For some reason, as soon as I heard that Donna Summer passed away, the fist song that popped into my head was The Who’s “Sister Disco.” Clearly it has nothing to do with Donna, but there it was… and there it stayed ALL DAY YESTERDAY… And yes, it is still in here now.
So why, aside from the obvious disco in the title, did it pop into my brain? Perhaps I wanted to make sure y’all knew I was a rocker… even while talking about the Queen of Disco… Easy, Mark G… Easy…
Donna was great, no questions… and it does not matter whether or not you liked disco.
Back on September 16, 2008 I wrote about seeing Donna Summer at the Hollywood Bowl a few weeks before… She was absolutely phenomenal, but the piece was more about how I wished I was gay… You have to read the whole thing to understand, but here are a few excerpts…
“Why didn’t I take a dance class… more than the ones I had to take at Northwestern as a theatre major? I really try to shake it up a little, pull a hip hop move out of my ass… but sometimes it… just… scares people… or has them worried that I’m sick or convulsing.
So there I sat… dancing on the inside. I mean Donna Summer was great. She’s still got it and totally defines Diva in the best sense of the word. But as heart pounding, pelvic gyrating, foot tapping as her music was, I felt the need to channel Billy Idol and just “dance with myself.
Well… all this sitting did not “sit” well with the two young, stunning women in the box behind us, who kept telling us that we should dance with our dates. I didn’t have the heart to tell them they were not out girlfriends, so instead, each time they tapped me on the shoulder, I stood up and moved as best I could and tried to dance like one of the Brothers Gibb.
But really, I was content to leave the actual dancing to the professionals… the handsome gay men or the crazy, disco loving ladies who kept bothering them.
Either way, that night at the Hollywood Bowl, I wished I was gay.”
This is highly edited, and there were several other reasons why I wished I was gay that night, which you can read all about… but I wanted to talk about Donna. She had a new album out at that point called Crayons and I enjoyed her so much I tracked down the record a few days after her show. I was going to discuss that record, but how can you not discuss her monster hits?
Donna Summer – Gold
There is a lot of great music on these two discs…
“Love To Love You Baby”, “Could It Be Magic”, “Hot Stuff”, “I Feel Love”, “Last Dance” (come on… even a hardened rocker can melt and swoon just a little right?) “On The Radio”, “This Time I Know It’s For Real” and “She Works Hard For The Money”.
She was a Diva… She was the Queen… but sadly like too many, she is gone too soon and too young.
RIP Donna Summer!
