As much as I love Tina Turner — she’s one of my all-time favorite singers — I have mixed feelings about the news, announced on Oprah last week, that she’s hitting the road again this fall.
The as-yet-unnamed tour will kick off Oct. 1 in Kansas City, Mo. A Washington date is slated for Nov. 23 at the Verizon Center. It’s Tina’s first trek since her “One Last Time Tour” (aka the “Twenty Four Seven World Tour”) ended in 2000. Tina, 68, said repeatedly that tour would be her swan song, but has been dropping hints that she might not be done.
A 2005 interview with Washington Post on the occasion of her Kennedy Center honor made it clear touring was on Tina’s mind.
And this isn’t the first time a veteran artist has reneged on a retirement pledge. Fans — even the ones who coughed up big bucks thinking it would be their last chance to see a favorite — almost universally welcome these returns. Barbra Streisand is the most “Guilty” of milking the retirement shtick. The Eagles parodied the concept with their “Farewell 1 Tour” concert DVD in 2005. Cher slips by on a technicality — with her new Vegas show she’s not technically touring. (Her three-year-long “Living Proof Farewell Tour” was billed ad nauseum as her last outing).
But milking the touring gravy train is something I’d hoped Turner would avoid. It’s not that the notion of seeing her again isn’t enticing (I haven’t yet decided whether to go). But it reeks more of a shameless money grab than a musical endeavor. Especially when there’s no new album to promote.
It’s not that one has to have a new album to justify touring. Acts like the Rolling Stones have continually proven they remain a major draw whether there’s a new album to hawk or not. And concert fans, especially casual ones, are usually much more interested in a stomp through the hits than new material. Some, like the Stones, Bob Dylan, et. al., keep things balanced by pulling out obscure gems from their immense canons.
But as the years have gone by with Turner, it’s become less and less about making good music and more about milking her hits “one more time,” as she ad libs on her chestnut, “Nutbush City Limits.”
I realize I’m in the minority here. Most Turner fans will shriek in euphoria to hear her dust off “Proud Mary” yet again. But for those of us who loved her when she was still interested in making new music, another shameless run through a predictable set list doesn’t seem too enticing.
We tune in every time she’s scheduled to make a TV appearance, only to hear her tear through “Proud Mary” once again. It happened on this year’s Grammys, last week on Oprah and on the VH1 Divas Live show in 1999 (the last time she sang with Cher — it hadn’t been the decades that Oprah implied when she introduced the two on her show last week). Sure, it’s always great to see Tina, but I’m ready for something different.
We get little reminders now and then there’s an artist lurking deep inside the “Proud Mary” routine, which, at this point, is beyond self-parody. Her splendid collaboration with Herbie Hancock on last year’s Grammy-winning “River: the Joni Letters” proves there’s more depth to her ability than her last few appearances have implied.
Admittedly there were some nice surprises on the last tour. She hadn’t sung early hits like “A Fool in Love” and “Acid Queen” in eons and her smoldering slow-burn cover of “Heard it Through the Grapevine” was a nice surprise (nobody covers a song and owns it like Tina!).
But huge sections of the show felt like the same old thing. She’s been performing the exact same arrangement of “Proud Mary” for about 25 years. That tired stadium arrangement pales in comparison to the blisteringly raw version she and ex-hubby Ike immortalized on their “What You Hear is What You Get: Live at Carnegie Hall” album from 1971.
Similarly, arrangements of “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” “Better Be Good to Me,” “Nutbush City Limits,” et. al., didn’t change one iota from the “Foreign Affair Tour” (1990) to the “What’s Love Tour” (1993) to the “Wildest Dreams Tour” (1996-1997) to the “Twenty Four Seven Tour” (2000).
I realize Tina’s in a bit of a creative catch-22. Like any veteran artist, there are certain hits that simply have to be performed or casual fans walk away moaning. Those brave enough to forge ahead into new areas (like Madonna did on the brilliant “Drowned World Tour”) risk alienating large segments of their audience (Madonna could get away with it that time because she hadn’t toured in nearly a decade).
But there’s also some refreshing middle ground, and I hope that’s what Tina will aim for. Two weeks ago I caught Dolly Parton’s splendid “Backwoods Barbie” tour and she refreshingly included long-unheard older singles like “White Limozeen,” “Baby I’m Burnin” and “Eagle When She Flies” — great songs all but not what one would consider signature, trademark hits.
Turner should go ahead and milk the touring gravy train if she feels so inclined. She’ll obviously sell out arenas all around the country (only U.S. and Canada dates have been announced so far). There’s clearly pent-up demand since she’s been off the road so long.
But it would lend this shameless revival some much-needed artistic credibility to have hunkered down first and made a slam-dunk album. She’s due for one as 1999’s “Twenty Four Seven” and 1996’s “Wildest Dreams” both contained multiple moments of greatness amidst the over-produced schlock. Hints of what could be — the masterpiece of a project she hasn’t even flirted with since 1989’s “Foreign Affair” which, despite the ’80s production, is a damn good record. I’d love to hear what she and producer extraordinaire Rick Rubin (who’s displayed a penchant for working with veteran artists) could come up with.
So yes we’ll go. Yes, we’ll roll down the river. Yes, we’ll buy the tourbook. Yes, it’ll sell out. I’d just hoped that Tina’s long-rumored emergence from retirement would have marked an evolution. Maybe she’ll prove me wrong and vary the proceedings.
But, unfortunately, I doubt it. It’s a shame because Tina’s capable of so much more. If you’re itching for a big dose of classic Tina, skip the tour and check out last year’s brilliant “Ike and Tina Turner Story” box set from Time Life.
The American Civil Liberties Union recently launched a gay rights resource website called "Get Busy, Get Equal." The site gives the community the tools needed to create change towards equality.
The site features news, video and a guide to organizing.
The ACLU explains: "This online toolkit provides the tools you need to reach out to your neighbors, schools, employers and elected officials and get them to pass laws or adopt policies protecting LGBT people and the relationships of LGBT people. There is also information on how to protect your relationship and family and how to share your experiences to illustrate the real harm of discrimination. This collection of information, helpful hints, step-by-step instructions and other resources can be used right now to protect LGBT people and our rights."
The real diva smackdown comes in the Leading Actress in a Musical category. Patti LuPone is up for her riveting performance as Mama Rose in "Gypsy" (a role she was seemingly born to play) and Kelli O'Hara, from "South Pacific," is her main competitor.
I'd love to see "South Pacific," because it's suppoed to be magical (and an interesting marketing choice given the U.S.' current occupation of a nation that brings up issues or racism — you've got to be carefully taught, indeed).
I saw LuPone in "Gypsy" during its City Center run, and she was downright terrifyingly brilliant. Supposedly, she's rounded the character out even more, which should be dazzling (even New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who's not her biggest fan from the gossip I've heard and read, raved about her).
I've always loved watching the Tonys (imagine), and one time when I was in grade school, one of our dogs was giving birth during the broadcast. I was running back and forth between the whelping box and the television,hoping to catch all the musical numbers.
“Vertigo,” considered director Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece by many cineastes, turns 50 today.
The landmark film, which stars Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes, hit U.S. screens on May 9, 1958.
I discovered this mystery about a man with a fear of heights who unwittingly falls in love while being entangled in an elaborate murder scheme on VHS in about 1986, just after Universal put it back in circulation. It and four other Hitchcock pictures had been unshown for 20 years, but this was all beyond my information realm at the time. I was 9 and just realizing that Hitchcock had done more than host suspense anthology “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” (which the earlier “Alfred Hitchock Presents” had morphed into). I’d become addicted to the show on Saturday nights on cable’s USA Network.
Watching “Vertigo” late one night with my parents I found it strangely terrifying. Seems a bit odd now — unlike “Psycho,” “Vertigo” has no blood, spooky old house, maniac on the loose or mummified discoveries in the cellar. Even then I couldn’t quite pinpoint why “Vertigo” disturbed me, but then neither can I explain now why I keep returning to it.
Why do I have spiral sketches from Saul Bass’s masterful credit sequence and a still of the Portrait of Carlotta on my desk? I’m certainly not frightened by “Vertigo” and yet that initial viewing turned out to be rather life altering.
“Vertigo” haunted me the same way Catholic Church imagery haunted me as a child — 17th and 18th Century art, large churches and foreboding graveyards, plus deserted missions whose only inhabitants seem to be grim reaper nuns who appear like phantoms out of nowhere. Bernard Herrmann’s brilliant score clearly upped the emotional ante.
So much of that first experience seems absurd now. “Vertigo’s” initial theme (which — plot spoilers ahead — turns out to be an elaborate hoax) of a woman who’s possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother struck my fundamentalist Christian parents as a smidge too close to demonic possession territory and there was talk of ejecting it.
Thankfully wisdom prevailed and we continued (to this day, I can picture where we were sitting in the room and my parents’ comments when it was over. My father’s knee-jerk take: “[Stewart] kinda got the raw end of the deal” — an understatement for the ages).
Eventually we got a second VCR, so I re-rented it and dubbed an illegal copy showing it to friends (videotapes were ridiculously expensive in those days — now you can’t give them away). My puberty-era pals seemed to regard it as an interesting-enough murder mystery, but little more.
I’d fully grasped the plot twists on first viewing but was always curious to gauge my friends’ reaction to the flashback scene in which Stewart’s character discovers it wasn’t Kim Novak’s character who went plunging out the window of the mission tower at San Juan Batista. Childhood pal David’s first thought was that Elster had thrown a dummy. When my ex-boyfriend Brent saw Judy slipping into flashback mode his first thought was that Scottie’s vertigo was somehow contagious and Judy had caught it. (This scene has always been controversial. It essentially gives the movie's secret away before the final act.)
I didn’t know anyone, though, who seemed to be as fascinated by the movie as I was (Brent, to this day, hates it — it’s his least-favorite Hitchcock by far).
I ended up writing papers on it in college. I analyzed the dream sequence for a class on cultural semiotics. Herrmann’s score provided fodder for a music history class analysis. Naturally I was beside myself with euphoria in 1996 when I learned cinematic saviors Robert Harris and James Katz had painstakingly restored the film, the original negative of which had deteriorated substantially.
Setting my emotional attachment aside, I realize it’s a curious little picture. Who would concoct as elaborate a ruse as Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to murder his wife?
It seems about as plausible as George and Martha’s wildly improbable deal to pretend they have a son and carry on as if he’s a real person in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” As with Elster’s murder plan, this is ludicrously absurd.
And the only plausible explanation for what many have pointed to as a “Vertigo” plot hole is that Ellen Corby’s hotel owner is in on the plan with Elster and Judy and plays along by telling Scottie that “Madeline,” who rents a room from her, hasn’t been in that day (Scottie followed her there and saw her go in). What did Elster tell the owner? That it was a practical joke? A real gas, eh?
“Vertigo,” clearly, is not a movie whose power is evoked through plausibility. In fact, its utter improbability, along with its misty San Francisco landscapes, undoubtedly adds to its dreamy aesthetic, for that’s what “Vertigo” ultimately is — a dream that occasionally slips into nightmare mode.
More literally, it’s a dream because it’s that rarest of films — a project where all the pistons fired and every element not only worked individually but coalesced into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Stewart’s performance showed he could do more than the gosh-golly-shucks routine. If Kim Novak’s scenes as Madeline seem limited, compare them to how natural she is as Judy and consider how awkward a gal like Judy (a shop girl, not an actress) would feel having to pretend to be someone she’d never met. It would be a hideously uncomfortable situation, having to ramble on to Scottie about elaborate phony trance experiences sketched out in precise detail by Elster.
And is there a finer character actress than the late Barbara Bel Geddes (I’d loved her previously as “Dallas’” Miss Ellie)? Her Midge gives “Vertigo” its only comic relief and yet the scene in which she walks out of the sanitarium — Hitchcock holds the shot almost perversely long — is heartbreakingly sad.
Perhaps we gay men relate to Midge so well because we’ve all been in her shoes — pining away, at some point (more often than I’d care to admit), for a man we know we can never have (either because he’s straight or gay but just not feeling it for us). And if we don’t relate to Midge, we at least understand her. Though Scottie’s unequivocally straight (even in San Francisco!), she furnishes him with a sort of fag hag/gal pal, an unequivocal part of the gay experience.
But …. I’ve digressed.
Perhaps my “Vertigo” fixation, as with any obsession, is impossible to fully explain. As with Scottie’s obsession with Madeline, it just is.
Joey DiGuglielmo considers the phenomenon of the Hitchcock blonde here.
Just this week, Pennsylvania killed an amendment that would ban gay marriage. Now, Gov. Ed Rendell will march in a Pride parade in New Hope on May 17.
"The parade and the entire weekend showcase New Hope and our diverse community," said Louis Licitra, Chair of New Hope Celebrates Pride 2008, in a press release. "It is fast becoming an annual New Hope tradition which highlights our varied history and our commitment to the future as a gay-friendly destination."
"The Governor has been an outspoken advocate for gay rights and is famous for his midnight visits to gay and lesbian bars during political campaigns for himself and other candidates. As the community often hears: 'The guv loves the gays!'" said Stephen Glassman, chair of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.
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