One of the most overused cliches when discussing a celebrity is to call them a survivor. Pretty much anyone in the public eye who has suffered any sort of calamity, no matter how minor, gets called a survivor as they talk to the entertainment media about their medical issues, the cancellation of their TV show, or making it through thirty days in rehab. That said, if there ever was a celebrity who inarguably earned that designation, it was Tina Turner. She quite literally survived a grim, physically and emotionally abusive relationship with her mentor and first husband, Ike Turner. After she finally found the courage to leave him, she was left with practically nothing except her talent and fierce determination, and she spent years rebuilding her life and career until she became the international star she should have been all along at the age of 45, a time most women in pop music are thought to be nearing their sell-by date. When she told her story, Turner never minimized the hard work and scaling of obstacles that led to her eventual triumph, and not in a way that was meant to elicit pity or fawning. Turner went from nothing to lasting superstardom for many reasons, but one of the biggest was that she worked hard for it, and she didn’t mind telling others that effort and determination played an enormous role in rising to the top.
Of course, in music all the hard work in the world means little if you don’t have the talent to back it up, and Tina Turner clearly had that. While she came out of the R&B circuit in the 1950s and ’60s, Turner was widely dubbed “the Queen of Rock & Roll,” and the power of her best work walked a line between the emotional expression of soul and the feral power of rock. Turner could sing with seductive finesse or abject sorrow on the right song, but when she first rose to fame as part of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, she was the focal point of one of the most explosive live acts of the day, and Turner could reliably meet or exceed the intensity of the band. “We never, EVER do nothin’ nice and easy,” she said in a famous bit of banter in Ike & Tina’s breakthrough 1971 cover of “Proud Mary.” “We always do it nice and ROUGH.” Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, but as gritty as she could get, the sheer gut-punch power of Tina Turner in her prime was something no one else could match. When Ken Russell needed someone to portray the Acid Queen in his wildly over-the-top 1975 film adaptation of the Who‘s rock opera Tommy, he turned to Tina Turner, and the volcanic power of her vocals and the twitchy intensity of her screen performance was one of the most vivid moments in a movie full of truly wild set pieces. Ann-Margret swimming in baked beans and Elton John in six-foot-tall Doc Martens may have been memorable, but it was the Acid Queen who stole that particular show.
Turner’s 1984 album Private Dancer was the LP that finally and definitively established her as a superstar, but in retrospect there were plenty of moments where she seemed poised for career-defining success. She was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939 in the rural community of Brownsville, Tennessee, and hard work was something she got used to early in life. She was born into a sharecropping family, and she remembered picking cotton alongside her two sisters as a child. Her parents didn’t get along, and young Anna was handed over to her paternal grandparents when the rest of the family relocated to Knoxville. By the time she graduated from high school, Anna was living in St. Louis, Missouri, and was working as a nurse’s aide at a local hospital. After spending a few years in the choir at church, she knew she could sing, which seemed like a better career path than the hospital, and she got her start one fateful evening in 1957.
That night, Anna saw Ike Turner & his Kings of Rhythm play a nightclub in East St. Louis. Ike was a local guitarist, songwriter, and bandleader of no small talent, but his greatest success so far, the 1951 R&B smash “Rocket 88,” was credited to his sax player, Jackie Brenston, who sang lead on the track. Ike, never known for his generous nature, would bitterly regret Brenston getting credit for his band’s first great hit, and he was determined to make it under his name. What would have been just another barnstorming gig for Ike became something different when, during intermission, Anna took the stage, and with permission from the band’s drummer, she sang B.B. King’s recent hit “You Know I Love You.” Whatever else one might say about Ike Turner, he had a keen ear for talent, and he immediately asked Anna if she knew any more songs. She did, and after taking vocals through the rest of the show, Ike recruited her as the Kings of Rhythm’s new featured vocalist. Many years later, Anna would say taking the gig was pure pragmatism: “I mean, I could do two things: work in a hospital or sing in Ike’s band. I didn’t know anything else. Or anyone else. And I wanted to sing.”
After Ike coached Anna on the finer points of stagecraft and singing with a band, she cut her first record with the group, 1958’s “Boxtop,” where she was credited as Little Ann. By this time, Anna and Ike were a couple, and though they didn’t tie the knot until 1962, he gave her a new stage name, Tina Turner, that made clear she and her bandleader were a package deal. As Ike & Tina Turner, they scored a hit in 1960 with “A Fool In Love,” and it was the first record that captured the full impact of Tina’s voice. Her ferocious lead vocal, which made an advantage of the grit in her instrument and her talent for pushing and pulling its raw edges, packed a tremendous sonic punch, and it became a Number 2 R&B hit. Surprisingly, the unapologetically raw performance also hit the pop chart, topping out at Number 27. In 1961, they scored another hit with “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” a bit less raw but still potently funky and built around the power of Tina’s voice. For the next several years, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue toured constantly and built a reputation as the hottest live show in the nation (see the 1966 concert film The Big T.N.T. Show for confirmation), but despite their early successes, they had a hard time crossing over to the mainstream pop audience, with the group’s frantic energy perceived as a bit too much for white audiences.
If Tina’s first shot at stardom came from one svengali, the next happened thanks to another, Phil Spector. Spector signed Ike & Tina to his Philles label and he used her as the lead vocalist for “River Deep, Mountain High,” a single he intended to be his masterpiece, the definitive example of his Wall of Sound production style. While Ike was angry about having no involvement in the making of the single, Tina’s voice was dynamic and impassioned enough to stand up to Spector’s overwhelming production, miraculously tender and forceful at once. However, while it became a Top Five hit in the U.K. and did well in Europe, “River Deep, Mountain High” was a flop in the United States, rising to a sluggish Number 88 on the American pop chart before slipping into obscurity. Spector retreated from the music business for a few years, leaving Ike & Tina high and dry.
In 1969, the Rolling Stones staged a much anticipated tour of the United States, and they invited the Ike & Tina Turner Revue to open most of the dates. It was an inspired pairing; it gave Ike & Tina new credibility with the rock audience, and Tina proved she was every bit as magnetic as Mick Jagger (and a better singer, too). Tina’s wildly suggestive performance of Otis Redding‘s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” became a highlight of Gimme Shelter, a 1970 documentary about the Stones tour dominated by footage of their disastrous Altamont Speedway concert (where Ike & Tina were thankfully not on the bill). In 1971, Ike & Tina finally scored the major pop hit they wanted with “Proud Mary,” which sold over a million copies and earned them a Grammy award. However, success did nothing to soften Ike’s mercurial personality; he had been domineering and violent before, and large sums of money and a steady supply of cocaine only made him more abusive.
Frank Zappa once booked time at Bolic Sound, the elaborately appointed studio Ike built as his base of operations and personal playhouse, and during the sessions for 1973’s Over-Nite Sensation, he needed female backing vocalists for a few songs, and was told Tina and her partners in the Ikettes were available. However, Ike would only allow Zappa to pay them $25 per song, the same thrifty rare he was paying them. While Zappa was happy with Tina’s work with his intricate arrangements, and she was justifiably proud of her vocals, Ike heard a playback and reacted with a dismissive shrug, saying “What is this shit?” “I don’t know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long,” Zappa said. “He treated her terribly and she’s a really nice lady.”
Enough has been written and said about the living hell of the last years of Tina’s years with Ike (sometimes by Tina herself, in her memoir I, Tina and its 1993 screen adaptation What’s Love Got To Do With It) that there’s no need to recount them here, though Ike, speaking in his own defense in a 1985 interview with Spin Magazine, went on the record as saying, “Yeah, I hit her, but I didn’t hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.” (Yes, he actually thought that was a reasonable defense.) In July 1976, after yet another fight with Ike, Tina finally had enough, and shortly before a concert in Dallas, she walked away, with just thirty six cents and a gasoline credit card to her name. Between the time Tina filed for divorce a few weeks later and when it was finalized in March 1978, Ike managed to piece together two more Ike & Tina albums, but while she made her solo debut with the 1974 album Tina Turns the Country On! (a better than expected stab at merging country and soul), she was now on her own as an artist as well as in life, and for the next several years, Tina was in show business limbo, appearing on TV shows like The Hollywood Squares and Donny & Marie, cutting the occasional album, and appearing in Las Vegas and secondary markets, struggling to pay her share of the debts she racked up during their marriage.
Tina had always been a strong and disciplined performer, but during her wilderness years, she subtly remade herself, evolving from Ike’s sexy mouthpiece to a confident and sharply focused performer who allowed her own personality and ideas to shape the gale-force vocal style that was her trademark. She found a manager that believed in her potential, Roger Davies, and slowly, though frequent touring in Europe and the United Kingdom, she began reminding fans that she was still in business and far from a spent force. In 1982, Turner’s sound got an update when she recorded a cover of the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion” with B.E.F., a studio project led by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh of Heaven 17, and the sleek electronic sheen of the backing tracks proved to be a fine complement for the strength and defiance of her vocals, reinforcing the urgency of the lyrics and shrewdly working the dynamics of the track. The single was a chart hit in the U.K., and Tina went back into the studio with B.E.F. to cut a version of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
Capitol Records signed Tina and brought out the single in America, but didn’t offer her an especially lavish budget or schedule to cut her first LP for the label, and most of 1984’s Private Dancer was recorded in a mere two weeks. Rising to a challenge was something Tina was used to, and Private Dancer was an unexpected tour de force. Turner made the betrayal and heartache of “What’s Love Got To Do With It” convincing in a way she couldn’t have managed as a younger woman, the title track was the testimony of a woman willing to do what she needed to survive and not about to let you forget the consequences, and “I Might Have Been Queen” was the anthem of a woman who has no doubts of her own worth. Radio and MTV treated Tina like a hot new artist – and in a very real way, she was – and after a tour opening for Lionel Richie where she consistently upstaged the headliner, she set out on the first of several world tours supporting Private Dancer, which would go on to sell over ten million copies worldwide and earned her three Grammy awards.
Turner never had another hit quite as big as Private Dancer, but the album’s success was big enough that this time, her stardom stuck. Her next two LPs, 1986’s Break Every Rule and 1989’s Foreign Affair, were major commercial successes cut from similar cloth, her tours packed halls wherever she chose to perform, and she was widely hailed as a diva, an icon, and a survivor. She could collaborate with Bono and the Edge, she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors, she staged the biggest grossing concert tour of 2000 before retiring from the road, and then changed her mind, playing 90 shows in Europe and North America between October 2008 and May 2009 to celebrate a half century as a performer. The tour sold out nearly all its dates, and critics praised Tina’s performances and showmanship as she bowed out on top. This time, her retirement stuck, and no one could say she had anything left to prove – at the age of 69, she sang with Beyonce at the Grammy Awards and showed she could go diva-to-diva with the reigning queen, and one could reasonably argue that without the example of Tina’s ferocity and strength, Bey as we know her could not exist. And to cement her legend, Tina’s life became the basis of a jukebox musical, Tina!, that premiered in London’s West End in 2018 and moved to Broadway the following year. Tina herself participated in the creation and production of the show, and it did an impressive job of telling her now-familiar true story. But the show would have been nothing without the voice that inspired it, and Tina Turner’s death on May 24, 2023 after several years of ill health silenced a great singer, a feminist heroine, an artist whose talents spanned several genres, and someone who was well and truly a survivor. She earned her rest.
