by Colin Hyde
Don’t look at me as if I am too last-century to wonder if Tina Turner was wayward. Her man used to beat her up, right? Tina Turner said she had a permanent black eye and one time she got a broken jaw. There’s no doubt that her beau had some evil in him. These brutish guys, they never listened to the lesson Camelot’s King Arthur said he got from a wise old man when he wondered about how to handle women. No threats, no cajoling, no flattering, all you got to do, the wise oldster said, is “love her”, love her, and she’ll be your taffi. Yap, that’s all the girl wants. Don’t go about beating up women. It’s not only against the law, it’s unmanly too.
Tina Turner has a “twin”, Millie Jackson. Those girls were two “bad” women entertainers, in the sense that they could make a song do things to you. Millie had me for her property when she sang “Back in love by Monday”, but I pulled back from her, naa, not “all the way”, I pulled back from her, put a shield around my heart, because she started sounding like a man-eater. I kind of prefer an, ehm, docile woman, and she was “getting”, ehm, raunchy. Whoa there, some of us guy types don’t like to be bullied. It’s from the Bible that the woman shouldn’t be the dominant force.
Yup, docile women are the big prize. Some guys think they are oh so special they can handle one and two and three. You bohbo, it’s the girl, not you. A guy can have all the money and give all the attention, but if he lands a “bad” gyal, he will get the sense. Forgive me for the about turn from the wisdom of old counsel when I say there’s no way to control that type, especially not after this modern wave came along and absolutely deleted physical cruelties.
Tina Turner’s music, she’s mature, but she never scared me off. Tina and “Private Dancer”, whew, the way she sang that song! The story is, the author of the piece realized after he wrote it that a man could never sing it. Ai, in the dancer’s cold, lonely, mercenary state there is warmth, a flickering dream of a better life. She didn’t really belong there. But all the evidence says some do.
Look, everyone’s got a space here, and REAL bad girls have a right to their district. We allowed others the closet, didn’t we? We just have to be straight and strict with the process. The district should be for “real” bad gyal oanli. There’ll be no seduction or corruption to corral any girl who kud make good church material. They’ll have to go before a Board to get a license. We must be sure about the cut of the jib. Remember a lady who told the Gleaner that she didn’t mind her young daughter getting in on the action bikaaz a little sex never haam nobody, and the young, slutty Hollywood girl who said “it’s just a hole”, well they belong there, they should get an automatic pass to sell. If that da di way dehn feel, that the treasure is but a trinket, that da di way dehn feel.
Tina sang, “What’s love got to do with it”, a song that was written by Graham Lyle and Terry Britten. Hold there, love has everything to do with it, unless you are some real cold fish or in terrible denial. You remember what the fox said when he couldn’t get the grapes. Love, love made JC give up His life for us, and love, love made your ma carry you for nine months. Lust has its own story, and love ain’t any secondhand emotion.
Hey, at some time Tina will meet up with our Esquivel, and I bet she’ll ask, what was that with you quoting that song? And I bet our Esquivel will say, “Well, it was 100% in the context of business, hard decisions trying to keep the country from going bankrupt after George Price let Ralph Fonseca borrow money at commercial rates from private banks.”
Hurray, in the end we find that Tina was no bad gyal ataal – sorry, no sober society encourages that. What we find is that Ike just had too much woman to control. He was eight years older than she was when they hooked up, and when she hooked up with another man, he was sixteen years younger than she. I will say that’s very interesting, and leave that at that. Staying on the surface, man, I’m staying on the surface where I belong.
The aggressive women’s league is on a big offensive, trying to steal all of Tina Turner. They, the women’s league, to push us down they’re all over the story of how she rose from being bashed by Ike. Tina left home with 36 cents, and nothing else, they say. Other reports say that’s not entirely true. Other reports say there was a settlement, though Tina didn’t clean Ike out. What I think are the facts? I understand that when she left Ike that was the end of him creatively and then financially.
Ike Turner was a musical giant
He did a lot of dope, he had his fun with women who liked playing around, he hit women, and he was a giant in the music industry and instrumental in the development of the superstar singer, Tina Turner. That’s the report I got from Edward Kiersh in the story “Ike Turner: Why I beat Tina” which was published in August 1985 in Spin Magazine. The article can be found at the website, thedailybeast.com.
Ike said: “Yeah, I hit her, but I didn’t hit her more than the average guy beats his wife. The truth is, our life was no different from the guy next door’s. It’s been exaggerated. People buy bad news, dirty news. If she says I abused her, maybe I did.”
Kiersh wrote, of Ike: “The sweet sweetback of rock, who put the S-E-X into Tina’s swagger, who cut what is arguably the first rock record, “Rocket 88,” in 1951; who discovered B.B. King and Little Junior Parker; and who once hired a kid he saw a lot of potential in, Jimi Hendrix by name…”
Ike said, of Tina: “That woman will say whatever she thinks you want to hear. I don’t care what she says about me, I’ll always be her friend. If the devil was real, it was real…”
I was joking when I said Esquivel hotel could sink Belize City
In one of my columns a ways back — I’ve been around, a lot more on than off, since 2003, Braa— I wrote that one day when I was sailing in the harbor I looked to the west, to Belize City, at the Esquivel hotel (remember he, ehm, “owned” it for a spell) and I thought that monstrous thing would sink and pull Belize City into the sea. If you love monstrous — some people call these massive ferroconcrete structures beautiful, and a sign of progress – give it up to Esquivel and the UDP who also built the fortress Central Bank.
Before those structures dominated Belize City’s shoreline, the most bulky buildings in Belize were Mayan temples. The tallest manmade structure in Belize is still at Caracol. I’m not impressed by big buildings. When I see temples and pyramids, I think slave labor. Okay, you have to respect the engineering, but I’ll give my kudos to a bridge, not a building. They aren’t even safe. For all the thickness of the Central Bank’s walls, look how easily the PUP got in there and drained our little savings.
I’m thinking about our monstrous buildings after reading this week about what structures made out of the very same materials are doing to New York City and Mexico City. Those two famous cities are reportedly slowly going under, under the tremendous weight of ferroconcrete.