Then We Are Decided
EXHIBIT A. FILED AS: COMMENDATION. RESPONDENT: A SONG THAT SHOULDN'T WORK ON ME AND DOES.
Let the record show that I am, as a matter of public fact, religiously challenged. I am not the target audience for a rock opera about the last week of Jesus of Nazareth. Nobody built the 1973 film with me in mind.
And I love it. Not ironically, not as camp, not as a period curiosity with good hair. I love the movie, and more than any other three minutes in it, I love this one.
The deep cut nobody can sing along to
Here is the thing most people don't know, and the reason this song is a shibboleth. It isn't in the stage show. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote it specifically for Norman Jewison's 1973 film. It is not on the 1970 concept album — the record that made the whole thing famous. It shows up as track five on the soundtrack and nowhere in the canon that most Superstar fans grew up with.
So if you love this number, you're not a Superstar fan. You're a film fan. Different denomination entirely. The people who know it by heart came to it the same way: sitting in front of the movie, about thirteen minutes in, when the thing stops being a concert and starts being a conspiracy.
What the scene actually is
Two men in a room. Caiaphas — Bob Bingham, in a voice that lives somewhere below the floor — and Annas, Kurt Yaghjian, sitting up in a register that sounds like an objection being raised. They are not arguing theology. That is the entire point and it's what nobody tells you.
Annas wants to wait. Let it burn itself out. It's a fad, it's a crowd, crowds go home. Caiaphas doesn't disagree about what Jesus is — he's arguing about what happens next, to them, if Rome looks over and sees a mob. Not "is this man the son of God." "How does this look, and who gets crushed when it looks bad."
It's a risk meeting. It's two middle managers with unusually good pipes discovering that the safest available option is to have someone killed, and talking themselves there in under three minutes. The title is the sound of a decision closing. Then we are decided. Motion carried. Next item.
The groove
And it grooves, which is the part that has no business working and works anyway.
It sits in a dark, loping, low-slung vamp — the kind of thing a rhythm section finds at one in the morning and can't leave alone. André Previn adapted and conducted the score for the film, and this cue is where the early-seventies session-player DNA is most obvious: it's closer to a crime-movie cue than to anything you'd call sacred music. There's menace in the bass and there's swing in it, at the same time, which is a hard trick.
Then you put those two voices on top of it. Bingham's bottom end against Yaghjian's needling top, trading lines, circling, neither one blinking. The groove is the room. The two voices are the meeting. When they finally land on the same note you can hear the door lock.
They shot it out at Herodium, on Herod's actual hill, which means the whole conversation happens on the ruins of the last guy who thought he had the situation handled. The film never points at that. It just lets you sit in it.
Why a nonbeliever gets to love this
Because it isn't asking me to believe anything.
You don't need faith to understand this scene. You need to have worked somewhere. Anywhere. Every person who has ever sat in a conference room while a decision got made about somebody who wasn't invited knows exactly what this song is. The specific man is almost incidental — he's become a problem, and problems get managed by people whose actual religion is not being blamed later.
That's the genius of the whole movie, and this number is the clearest three minutes of it. Jewison made a film about Jesus in which the most human, most recognizable, most uncomfortably familiar characters are the administrators. Judas gets the best songs. The priests get the best scene. And none of it requires you to kneel for any of it.
I came for the groove. I stayed because it's the most honest depiction of institutional self-preservation ever set to a bass line.
Play it yourself
If you want to put your hands on it, the chords are charted over at Ultimate Guitar — we're not going to reprint somebody else's transcription here, so go give them the click:
Then We Are Decided — chords at Ultimate Guitar
Fair warning: it looks simple on the page and it is not. The notes are easy. The feel is the whole song, and the feel is a rhythm section deciding to take its time. Play it too clean and it turns into a church hymn, which is the one thing it absolutely is not.
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), directed by Norman Jewison. Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice. "Then We Are Decided" written for the film and not included in the 1970 concept album or the stage production. Caiaphas: Bob Bingham. Annas: Kurt Yaghjian. Score adapted and conducted by André Previn.