This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review*. Buy back issues of the magazine here.*
The year is 1972, Oakland, California. Down a sunny street and inside the doors of a neighborhood teen center, things are popping. Everyone’s wearing black leotards, striped short shorts, flared blue jeans, tight, bright sweaters, floppy hats, Afros and Afropuffs, denim vests, crocheted shawls. They’re snapping bubblegum and petting dogs. Playing pool and Ping-Pong. Black Power posters line the walls. At one point the room spontaneously breaks into a beautiful acappella hymn: “That’s the way love is.”
And then, straight out of nowhere, smack in the middle of this scene appears a man in a voluminous black caftan draped in an iridescent silver overlay and a headdress of gold chainmail. He is a time traveler from another planet. He is flanked by a pair of resplendently costumed women, faces obscured by massive gilded animal masks; one dog, one eagle. They appear vaguely Egyptian, certainly not of this world. The camera centers on the curious visitor’s shoes: a pair of striped platform oxfords that conspire to send their wearer a few inches further into the atmosphere.
“What it is, what it is,” someone greets this spectral gang. “Why your shoes so big?” says another kid. “Are those moon shoes?” a girl asks. Another: “How do we know you for real? How do we know you ain’t some old hippie or something?”
“He might have something going for him,” a guy suggests. It’s not lost on anyone that the face of this vibrant, bizarrely outfitted visitor is the same color as theirs.
And at this, about 20 minutes into the film The Space Is the Place, their uninvited, recently-arrived-on-Earth guest introduces himself. He is an ambassador, he informs them in his chamomile-calm Southern Saturnalian accent, “from the intergalactic regions of outer space.”
Moon shoe girl pipes up again: “I ’bout to take off down the street running when I see somebody dressed like that talking to me about being from outer space!”
Sun Ra came from the galaxies decades before Isaac Hayes whipped off his multicolored robe and became Black Moses, shackled in gold chains; before Parliament arrived on the Mothership, or Hawkwind took their first ride on the Silver Machine; before Ziggy Stardust fell to Earth from Mars; before Dr. Octagon left his native Jupiter; before Kanye West donned a Margiela mask and longed for his own spaceship to fly past the sky. In his spangled capes and violet cloaks, his painted third eye, his mesh caps and pyramid hats and pharaoh’s headdresses and solar antennae, Sun Ra ushered in an utter sense of liberation, mystery, and free expression. He was not a man, he patiently explained to all who asked, but an angel. Above all, he projected benevolence: a hopeful idea of an extraordinary realm existing outside of the very troubled real world. He did this through what he wore just as radically as by the music he made.
He was born on Saturn. Or he was born nowhere (he preferred not to discuss his origin story in terra firma terms). Or, as a birth certificate for Herman Poole Blount claims, he was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 22, 1914. This detail is confirmed by his biographer, John Szwed, but for the better part of his time on Earth, Sun Ra avoided the literal world. He focused instead on the ancient times of his imagination, the future realms, and above all, music: His wildly innovative, improvised, modal, cascading, sometimes dissonant but also frequently harmonious compositions worked in touches of ragtime, big band, swing, bebop, and, of course, free jazz, of which he was a pioneer. Truly, though, Sun Ra was celestial jazz, space jazz—his was a music that shunned gravity and reached for the cosmos.
“The music was a little like the sound of Ornette Coleman, but further out, outer space music, close to the EEEE of an electric drill at the center of a harsh trumpet,” wrote Norman Mailer in 1963, after a friend took him to an open Arkestra rehearsal in Chicago. “My cold cleared up in five minutes, I swear it.”
By and by, Ra amassed his Arkestra, a sprawling collective of rotating and regular musicians who, led by his disciple Marshall Allen, still perform under the name (which is “how black people pronounce orchestra,” their original leader explained). Onstage, evocatively dubbed instruments—the flying saucer, the fireplace, and the sunharp—mingled with saxophone and trumpet and drums, and the then-novel Moog; they shared space with acrobatics, recited poetry, a transcendent circus, total theater. Twenty costume changes might occur in a single concert, cape upon cape. (And you thought James Brown had robes.)
Sun Ra might do a little softshoe to Billie Holiday; a replica of the solar system might serve as a hat, with a standup collar making pleated sunrays fan around his face. He and the Arkestra were as apt to pay aural homage to Frankenstein or Star Wars as they were to perform Duke Ellington. Veritable solunar storms erupted mid show on occasion, aided by lighting effects and industrial fans that sent the band’s garments billowing like sails. The fabric they sourced was so heavy that singer-dancers learned to swirl and sway and slide so it moved—“I developed the ‘space walk,’” said Arkestra member Verta Mae Grosvenor, “the one that Michael Jackson did later and called the ‘moon walk.’” In their metallic, bell-ringing, gliding wake came Sun Ra, cradling in his palm a crystal ball.
Sun Ra was the future, the ancient past, and the embattled present, all in one. Years before the Birmingham bombings, the town nicknamed Magic City was so segregated that young Sonny Blount, an insatiable reader, was slipped books by a librarian out of the back door of a public library. He was 8 years old when the entrance to the tomb of King Tut was unveiled to the world in 1922, in drawn-out, spellbinding suspense. This event resonated for him ever after: At Berkeley, where he briefly taught, prominent on his syllabus was the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He christened a certain talented protégé Pharoah Sanders. Moon Stew was the name of the dish he cooked for friends and it was never the same recipe twice. He rarely drank, didn’t do drugs, popped nutritional supplements before most anyone in Alabama knew what a vitamin was. Even his alleged interplanetary travels were well ahead of the times—long before stories of UFO abductions proliferated in popular media.
“This boy was definitely out-to-lunch,” said George Clinton, whose outsized helmets, bright furs, decorated jewels, and generally bedazzled, larger-than-life self in Parliament, Funkadelic, and onward, are a fantastical reflection of Sun Ra. “The same place I eat at.”
Sun Ra believed the avant-garde could use a sense of humor (he was right), and though a certain tongue-in-cheek sensibility emerged in his music, this found its truest expression in the way he dressed. He was raised in a time when jazzmen wore bow ties and pin-striped suits. “They don’t look like they’re having fun,” he told a reporter in 1986. “I want people to laugh at the costumes I have on. Why do astronauts wear what they wear? Why do soldiers? Because it makes people notice them more. The musicians have a perfect right to join the crowd and say, ‘We’re going to wear this; this is how I feel.’”
Feeling dictated fashion. During their Chicago period in the mid-’40s to early ’60s, Sun Ra and the Arkestra bought up costumes from an opera company and started wearing them onstage; the shimmering cloaks and metal headpieces chimed right in with Sun Ra’s organ. The outfits were a visual link between past and present—those breastplates and robes channeled the slaves and kings of Egypt as much as they did the comets and planets. Dressed in chrome-colored bodysuits and gossamer capes, singer June Tyson said she felt like a celestial being with the Arkestra as she chanted lyrics like, “If you find earth boring, just the same old same thing, c’mon sign up with Outer Spaceways.”
Central to the life story of every true icon is the defining moment when one rejects the world, the mainstream, and genuinely becomes oneself: When Coltrane had his Year Zero, kicking his addictions and making his debut. When Nina Simone roared through “Mississippi Goddamn.” When the Beatles dropped acid. And on and on. In the moment when you become yourself, you become something to others.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
For Sun Ra, this moment came in New York. He’d moved his band there and took to wearing his stage clothes on the street, all the time. He bought a pair of opaque, citrus-colored shades from a vendor on Orchard Street and wore them on the cover of Rolling Stone; in his flowing finery, he was a Lower East Side precursor to the caftans worn now by fashion icon Andre Leon Talley. The separation of costume and daywear disappeared altogether, and Sun Ra came into his own, letting his clothes sing.
It’s not that his outfits were so beautifully made or even as spectacular as the imaginative universe they represented—what made them fabulous was that they weren’t, at all. Their specialness emanated from their imperfections. They were handmade, homespun, assembled from Garment District remnants, theatrical castoffs, gifts of dashikis and togas from fans on tour; they lay somewhere in between drama department castoffs, a child’s dress-up drawer, and sci-fi fantasy. But no matter how shabby his stage clothes appeared in the light of day, the fact that he remained consistently in costume and thus in character was what made him truly radical—unafraid to be himself, to arouse attention, to draw stares, to elicit smiles. “What are you doing here?” Charles Mingus once asked him in the Village, and Sun Ra replied that he came downtown quite often. “No,” Mingus said. “I mean what are you doing on Earth?”
Kanye takes off his masks after the show is done and puts on his Yeezy boots and jeans. After David Bowie died, pictures surfaced of the Thin White Duke in cargo shorts, walking the streets of Soho. How marvelous it was, everyone said, that he had slipped in among mere mortals, unnoticed. But what Sun Ra had done, and done best, was reminding earthlings everywhere that he wasn’t mortal. He was a signifier of a life beyond the reality of this one. He was a visual reassurance of the presence of another world. He brought the cosmos to the streets, and, most importantly, he was a reminder that one does not have to subscribe to the status quo—musically, stylistically, politically, ideologically.
The vision of Sun Ra in the everyday, catching the subway or strolling through the grocery store in his alien garb, is inspirational. It’s akin to witnessing a carnie outside of his element, with a novel of tattoos running down his arms; the cool old couple holding hands in matching furs; the high schoolers sailing down the middle of the street in their cut-up, thrifted prom dresses on a regular afternoon; it’s the toga-wearing being with the Manic Panic-dyed beard beaming in the midst of the Central Park roller skaters. When the Sun came out, it was a rare bird sighting, a reminder of pure, total, not-a-damn-given, free expression, that assurance of the permanence of weirdness. It simply makes you happy to be alive.
But back to Oakland, early ’70s. Sun Ra moved there briefly at the invitation of Bobby Seale. Ra and the Arkestra lived in a house owned by the Black Panthers, whose military uniforms reclaimed symbols in a way that paralleled Sun Ra’s mythic dress, both offering their own version of Black Power: the Panthers in their black berets and leather jackets, Sun Ra in his moon boots.
“How do you know I’m real?” he addresses the youth center with a shattering peace that resonates loudly. “I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you were, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. I come to you as a myth… I come to you from a dream the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.” The luster of his brilliant cape illuminates the glow in the room, beaming the light right back at them.
