It’s Friday And I Need To Dance!

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Every Friday, Tunes du Jour’s playlist is designed to get you dancing into the weekend. Today we kick off with The Spinners’ “The Rubberband Man,” written by the songwriting team of Thom Bell and Linda Creed, as today is Creed’s birthday.

You may not know her name, but chances are you know some of her work. With Bell, she composed several hits for 70s soul group The Stylistics, including “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” “You Are Everything,” “Break Up to Make Up,” “I’m Stone in Love With You,” “Rockin’ Roll Baby” and “Betcha By Golly Wow.” If any readers plan on marrying me, note that I insist the latter be our wedding song.

With Michael Masser, Creed wrote “The Greatest Love of All” for the Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest. George Benson took the film’s theme song to #24 in 1977. The week of May 17, 1986, Whitney Houston took her remake of the song to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. However, Creed didn’t get to see that. She died one month earlier of breast cancer at age 37.

I Tina

Happy Tina Turner’s Birthday!

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Down the street from my first job in midtown Manhattan was a bookstore that often hosted book signings. There was also a record store one block over that held album/cassette/CD signings. Between these two places I got to meet many great artists, including Prince, Joan Rivers, Liberace and Tipper Gore. I also met Tina Turner, who turns 74 today.

I Tina

My main memory about that meeting was how flawless her skin was. She was 46 and there was not a wrinkle to be found. I’m now older than she was then and my face is devoid of wrinkles, which is why I’m often mistaken for Tina.

Tina-mania was high in 1986. After separating from her abusive husband Ike, she toiled in relative obscurity until her 1984 album Private Dancer put her back on the map in a big way. The album sold around twenty million copies worldwide and earned Tina a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year (alongside three other great albums – Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., Prince & the Revolution’s Purple Rain and Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, as well as Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. Guess who won.), with its single “What’s Love Got to Do With It” winning Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female and its “Better Be Good To Me” winning Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female. In 1986 she released her best-selling autobiography, I, Tina, and her follow-up to Private Dancer, Break Every Rule, which produced three top forty hits in the U.S.

Enjoy this Tina Turner-inspired playlist.