Throwback Night at the Republic, like the Eighties Dance Party at One-Eyed Jacks, is a local favorite, and the people of New Orleans are more than happy to turn out to see which up and comers they need to pay attention to in the coming weeks and months. When I first moved to NOLA from Baton Rouge, I knew that the Republic would be the place I'd find myself frequently; New Orleans is renowned for its rhythm history, and is, of course, widely known for being the birthplace of jazz. Unfortunately, this has meant other genres, including local bands that fall on the more independent side of the spectrum, get pushed into a corner. Not so at the Republic, which has hosted such beloved fixtures of the genre as Rilo Kiley, and the first show I saw in my new town was local legends Glasgow, playing for Throwback Night, with The Little Mermaid as the theme.
This time around, the theme is the topic I find myself thinking about somewhere around 35% of my waking hours: Batman. Big History, who played the Spanish Moon dance party with Big Rock Candy Mountain and Prom Date last week in Baton Rouge, take to a stage adorned with small painted canvases adorned with the familiar non-words that spring to mind when one thinks about the Adam West Batman series: "Zoink!" they say, "Kabluey!" As the gels in the stage lights rotate, the colors change, and the words pop, and I applaud the designer. Blue rope lights trail along the drum set, ending in a reddish outline of the familiar symbol of The World's Greatest Detective.
I arrive just as the first song is ending, hobbling along in an ancient pair of Conver high tops that are a size and a half too small, but covered in that same BatSignal logo, and I could wear nothing else. On the screen behind the six-person band clips from various Batman series play, showcasing Cesar Romero as the Joker and Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, before shifting gears to clips from episodes of the infamous 1990s animated series, and the Batnerd in me immediately identifies it as the episode in which Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon ostensibly dies at the hands of the Joker, before the ending reveals it was all a fear-toxin induced hallucination (nerd alert!). I am briefly disappointed that the band isn't playing in costume, save for the female keyboardist, whose leaf-print green shift could be Poison Ivy-ish.
But enough about Batman. The band performs more than competently, and the singer, whose sunglasses never come off of her face, creates that fabled reciprocal energy with the audience, despite seeming a little lethargic, as her throaty vocals fill the entire performance space. A few respectable but unfortunately unmemorable songs come and go, before she takes a break to talk directly to us about the next song, their big single, "All At Once", which we can find in video form on youtube in a musical short directed by local videographer Jeremy Blum.
Now the show has finally found its legs, as the audience truly becomes a unit, taking to the single like so many fishes to water, and I can hear the lyrics coming from a legion of vocal cords, behind, beside, and all around me. As the music dies, the crowd lets loose a spectacular roar, and the singer introduces the members of the band. A man in a homemade Batman costume runs back and forth in the front, between me and the stage, although he looks more like the arcetypical cat burglar from the silent 1930s film The Bat, which is occasionally cited as the inspiration for Bob Kane's Detective Comics character (nerd alert! again!) Riding this wave of audience goodwill, the band launches into their first cover (a Throwback Night staple) of the night, a version of 1970s German musician Peter Schillinger's space opus "Major Tom (Coming Home)," which suffers not in the least from its notable similarities to the Shiny Toy Guns cover of the same a few years ago.
From there, it's back to Big History's original stuff, including their other single "Every Bone" (which, along with "All At Once," is available from bighistory.bandcamp.com as no-cost downloads), and once again the crowd shares their enthusiasm vocally. As the show draws to a close, the band finishes their set with their second and final cover. In a bizarre moment of synchronicity, they begin to play "Dancin' in the Dark," originally by Bruce Springsteen, the video for which was the first acting job of Courtney Cox, who is reprising her role of Gale Weathers in the fourth film of Wes Craven's Scream film franchise, which opened the same night. Unfortunately, though they went to the trouble of having a saxophone player named Steven McDonald join them on stage, the sax itself was totally inaudible. No encore is demanded and none is given, which is a poor thing for a show that was, if not groundbreaking, at least thoroughly enjoyable.
Mark “Boomer” Redmond is a former KLSU DJ, writer, and graduate student at the University of New Orleans. He currently lives in the Bywater with a cat named Murderface. He can be reached at boomerklsu@gmail.com.
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