Richibi’s Weblog

  Tina Turner performing in Norway, 1985

             __________

                                                  for Norm

shortly after my most recent post, a 
friend, as avid as I am about Classical
music, but who also lived through our
own golden age of music, and throbbed 
as I did to its pounding rhythms, sent 
me this video of one of Tina’s greatest 
hits, “Proud Mary“

not to mention that my inbox lit up at 
the same time with equally corroborative 
applause from a host of other, apparently
also fervid, admirers

it was the best of times, it was the worst 
of times, everyone did everything with
anyone then, and was impeded only    
by hir own personal inhibitions

therefore Studio 54, and even more 
glamorous Manhattan party outlets, 
the Paradise Garage, Les Mouches, 
warehouses full of carousers, and 
Bette Midler was showcasing at the
Continental Baths, if you were 
wanting a less frenzied, though not 
at all uneventful, evening, or night
  
London had it’s comparable Heaven, 
nowhere was not having its bacchanals

the era would come down crashing, 
never to be put back together again,
of course, as a soothsayer I knew 
was then prophesying, but while it 
lasted we revelled, and had Tina 
Turner, among other, as incendiary, 
oracles telling it like it was, is, listen

 
Beethoven would’ve been proud of 
Tina, incidentally, note the adherence 
to Classical conditions, tonality, tempo, 
and repetition, art is about doing your 
own stuff around those imperatives, or, 
if you can, busting through them

Tina might not have burst through, but  
she sure knew what to do with her 
perimeters, which is to say, knock them
right out of the ballpark   

wow, watch, what a woman

R ! chard

psst: thanks Norm