{"id":85442,"date":"2015-05-05T16:39:51","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=85442"},"modified":"2015-05-06T08:24:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T12:24:01","slug":"mazzy-star-batman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/05\/mazzy-star-batman\/","title":{"rendered":"Mazzy Star Batman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sun Ra, self discovery, and apocryphal Batmans.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"cover\"<\/a>

Sun Ra\u2019s Batman and Robin<\/i> album, released under the name the Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale.<\/p><\/div>\n

My friend Amy and I moved to New York at about the same time, for the same reason: to pursue careers and then to decide we didn\u2019t like ourselves in those careers. It was fine, when we arrived, to tread water for a bit\u2014fun, even, in the way that living off peanut butter can be when creative success feels inevitable. After a couple of years, though, my excitement at living in the city started to curdle. I\u2019d lost my master\u2019s diploma somewhere between Boston and Brooklyn, but had somehow failed to shake my credit cards and student loans. So\u2014terrified, with no real prospect of making a living as an artist\u2014I watched my day job in publishing turn into my life.<\/p>\n

It was a few months after the drudgery of fiscal responsibility kicked in that Amy introduced me to the joys of weekly comics. She\u2019d set up a pull list at Midtown Comics, a twenty-dollar-a-week subscription that gave her something to be excited about on Wednesdays. Before she lent me her copies of the Batgirl<\/em> reboot, I didn\u2019t totally get it. Having read only occasional comics from the supermarkets of my childhood, I had never experienced a full narrative arc. I assumed that, like McDonald\u2019s Monopoly\u2122, there would always be a piece missing\u2014what I might have jokingly called an objet petit a<\/em> before my resentment of graduate school took over.<\/p>\n

That changed after I set up my own pull list, taking the R train up to Times Square on my lunch hours and sneaking back into the Flatiron building with issues of Swamp Thing<\/em> and Hellblazer<\/em> tucked under my arms in opaque black plastic bags, like top-shelf Hustlers<\/em>. It started off as simple transgression: the thrill of spending time with back issues of Savage Wolverine<\/em> instead of the novels I should have been reading, both for work and as a \u201cgood literary citizen.\u201d Before long, though, I developed favorite artists and writers\u2014even letterers. After having lost my love of literature to the daily grind, it felt like a homecoming, to be excited to read again. All it took was two-page spreads of Morlocks tunneling through the bowels of Manhattan. \u201cGood\u201d was boring, I decided, arranging the books on my desk so I wouldn\u2019t have to face their author photos. Better to be a delinquent with adamantium claws. <\/p>\n

Obsession comes naturally to me. I blew my weekly budget at the comic-book store and then discovered the stacks at the library, refreshed occasionally by the efforts of someone a few steps ahead of me with interlibrary loan. My invisible mentor. Not having a gauge for the genre, I borrowed a backpack full of comics every Saturday without much thought or deliberation. Most were missteps, problematic older pulps in yellowed trade editions. Some had their more lurid panels torn out, and I imagined my library twin carefully taping these into a loose-leaf notebook.<\/p>\n

Much as the \u201cWorld\u2019s Greatest Detective\u201d (Batman) might have, I considered tracking him down\u2014scanning names on the library\u2019s hold shelf and covertly flipping through his selections before and after he\u2019d borrowed them, checking for holes. Around this time, though, the interlibrary loans dried up; my mentor\/Moriarty and I had read almost every trade in circulation.<\/p>\n

Luckily, between us, Amy and I had the new releases covered. I\u2019d meet at her apartment every few weeks and trade stacks\u2014binge reading the latest Locke &\u00a0Key<\/em>\u00a0while listening to Minor Threat. It was at one of these hangouts that she told me she and her husband were having a baby. There was no record scratch. We were both in our thirties and I was used to my friends growing up around me. Inspired, I diverted my energy into scouring New York\u2019s record stores for the superhero LPs of my youth: narrated gatefolds with comics attached, so early readers could follow along. In the one I remember most vividly, Spider-Man recovers a stolen El Greco from a little-known villain named the Conquistador\u2014if not the perfect gift for any expectant mother, the perfect gift for Amy.<\/p>\n

My plan was to surprise her with a crate of these. But after months of searching, I only found one that came close.<\/p>\n

Sun Ra\u2019s pseudonymous 1966 Batman and Robin<\/a><\/em> album<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My objet petit a.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Sun Ra\u2019s Batman<\/em> wasn\u2019t the record I wanted\u2014like, I assume, every unsuspecting listener before me, I was disappointed when I finally dropped the needle. It was textbook bait-and-switch: even the heroes on the cover, swinging into action in classic Golden Age style, seem unaware of the famously avant-garde jazzman lurking within their sleeve.<\/p>\n

Attributed to the Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale\u2014described by WFMU as \u201cone of the greatest uncredited session combos of all time<\/a>\u201d\u2014the record is an overt cash-in on sixties-era Batmania. My copy was previously owned by an improbably named child (Bart) who scrawled his name in green crayon across Robin\u2019s legs. Bart had seemingly listened to the record only once, and I doubted he\u2019d gotten all the way through. We had both been expecting the old na-na-na-na<\/em>, the Adam West theme song. Past that, I\u2019d had high hopes for \u201cThe Penguin Chase\u201d and \u201cBatman\u2019s Batmorang,\u201d which\u2014with the benefit of hindsight\u2014should have tipped me off (as Batfans know, they\u2019re called batarangs).<\/p>\n

Instead, Bart and I got two sides of funked-up public-domain pastiche. Musically, the only signals that Sun Ra even knew how this record was going to be packaged are in \u201cBatman\u2019s Theme<\/a>\u201d and \u201cRobin\u2019s Theme<\/a>,\u201d the two vocal tracks on an otherwise instrumental half-hour jam. While thematically relevant, these lyrics, belted out con brio, really underline Dan and Dale\u2019s lack of familiarity with the source material. If you\u2019d like to sing along, the words are (respectively): \u201cBatman \/ Batman \/ Batman\u201d and \u201cI said, Robin \/ Robin, yeah!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s classic swing, the ideal album for a smoky bar or\u2014I imagine\u2014an awkward, LBJ-era key party. It\u2019s Bruce Wayne as Don Draper, and I don\u2019t blame Bart for rejecting its bad-dad charms.<\/p>\n

Still, if you\u2019re able to accept the Sun Ra Batman at face value\u2014not the record itself, but the impossible Bruce Wayne who lives within the imagined Gotham of its grooves\u2014he\u2019s arguably the most compelling iteration in the franchise. Released from the endless cycle of vigilantism that typically defines him, Sun Ra\u2019s Batman becomes unpredictable. He orders a third drink, then laughs\u2014forgetting, for one happy moment, the constellation of emotional and physical pain that landed him this bit role in what looks to be an Antonioni film. He lays his head on the bar for one long second, then another. Just when you think he\u2019s not getting up, he stumbles toward the jukebox, bar stool clattering to the floor in his wake.<\/p>\n

The conflict inherent in this inaction\u2014accompanied, perhaps, by \u201cThe Riddler\u2019s Retreat\u201d (a sax-heavy riff on the Beatles\u2019 \u201cShe Loves You\u201d)\u2014is more interesting to me than any evil plot to overtake Gotham, which, let\u2019s be honest, never have much of a chance anyway. Here, for once, is tension without obvious resolution: What could Batman possibly be doing here?<\/p>\n

After nearly a decade in the city, I wondered the same thing about myself all the time. I\u2019d stopped going out: most of my friends were busy buying houses or party drugs, and I couldn\u2019t keep up with either. Instead, I settled into a forgettable routine of going to work and coming home, where I sat with my wife in an overpriced one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by dog-eared library comics, listening\u2014increasingly\u2014to the Sensational Guitars of Dan and Dale.<\/p>\n

Freed from the tyranny of comic-book canon through the beneficence of Sun Ra, I started projecting Batman into mash-ups that more directly reflected my own mostly plotless narratives, trying to conjure a role model if not a revelation. Scrolling through sales reports at work, I imagined Mumblecore Batman misquoting lines from art-house films, \u201cnostalgic for yesterday.\u201d Before Sunrise<\/em> Batman drifted with Julie Delpy through my old neighborhood as I walked to the subway, expressing hopes and fears so nakedly it made me cringe. Mazzy Star Batman tried to shake a lingering sense of pointlessness as midafternoon light refracted through jam jars of ten-dollar wine.<\/p>\n

\"MazzyStarBatman\"<\/a>This last Batman\u2014peering confidently through existential haze, or possibly a lingering cloud of Nag Champa incense\u2014was the one I most identified with. He was vulnerable, sure, but he was also Batman<\/em>, so you knew he\u2019d pull through. Unable to stop thinking about him, I photoshopped a picture of Michael Keaton into one of the band\u2019s sepia-toned publicity shots and stared at it, listening to So Tonight That I Might See<\/em>\u2014their hauntingly fragile breakthrough album\u2014on loop.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes it have to be Mazzy Star,\u201d my friend Justin asked, after I thought I\u2019d sold him on the idea, \u201cbecause they\u2019re on the Batman Forever<\/em> sound track<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t known, at least not consciously. We\u2014minus Amy, who was at home with her newborn\u2014were a handful of beers in by this point, and the universe shifted briefly into focus as Justin explained that the Forever<\/em> sound track featured mostly songs that weren\u2019t actually in the movie. Mazzy Star\u2019s \u201cTell Me Now\u201d was, appropriately, one of them: a shadow sound track, an anthem for a Batman that didn\u2019t quite exist. I went home and looked up \u201cTell Me Now.\u201d It\u2019s a fine song, but I preferred to think of Bruce Wayne striding purposefully\u2014in my worn out peacoat, from his lunch hour at the record store to the nine-to-five he doesn\u2019t really need\u2014with the refrain from their more popular \u201cFade Into You\u201d swelling through my tangled earbuds.<\/p>\n

The idea of Mazzy Star Batman sustained me for a little over a year after that night, during which time I wrote a novel about, sure enough, an unlikely hero who doesn\u2019t feel like he\u2019s in control of his life. Soon after, I moved away from New York.<\/p>\n

Nick Courage\u2019s middle-grade novel<\/em>, The Loudness<\/a>, is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sun Ra, self discovery, and apocryphal Batmans. My friend Amy and I moved to New York at about the same time, for the same reason: to pursue careers and then to decide we didn\u2019t like ourselves in those careers. 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