Queen of Rock & Roll 1939-2023

 Tina Turner, the Queen of Rock and Roll, passed away. I was a fan.

The first time I ever watched "Saturday Night Live" by myself (a lovely tradition I've continued for nearly forty years) was not for the guest host or the cast, but for Turner, who was on the radio with "What's Love Got To Do With It" at the time.

Anyway, Tina Turner died today, at age eighty-three.  She'd been sick for a while, living out her final years in Switzerland, where she had repatriated a decade ago.

Big Anklevich has told me time and time again over the years how much he hated Turner's music, mostly due to her voice (which Juggy Murray, president of her first record label, described as "sounding like screaming dirt."), but it's never come between us as friends.  After all, he knows what I think of his favorite band.

Something remarkable (and unheard-of in 2023) is that, when I first became a fan, when "WLGTDWI"" and "Private Dancer" and "We Don't Need Another Hero" and "Better Be Good To Me" came out, she was already in her forties, having been half of Ike and Tina Turner in the Sixties and Seventies.  But she had this enormous comeback, with hit after hit, like "Simply The Best" and "Typical Male" and "I Don't Wanna Fight Anymore" and the theme to GOLDENEYE, and when Big and I talked about her silly title ("The Queen of Rock & Roll"), we couldn't really come up with somebody else who deserved it more.*

We took a few minutes going through honorific titles for various other artists (there was a whole page for it on Wikipedia), playing a sadistic game where I would ask Big who was known as The Chairman of the Board, or The Voice, or Godfather of Soul, or the King of Swing, or The Artist.  Before I knew it, I had wasted two of Big's precious hours with the game, and he hung his head in shame.

Anyway again, I wanted to say something, because I was a big fan, and was happy to see her get the recognition she had earned from such an enormous career, and music that reached me so profoundly that I still remember that first SNL I watched, waiting to hear that song.

"Who needs a heart, when a heart can be broken?"

*Except Carly Rae Jepsen.  We both agreed on that.