Tina Turner & A Couple of the Forces Behind A Force of Nature
Our divided land came together on at least one patch of common ground this week: Tina Turner was a marvelous creation.
Turner died in her Switzerland home Wednesday at the age of 83, meaning she lived long enough to appreciate the esteem in which she was held within and beyond the music world.
Upon her passing she was hailed for her powerful voice, her memorable hit records, her explosive stage show and the way in which she survived childhood abandonment and frightening domestic abuse to achieve a level of fame and fortune that said maybe once in a while there is justice.
Tina Turner wasn’t the first woman artist to own a stage. From Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey to Ethel Merman, Lena Horne, Madonna and Beyonce, women have kicked down the doors many men wanted to leave closed.
Turner knew all about that. When she divorced her abusive husband Ike Turner in 1978, her hardest fight was to win the rights to her name. Ike had copyrighted it, figuring that if this Tina ever left, he’d just hire another one.
Kind of like bringing in a new Lassie if the first one died.
It sounds outrageous. But in one sense, Ike had a point. Tina Turner was in fact an entertainment creation.
Ike ran a rhythm and blues band in the 1950s — a very good one, because for all his flaws, Ike was a terrific musician. Several R&B labels employed him as a talent scout, and used his band on records.
Ike at first didn’t think much of a 17-year-old girl, Anna Mae Bullock, who hung around his shows asking for a chance to sing.
When he heard her, he changed his mind and started incorporating her into his live shows. He also decided to enhance her persona, making her more than just his girl singer.
He renamed her Tina, after the female comic book warrior Sheena, and fed her material that was hot, raw and sexy. He schooled her on stage presentation and vocal styling.
Eventually he married her and we all know how that worked out. It didn’t, and thanks to Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of a psychotic Ike in the movie What’s Love Got To Do With It, that was Ike’s public image until the day he died in 2007.
The musical question, however, remained: What part of Tina Turner was Ike responsible for? In a 1985 interview, he said pretty much all of it. “I invented her,” he said.
In a rather narrow literal sense, that’s true. But a game plan is nothing without execution, and it was Anna Mae who transformed herself from a teenager with a dream to a grownup who commanded the stage with a killer act. If she couldn’t sing the songs and couldn’t sell the moves, a blueprint handed down on stone tablets to Moses wouldn’t have helped.
Still, giving Anna Mae Bullock a new name, an established platform, first-rate rhythm and blues songs and pointers on how to grab an audience is not nothing.
So there’s a shared credit here. Most of it to Tina, but Ike isn’t wrong that he had a hand in it.
Fast-forward to the late ’70s. Tina has extricated herself from Ike. She has wrestled her name back. She’s also a half million dollars in debt, mostly from shows that were cancelled when she and Ike split up. So she’s playing a Vegas nostalgia date here and there, then flying off to clubs in Eastern Europe where small groups of fans revere classic American R&B artists. It’s not especially lucrative and it’s definitely exhausting, especially when she has four kids at home. But it’s what she does.
Then she runs into Roger Davies, who becomes her new manager. Davies gets her better dates and maps out a plan to make her a relevant contemporary artist again. It takes a couple of years, but when she remakes the Al Green hit “Let’s Stay Together” in the early 1980s and it hits the charts, she’s back in the radio game. Even if part of the fascination is that she’s now the most famous battered wife in popular music.
Next Davies and the record company hand her “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” a world-weary song that’s been kicking around for a while and has been rejected by other artists.
Tina wants to reject it, too. “I hated it,” she said a couple of years later. “It was a pop song.”
Yes, it was, which made it different from almost everything Tina Turner had been singing since 1957.
But she was talked into singing it anyway, and in a decade full of great music marketing decisions, this turned out to be one of the best. When Turner won a Grammy for singing it, she dedicated the award to Davies.
The success of “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and the album it anchored, Private Dancer, remade Turner into what the music world is mourning this week. While some of us may most revere earlier songs like “I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” or “Don’t Play Me Cheap,” the ’80s Tina left the biggest footprint.
So here again, someone made a decision on a direction and a style and once again, it was Turner who executed it. She did the shows, she packed the arenas, she sizzled alongside Mick Jagger.
Abhorrent as Ike’s personal conduct was, and rightfully as Tina resented his assertion that she was wholly his creation, the onstage tornado called Tina Turner did emerge from a convergence of multiple forces.
In sports parlance, she gets the basket. The points go on her score sheet. As they should. The hustler Ike and the more modest Roger still get assists.
