![]() ![]() It rained in the morning, pushed the heat back all day, then poured again that night as we drove back to our apartment with the wedding loot. We found a caterer, a baker, a quaint historical house to rent for an August afternoon. We hummed them in the car, in the kitchen, in the backs of our heads as we drifted asleep. Pocketful of Kryptonite sold 5 million, its four singles muscling through the airwaves. A rotating CD rack perched on a speaker the size of an end table. I’d thought CDs were a passing phase, like 8-tracks, but was now giving in to fate. When Lesley and I moved in together that year, the hardest part was merging our record collections, deciding whose redundant copy of which David Bowie was less scratched, less nostalgically vital. An analog amalgam at the dawn of the digital sample. Our kitchen calendar said 1991, but it sounds like the 70s rebooted, Steve Miller Band, Aerosmith, even a little Lynyrd Skynyrd, all of it seamlessly synched together by the dance beat thumpings of a double bass drum kit. Trust me when I say I know the pathway to your heart.” If you go a million miles away I’ll track you down girl. I know you don’t love that guy ’cause I can see right through you. “You don’t really love that guy you make it with now do you? I might not have had her grades, her scholarship, none of the spark bursting through her poems. wouldn’t have their breakthrough till the following year, when it wasn’t just our college DJs twirling “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The whole multiverse was about to explode. Lesley was dating someone else, but we kissed once, during a party in her honors dorm, and then she flew away for a semester abroad. Michael Stipe is slouching by a back-up microphone, a cup of coffee in his hand, tambourine in the other. Despite all the Superman hubris, it’s an underdog’s song. Another ret-con, but nobody was pretending otherwise this time. Apparently this “Superman” was a cover of an obscure 1969 single from some band named the Clique. We meet in a student center utility closet moonlighting as our literary magazine office space. I had way too many Black Sabbath albums to get my head around R.E.M in high school, but college was another planet. I need you, but I hate to see you this way There’s got to be something better than this “Hey girl we’ve got to get out of this place If everyone jumps off a cliff, of course you jump off too. Next thing my first-ever girlfriend and I are cheering them in the Civic Arena, and wearing our matching concert T-shirts on our anniversary every month after clueless month. But suddenly there they are strumming between the Who and the Rolling Stones since the 60s. Reallocating the area of my brain previously devoted to superhero teams and baseball rosters. ![]() I’d been listening to Pittsburgh’s WDVD for a couple of years, memorizing playlists, band line-ups, discographies. I felt like the lone survivor from some parallel universe. ![]() First time I heard “Lola” from a radio speaker, a stadium of fans were la-la-la-ing the chorus. Van Halen’s “You Really Got Me” wasn’t a cover until it appeared on One for the Road, an album of rock classics retroactively inserted into the AOR timeline. That’s right, the Kinks did not exist before 1980. ![]() The year the Kinks were ret-conned into Rock continuity. I didn’t hear the song till their live album a year later. The Kinks with a disco beat? It was 1979 and so not entirely their fault. The Kinks, “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” Since then, lovedumb Supermen have been crooning through the decades.ĥ. Despite all of its anti-marriage ubermensch rhetoric (marriage is an obstacle to ideal breeding blah blah blah), George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 Man and Superman ends when the girl lassos her Clark in the final act. So it’s fitting that most Superman songs are love songs. The word “superman” premiered in a play about a modern Don Juan. The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here. ![]()
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