Happy Birthday, Diana Ross!
She turns us upside down.
The legendary Diana Ross is 79 today! Let's celebrate the Motown queen. (Her daughter, Tracee Ellis Ross, is another personal hero of mine.)
By 1967, the Supremes were now Diana Ross & The Supremes. For further details, see Dreamgirls .
This outfit from Diana's performance of "Love Hangover" on "Midnight Special" is just epic. If aliens landed, they'd head straight for her.
My favorite Diana album is her self-titled 1980 album, produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards from Chic. It boasts three major hits, "Upside Down," "My Old Piano," and "I'm Coming Out," the latter inspired by New York drag queens who'd dressed up as Diana.
Rodgers described the songwriting process in a 2021 TikTok video.
So the way that the song "I'm Coming Out" came to be was when we went to work for Diana Ross we wanted to write about things that were in her universe, so we went to her apartment and interviewed her for a couple of days. One particular night I went to a club, The Gilded Grape, and I happened to notice that there were at least 6 or 7 Diana Ross impersonators, so I went outside to call Bernard and said "you know, Diana Ross is revered by the gay community. If we wrote a song called "I'm Coming Out" for Diana Ross it would have the same power as James Brown 's " Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud " and next day we met in the studio [...] and then from that we built the song.
Seems fitting right now to end with this one.
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Six years in Ridgecrest. It's over 110 that starts being hard to live with.
That hat is everything.