With the death over the weekend of Joey Bowker — the enigmatic public-access zany known far and wide as
The Bat Poet— Nashville loses a one-man resistance movement against all that is slick, soulless and done for the money.
Bowker, 59, presided over one of the weirdest spectacles in the history of Nashville TV programming: a fleabag variety show featuring hand puppets, stuffed-animal warfare, wrestling matches, and local celebrity cameos ranging from attorney Bart Durham to country warbler Miss Melba Toast. These were embellished with crude first-generation video effects and supported by plotlines that could only be followed by kids and the deeply, irretrievably stoned.
But the man in the $62 Batman mask (purchased in 1992 from Spencer's Gifts in Hickory Hollow) had a loyal fan base that included musicians, politicians, wiseguy teens, college kids, and anyone else likely to be home, bored and curious on a Friday or Saturday night, when his shows aired on NECAT Channel 19 (as they have, off and on, since the show debuted in 1995). His notoriety was sometimes regarded as a mixed blessing at a public-access station trying to cultivate an air of professionalism. But there is too much dull proficiency in the world as it is, while there was only one Bat Poet.
