Rod the Rocker
- 9/12/2008 <--Prev : Next-->
Well well well, here we are at a nubile yet venerable age, well past majority, in fact
bordering on creating an epoch , and we have just been to our third rock concert !!
We just missed the Woodstock era by a hairsbreadth .... Cliff Richard at the Palace Hotel
could hardly be described as a "rock concert" ..... mother refused to allow us to see Elvis
when he came to Bulawayo !! and the closest we got to a concert was watching the
Drakensberg Boys Choir.
But then of course, as innovative as we had to be, we used to make our own rock concert
type entertainment, like "sessions" with Ots Waygood at the Jewish Guild Hall, or at St
Mary's Catholic Church Hall or dancing to the Collection at the Macdonald Club !!
It was only when I married HeeHoo that real live Rock Concerts entered our lives.....
The first was Bruce Springsteen in Harare in the eighties ... that was an extraordinary
experience .... it was at the National sports Centre and it was a glorious occasion.
It was not that we led an over protected life I assure you, it was just that no one famous
came to visit Rhodesia , as it was then known, due to our strange political leanings. There
was a brief period of normalcy in Zimbabwe, between 1980 when Independence was
declared, and about 1996 (when the wheels started to fall off the country once again),
when we had a number of famous entertainers blessing us with their talents.
And it was also not that we had a deprived childhood either, Michael Bullivant has spent
every waking hour of his energetic life making sure we have had at least one if not two
classical concerts weekly in Bulawayo, and then of course there was the annual Texan Rock
Band Concert at the amphitheatre every Trade Fair. !! What more could a healthy well
brought up Zimbabwe teenager need in his/her life !!
But Bruce was one of the only real rocking jaunts we ever took, and was it my very first
Rock Concert experience.
The second was when went to see Eric Clapton, again in Harare, again magical. We did go
and see the BeeGees at Loftus some years ago but they were so far away that we could
only see them with binos, it could have been Tarzan and the Ape Men singing for all we
knew .... so that does not really count and although the music was great, the magic
atmosphere was lost in the vastness of the stadium.
And so Rod Stewart was officially my third Rock Concert, and I was grateful that every
Baby Boomer in South Africa had also bought a ticket, as Rock Concerts are generally only
for the young they tell me ? However we proved them wrong !!!!
Perhaps they should have had a few more St John's ambulance people there with oxygen at
various points along the way between the car park and the venue ?
A few more "crash carts" could probably have been ordered, as those Baby Boomers gave
Rod the Rocker the welcome of his life !! There were some "Antiques" of dotage note there
singing along with geriatric vigor.
Oh those magic songs of his, "Forever Young" was undoubtedly one of the favourites
amongst the senile but surprisingly enough there were loads of youngsters there too !!
When the oldest teenager in the business, clad in his wild silver jacket, shook and gyrated
for two solid hours, those long skinny legs of his must have been as tired as ours were
from rockin' and rollin' in our senile seats, in the augustan aisles, along the wizened
walkways .... oh what a night it was, such a night ......
