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 ......