Interview conducted by David Bell on May 28, 2018

Ted Neeley isn’t just any musical theater superstar. He is THE superstar, originally cast as the title character in the 1973 classic film, Jesus Christ Superstar. As the movie celebrates its 45th anniversary this year, it’s all still surreal for the man with the golden throat.

“It’s overwhelmingly wonderful,” says Neeley, who is still performing the very role that catapulted him to superstardom almost five decades ago. “This movie has some sort of an impact on people, a spiritual impact. And they connect me to that. They’ll come to me and say, ‘you’re my Jesus.’ And instantly I say ‘I’m a screaming, rock and roll drummer from Texas who got lucky, I’m not Jesus, It’s okay.’ But the way they react to it, it’s a life-changing experience and this is all these years later.”

Neeley is referring to his humble beginnings in Ranger, Texas, a town of less than 2500 inhabitants located west of Dallas. “I had a rock and roll band when I was nine years old, well, if you could call it a band, we were just a bunch of kids farting around and stuff, you know? We were good enough as singers, but we were terrible musicians. But we all could copy people, singing, we were good enough that we were invited to play for every function in our hometown. So the bottom line is I had been singing all my life, and I just wanted to be a singer. I was playing drums and I was a screaming rock and roll drummer in a silly band. And so if we heard a song, one of us would sing it, you know?”

Known for his exceptionally wide vocal range (including those stratospheric high notes in “Gethsemane” that we all try to hit), Neeley has never actually had any formal vocal training.

“No I didn’t have any training. I was born and raised in a tiny town in Texas. There was no such thing as vocal coach. But I’d been singing since I was born,” says Neeley. “And so we were impersonating all the singers we heard. It wasn’t that any of us had any training, we just had an ability to sing. So those of us that could hit the high notes would do those, and the other four guys would do the parts of the bass or whatever.”

Neeley’s band eventually took their vocal prowess on the road, playing sets of cover songs in small clubs in California. As Neeley developed his vocal style, people began to take notice. In 1965, Neeley and his band, The Teddy Neeley Five signed their first record deal with Capitol records. Four years later, Neeley was starring in the lead role of Claude in the Los Angeles and New York productions of Hair, where he worked with director Tommy O’Horgan. When O’Horgan was tasked with staging Jesus Christ Superstar for the first time on Broadway, Neeley got the call. But it was during his run as the title role in The Who’s Tommy that Neeley first crossed paths with director Norman Jewish (known to genre fans as the director of The Cincinnati Kid and Rollerball), who was in town auditioning actors for the Superstar film.

“I had read an article in the Hollywood Reporter that Norman Jewison was in town auditioning for the film Superstar. And I said oh my god, I gotta fix this. I didn’t have an agent or a manager, and I knew I had to get in touch with him,” says Neeley. With that, he invited Jewison to come see him perform in Tommy, hoping that could be his audition for the lead role in the Superstar film.

To Neeley’s surprise, Jewison agreed. But Neeley didn’t want to know which performance Jewison planned on attending. As he recalled, “I said ‘I don’t care, he can come anytime he wants I just don’t want to know he’s in the audience because I’m going to freak.” As promised, he never told Neeley when he was coming. So imagine Jewison’s surprise when he attended a random evening performance of Tommy, only to find Neeley’s understudy performing the role.

“And as it turned out, Tommy was a very physical piece,” says Neeley. In one of the performances, Neeley was knocked out cold due to a misjudged toss by one of the dancers, and doctors ordered him to skip that evening’s performance.

“And that was the only performance I missed in the whole run of the show, and that was the show Norman Jewison came to see. And so he saw my understudy go on. And I didn’t find that out until the next day. From the agent, he says ‘where the hell were you last night? Norman came and you weren’t there,’” says Neeley. After explaining the situation to the agency, Neeley pushed for another meeting with Jewison to plead his case and at least apologize for the snafu. Jewison agreed to meet Neeley for lunch at a local diner near his hotel.

Neeley was ecstatic, but anxious. As he recalls, “I realized suddenly, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna go talk to Norman Jewison about doing Jesus and I’m doing Tommy and I look like I’m 16 and I don’t have any facial hair.’ So I called a buddy of mine and said ‘can you come over here man and make me look like Jesus?’ And so came and he put the wig on me and he did the facial hair and all that.”

So there’s Ted Neeley, dressed like Jesus, sitting in a coffee shop. Waiting for Norman Jewison. But when Jewison finally arrived, he informed Neeley that he had already cast all the principal parts for the film.

“And my heart just fell out of my pants,” says Neeley. Ever the determined rock star, Neeley instinctively offered to pay for a screen test to audition for Jewison.

“With that he almost fell out of his chair laughing,” exclaims Neeley. “He said, ‘Do you have any idea how much a screen test cost?’ I said, ‘I don’t even know what it is, I just heard the term.’’ Jewison said he’d be in touch, and with that he was off to London to continue working on the casting process for the film, and Neeley was left wondering what might have been. As Neeley remembers, “I thought it was his very gentle way of telling me to get out of his face, so to speak.”

Three weeks later, Neeley got a call from Jewison, asking him to come to London to audition for the role of Jesus in the movie. As he recalls, one of Neeley’s first questions for him was, “Do you have anybody in mind for the role of Judas?” Neeley suggested his long-time friend and co-star Carl Anderson also be screen tested for that role, seeing as how they were both just weeks away from opening night of the first American tour of Superstar.

According to Neeley, upon their arrival in London Jewison exhibited his wry sense of humor by greeting both men and saying, “Carl the reason both of you are here is because this guy (pointing at me) won’t leave me alone. So I had to bring you here so he could get out of my face.”

Besides illustrating Neeley’s persistence, the story of the audition also displayed the depth of his friendship with Anderson, which is what ultimately landed him the role of Jesus. After he and Anderson were officially cast and filming began, they asked Jewison why he chose them to play the iconic parts.

“And he [Jewison] said, ‘Honestly, after we did all those screen tests, I was sitting down watching them, and there was something I saw in the two of you that I didn’t see in anyone else. There was an honest, human friendship…That’s exactly what I wanted to show in the film. And it’s not that the actors couldn’t create it, but you guys already had it. So it was a big plus for me as a director. AND it didn’t hurt that much that both of you could sing fairly well.’ So that’s how I got into the film, by accident. Literally, by accident.”

45 years later, Neeley is still performing the role live onstage around the world, with his latest adventure taking him through Rome and the Netherlands on a continuous five-year run. And according to Neeley, this train isn’t running out of track anytime soon, as there is talk of taking the tour to the southern hemisphere.

“And now the people in Madrid—who took us to Madrid and Barcelona—they want to take us to South America. This show, exactly as it is. So if it weren’t for the men in Italy calling me and asking if I’d be in the twentieth anniversary [in the early 1990s], chances are I wouldn’t be doing any of this…and it’s the first time I’ve ever been in a live production of this show where we have the band on stage. So it’s really a rock opera.”

Between the original airing of the film and that fortuitous twentieth anniversary reunion in 1993, Neeley took on other projects, including being tapped to write the musical score for what has become something of a cult classic, Summer Camp Nightmare. Released in 1987, the film borrows generously from Lord of the Flies and follows the exploits of a group of young camp counselors who stage a revolution and take over the campgrounds. Although the film was a box office flop, it garnered a niche audience over the years.

“But again it was thanks to Superstar. Because that director [Bert L. Dragin] was a big fan of Superstar. And he heard that I was in town and he tracked me down and said I’m an independent filmmaker and I’m doing blah blah and if at all possible I’d like you to do the score, and I said ‘sure.’ So I did it. It was so much fun for me, you know? Because there was somebody regardless of who he was or wasn’t he had enough faith in me that I could write the score. So I did.”

Ever so humble, Neeley is grateful for the experience.

“That guy [Dragin] did a really great job,’ reflects Neeley. “We had a great time doing it, and I was honored that he wanted me to do the music and it gave me the courage then to pursue that with other people, and was able to collaborate with several composers and lyricists over the years. And if it hadn’t been for that guy I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to do that either.”

As for the “other” movie Neeley is known for, Jesus Christ Superstar continues to be popular nearly half a century later, as evident through its annual airings on Easter, on Turner Classic Movies, and in sold-out sing-a-long screenings, led by Neeley himself. The next stop on that tour will be this weekend at the Hollywood Boulevard theater in Woodridge, Illinois from June 8th-10th. Neeley and long-time manager Frank Munoz co-created the tour after demand skyrocketed following the first screening at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood five years ago. Five years and 160 screenings later, the tour is still going strong.

“We’ve been everywhere from Seattle, San Diego, to Florida, to Massachusetts and everywhere in between. And the demand for us to keep coming back and playing this film is overwhelming, So that’s why we do it,” says Munoz.

Over the years, various other cast members have made appearances at the screenings, including Yvonne Elliman—who played Mary Magdalene—and the late Barry Dennen, who originated the role of Pontius Pilate. And because Dennen was a Chicago native, Neeley and Munoz have a special tribute planned for him.

“At the Hollywood Boulevard they have these little display cases and stuff of Hollywood memorabilia and stuff like that. So…we’re going to do a little display of Barry. Because of his connection to Chicago. And that’s going to be the first night, Friday [July 8]. Again, paying tribute to him. And Barry was at our first screening, in the Chinese Theatre,” declares Munoz.

In addition to the tribute, merchandise specifically related to him will be sold during the tour at Dennen’s request. Proceeds from the sales will go to the Barry Fund, which allows flowers to be placed at Dennen’s final resting place at the Hollywood Forever cemetery every month.

“He’s literally two feet away from the original Toto, right near Mickey Rooney, right across from the resting place of Joey Ramone and Chris Cornell. It couldn’t be a better spot for him,” Munoz states.

As Neeley reflects on the film’s impact on people like Barry Dennen and the late Carl Anderson, he also acknowledges the role it played in forging his path as well.

“It’s overwhelmingly wonderful. And, if that’s not enough, when we were in Israel making the film, I met the woman who would be my wife. She’s a dancer in the film.” Neeley continues, “It gave me a life, it gave me a family, it gave me a future. It gave me recognition worldwide. And I could maybe understand it conceptually if it were a couple years after the film came out. But this. This is a lifetime since that film came out.”

Ted Neeley attributes his success to “being in the right place at the right time.” He credits very little to his own determination and drive. Perhaps a less humble assertion is that he puts himself in the right place at the right time. And this weekend, he is putting himself at the Hollywood Boulevard cinema in Woodridge, Illinois for the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to sing the score of one of the greatest musicals ever written, alongside a screaming rock and roll drummer from Texas.