissed-off mutant twin of der Zep’s ‘Immigrant Song,’ erupting from the opening classical freak-out into a Godzilla stompin’ onslaught of evil psyche guitar & Bonham funk-rock drumming which is all over way too quickly. While it lasts, it’s a gas, and you even get one bar of the famous JCS brass fanfare at the end.

.2. What’s The Buzz?: If you dig Rubber Soul /‘The Word’ era- Beatles, or Googoobarabajagal by Donovan, or ‘Love Love Love’ by Lulu, or fuzz-bass & funky drummin’ mid-sixties freakbeat RnB in gen, this is the tune for you. Perfect retro mod-party floor fillin’ material, I’m hereby makin’ a solid gold Fuzz guarantee that no DJ will be dissapointed with how many wigs are flipped when they drop this smasher.

They’re yer biggies. In other news, ‘Superstar,’ ‘Damned For All Time’ and a handful of others are funky, up-tempo brass-powered RnB rockers that wouldn’t sound outta place on the first Chicago Transit Authority LP.

The JSC OST sold, like, a gazillion copies around the world. Your dad probably has a copy somewhere. It’s not a cool, or cult, LP by any stretch. And yet despite the fact that it can be found in millions of households, it remains something of a lost classic for fans of Chicago/BS &T etc, unlistened to & unappreciated, understandably so, as there’s no reason why anybody huntin’ for psychedelic rock ‘n’ soul kicks would reasonably expect there to be something as wickedly bad ass as ‘Overture’ or gen-u-inely freakbeatastic as ‘What’s The Buzz?’ on a Webber/Rice LP. 

Become a Jesus freak today, brother.