Christopher Sandford

Even rock and roll can have produced few stranger paths than the one that led a then physically unprepossessing, raspy-voiced African-American named Anna Mae Bullock from her early days as a devoutly Baptist sharecropper’s daughter in Depression-era Tennessee, to her final years as a practicing Buddhist living in a whitewashed mansion overlooking the dove-blue haze of Lake Geneva. That was the life trajectory of the artist known to the world as Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of eighty-three.

It was the ultimate summit between the two kings of pop-art camp, and one of the weirdest celebrity encounters even by the standards of 1970s New York. Salvador Dalí might have been the century’s most notorious modernist, but by the spring of 1973, when he was turning sixty-nine, his reign as the high priest of surrealism had descended into self-parody. Paintings such as his 1931 “The Persistence of Memory,” with its array of limp watches set in a barren landscape, had once sharply polarized critical opinion. For years, people saw Dalí either as a beacon of intellectual and emotional freedom, or as a madman who was more interested in money than art.

If, in the spring of 1923, you’d somehow found yourself in the tumbleweed junction of Spokane, Washington, you might have shaken the dust from your feet at the strange and magnificent Davenport Hotel. Still standing today, this vast folly, soaring up in the middle of town like a gaudily iced wedding cake, was evidently greeted by cries of disbelief upon its opening in 1914. In the rural west of the early twentieth century, the Davenport was the last word in luxury and refinement. The lobby was a work of art in itself, with lamps in alabaster shells mounted on a twisted bronze column in each corner, and an Italian marble fountain set under a chandelier that tilted at a slightly drunken angle, like one of those ghostly photographs taken onboard the wreck of the Titanic.

Relatively few rock musicians would care to replace Eric Clapton in a band, or to veer spectacularly off course to record a free-form jazz-inflected album that defied prediction to sell two million copies, or for that matter to laughingly turn down an invitation to become a fully fledged member of the Rolling Stones. The British guitarist Jeff Beck, who died this week at the age of 78, did all of these things and more. A brilliantly gifted instrumentalist, he never kept still musically. To call Beck the David Bowie of the guitar world would be to confer a somewhat misleading sense of consistency on a maverick who seemed to reinvent himself with every album, and sometimes every song.