Tina Turner (Anna Mae Bullock, 1939-2023) passed away back on May 24. This was too momentous for a hasty, ad hoc memoriam, so I opted to wait and do a more thoughtful tribute on her birthday. Her vilified ex Ike Turner (Izear Luster Turner Jr., 1931-2007) was also born in November.
Most celebrity obits are superficial in the extreme, merely reminding readers of supposed high points and low points in a person's life, often missing their true significance entirely. This is definitely one of those occasions. The success of Ike and Tina Turner began decades before Top 40 hits and Hollywood movies came into it, and has always been deeper in certain pockets of America than the culture-at-large. (Those pockets being black music fans...and fans of black music. The latter is not the same as the former. I'd further add that, while many white people CLAIM to be fans of black music, what they really mean is that they are fans of the small amount of black American music that has made it onto their radar by way of the pop charts. There are many other charts in the record business.)
First I want to digress (seemingly) to talk about the significance of the name Turner. Specifically I hope you will read my post on Big Joe Turner, which is here. I've come across no mentions of Ike being related to either of the Joe Turners in that post, but there is a kind of confluence. Bill Haley and the Comets recorded tunes by both artists, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" by Big Joe, and "Rocket 88" by Ike. Many have called "Rocket 88" (1951) the first rock and roll song. Former Rolling Stone Ian Stewart named his band after the tune. It was the first recording by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, though for some reason Sam Phillips opted to credit the release to "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats" (Brenston sang lead but Turner was the leader of the band).
Originally from Clarksdale, Mississippi, Turner started out playing guitar for a jazz orchestra called The Tophatters circa 1946. The Kings of Rhythm were a splinter group off the Tophatters. He naturally made his way to Memphis where he worked at Sun at other labels as a recording artist, session musician and A & R man. Artists he was credited with discovering in these early years included Howlin' Wolf, Little Milton, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Little Junior Parker. On his own records, Turner played guitar and piano, and sang in a bass voice not unlike that of Orville Jones of The Ink Spots.
It was when Ike and his band were playing clubs in St Louis (Chuck Berry's town) that young Anna Mae Bullock tried out for and was accepted into the band in 1956. A native of the Brownsville, Tennessee area, she had started out singing in church, and had a little experience in night clubs. As "Little Ann" she sang on Ike's tune "Boxtop" in 1958, and slowly insinuated herself deeper and deeper into the act. By 1960 when she sang lead on "A Fool in Love" she was fhe fully fledged Tina Turner. It went to #27 on the pop charts, and was Ike's first real hit since "Rocket 88". Ike knew what side his bread was buttered on, and he began to build the act around her talents.
Basically, Tina Turner's act was that she was a wild woman, a jungle woman. That's not me imposing some sort of European value judgment. The whole point of black music throughout American history has been the steady process of admitting the joy and excitement of African music into western song structures, performance and instrumentation. There were novelty tunes that sort of acknowledged that evolution, and many that embraced it and promoted it. Acts like James Brown and Little Richard and Screaming Jay Hawkins were among them. Tina Turner, with her hoarse blues shout, and her gyrating dance moves completely pushed the outside of that envelope. Aside from sounding good with "Turner", the name Tina rhymes with that of "Sheena", the Queen of the Jungle from the comic books. That's literally what they were going for.
This was an act that embraced the tastes of its black audiences; consequently it took them several years to cross over into pop success. For many years, they dominated the R & B charts and toured the chitlin' circuit, successor to the black vaudeville circuits. Their stage show The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was in the tradition of Black Patti's Troubadors, and the blues revues of Ma Rainey and the Whitman Sisters. In addition to the huge band, with Tina fronting, there was also a trio of backing singers called The Ikettes.
Like James Brown, who was on a kind of parallel track, they did not truly break through into mass consciousness until the mid '60s, by which time TV audiences had been primed for them by acts like Sam Cooke and the many girl groups of color. In 1964 they had a hit live LP and got booked on shows like American Bandstand, Shindig, and Hollywood-a-Go-Go. Phil Spector booked him for his concert film The Big T.N.T. Show (1965). Then came the famous debacle of 1966. Spector poured his all into all into the sing "River Deep -- Mountain High", declaring it to be his masterpiece. It didn't chart very high and critics were lukewarm about it. I've listened to it many times in an attempt to find redemption for Spector and have always walked away with an affirmation of the general assessment. It is not bad -- no one should ever call it that. Though I will say, I don't think the song itself is very good as a piece of writing, and no matter how good the performance or production is, it can't cover up a ho-hum song. And Spector has reined in Tina way too much. And as for the production...everyone loves Phil Spector's records, but this was just more of the same, not an advance in any way. It was a very 1963 record to be making in 1966, when George Martin and Brian Wilson and Quincy Jones and even Mickie Most and Chip Douglas were breaking all kinds of rules and doing all sorts of surprising and interesting things in the recording studio. The relative failure of the single put Spector in a tailspin from which he did not emerge until he started working with the Beatles in 1970.
But Ike and Tina Turner continued their upward trajectory. Tina replaced the girl group style evening gowns in her wardrobe with wild woman style mini-dresses. One thinks of the classic Tina Turner as being from this era. She represented the Oort Cloud of the sixties, the outer limits where vocalists like Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker and John Lennon (and Yoko Ono) shrieked and howled and moaned, and The Who smashed their instruments and Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire. Pink Floyd had a bona fide mentally ill person on stage. The Velvet Underground embraced dissonance. And furthermore, Tina was as crazy a dancer as Elvis and Ann-Margret put together. So variety television loved this act. They were on the shows of Ed Sullivan, The Smothers Brothers, The Hollywood Palace, Playboy After Dark. They toured with The Rolling Stones and were in their 1970 concert film Gimme Shelter.
At this stage they were about cover songs. Their version of "I Want to Take You Higher" charted higher than Sly and the Family Stone's original one. In 1971 they had their biggest hit with a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary" (#4 on the pop charts). They also did covers of the Beatles "Get Back" and "Come Together", the Stones' "Honky Tonk Women", and Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love".
In the early '70s, Tina began to assert her independence, writing a whole huge crop of songs that the band recorded, and playing the role of The Acid Queen in the film version of The Who's Tommy (1976). Ike, meanwhile, had become heavily addicted to drugs and had beaten her many times over the years. She took the opportunity to leave him at this juncture, despite having unfulfilled concert engagements, a new record deal, and a TV deal lined up. Would their show have been like those of Sonny and Cher, Donny and Marie, and The Brady Kids? I doubt it, although Tina continued to perform on those shows as a solo act.
Then, in 1984 she took the world by surprise by enjoying the greatest success of her career. I chalk it up to MTV. She was always a highly visual performer. Her reemergence at that particular time seems almost foreordained. She also revitalized her sound, incorporating techno/dance elements that were then popular. She released the multiple Grammy winning record Private Dancer LP with its hit title song and the additional hits "What's Love Got to Do with It?" and "You Better be Good to Me". This was followed by her appearance in the film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985) with the hit songs "We Don't Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)" and "One of the Living". The next LP Break Every Rule (1986) went #1 and yielded the hits "Typical Male", "Two People", and "What You Get Is What You See". Later U.S. included "The Best" (1989, #15), "I Don't Wanna Fight" (1993, #9) and the theme song to the James Bond movie GoldenEye (1995). Meantime she wrote a 1986 memoir called I, Tina, which was adapted into the 1993 film What's Love Got to Do with It? starring Angela Bassett.
In 1994 Turner moved to Switzerland, finally becoming a naturalized citizen there 20 years later. Just like Charlie Chaplin! But it's a thing among the biggest pop stars, especially it seems, ones from the '80s (Michael Jackson and Madonna both spring to mind. They obviously all had different motivations.) Meanwhile, following multiple incarcerations, 14 marriages, and a series of drug incidents, Ike died of drug related causes in 2007. Tina finally succumbed to multiple ailments in May of this year.
For more on show business and vaudeville history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and keep an eye out for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
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