They’ve been gassing the PR machine pretty hard lately around the impending opening this fall of the $25 million-dollar budgeted Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Directed by the brilliant Julie Taymor and featuring a score from U2, it’ll either be a great night of theater or else the most-embarrassing piece of shit ever. When it comes to a musical sung by a superhero and supervillains, I doubt there is much of a chance for middle ground!

But did you know that there already was a Spider-Man musical? Yup. In 1975, a Spidey rock opera, Rock Reflections of a Super-Hero was released. One day when I was 9-years old my dad brought it home for me. It had a cool album cover which was a painting of Spidey/Peter Parker by John Romita and narration by—who else—Stan Lee. It’s gloriously awful, basically the Peter Parker story set to song (“Square Boy” is about his nerdy high school years. “Gwendolyn” is of course about the death of his girlfriend Gwen Stacy).

The best/worst song is the Doctor Octopus song. In it he threatens to turn the Black Panther and Thor into go-go dancers. If the whole things were a Doctor Octopus album, it would have been way better. It begins in the second half of the clip below:
 

 
And dig the back cover: The Hulk on drums, Silver Surfer on synth, Luke Cage on bass, Thor on trumpet, the Fantastic Four on backing vocals (Ben Grimm has a certain Mama Cass-like quality to his voice, don’t you think?) and Captain America on… tambourine?