"You know what she sang like? She sang like if she didn’t sing, she’d die...."
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We’ve lost Tina Turner. Rolling Stone magazine called her “the Queen of Rock and Roll”. Pete Townshend called her “the female Little Richard”. Like Richard, she was volcanic. She was thrilling and unrepentant. She oozed sexuality. Her charisma was almost frightening. Mick Jagger used to stand on the side of the stage when she performed, hoping to absorb every move she made. She remains the only person who could upstage him.
She could sing anything. The blues. Gut-bucket rock and roll. Pop with a modern sheen. She took John Fogerty’s classic “Proud Mary” and detonated it into something that sounded like the soundtrack to the big bang. And all the while shimmying like James Brown, on the best pair of legs in the business. There was nobody even remotely like her.
Well, maybe there was one person like her.
Elvis.
Elvis was the male Tina Turner.
How does that sound?
The King and Queen.
They transcended…..well….everything.
They changed the world. As Elvis said when he was asked who he sounded like….
“I don’t sound like nobody…”
Neither did Tina. She sounded like the death knell of slavery and misogyny. She sounded like liberation. She gave a singing voice to our better angels.
You know what she sang like?
She sang like if she didn’t sing, she’d die.
It’s a pity she had to drag her abusive ex-husband Ike around with her, even after she got away from him. She was forever being asked about the relationship. Movies and musicals put it front and center again and again. Ike was at once a great bandleader and one of the most loathsome, brutish creatures popular music has ever produced. He remained an asshole until he managed to kill himself with an overdose of cocaine in 2007, toxic to the end. The abuses and cruelties he heaped on Tina were almost indescribable. Almost.
But Tina did describe them. In great detail in her multiple autobiographies. Ike burning her with coffee, beating her with shoes and hangers, raping her and breaking her jaw and nose before they took the stage and performed together. He’d smash her head into backstage walls. One night in Dallas, after another beating, she looked down at her sleeping husband and said “You just beat me for the last time, you sucker.” She escaped across a multi-lane highway, dark shades covering her blackened eyes, with 36 cents in her pocket, and never looked back.
She kicked the wall down. She decided she was going to talk about this when nobody else was. There was no shame. There was grace and defiance. And there was empathy for any woman trapped in the same situation. Eventually, her book was used as part of a domestic abuse course at the University of Colorado. She didn’t just further the narrative, she helped create it. Her bravery as a woman was every bit as important as her being one of the greatest performers who ever graced a stage.
It seemed none of those stages could hold her. She was a whirling dervish. (It’s said that the actress playing Tina in the Broadway musical required physical therapy after her run ended) After leaving Ike she took to cleaning houses to help pay her bills. For years she played any room or lounge that would have her. She was nearly forgotten by everyone except those in the house on those nights. Word of mouth grew. One night David Bowie learned of a small NYC club gig and insisted 63 of his friends attend with him. After the show he and Tina and Keith Richards held court around the hotel bar piano, and she went drink-for-drink and song-for-song with both of them. Peers. Something was in the air.
(A few years later Bowie joined Tina onstage and, grinning like a schoolboy, tells the crown “this is a privilege..”)
For Tina the stars finally aligned with “Private Dancer” in 1984. Thus began perhaps the greatest second act in music history. Over 12 million records sold. Multiple Grammy awards. Her look became iconic. Black pumps with the leather mini, slit on the sides. Faded denim jacket. That incredible wig that looked like the mane of a lioness. She became a single name. Tina. Her mid-80s peers were Madonna and Michael and Mick and Bruce and Prince and Sting. She had enough star power to stand toe-to-toe with any of them. She was in her mid-40s, and never pretended that she wasn’t. Nobody ever aged more gracefully. Nobody ever made getting older more irrelevant.
There’s a 1997 interview Tina gave to Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. As she shows him around her lavish estate in the South of France, Wallace, not known for his tact, blurts out “You feel you deserve all this?”
Tina never misses a beat. “I deserve more”, she says.
Damn right.
In a bit…
—tf