Tina Turner (1939-2023): a true legend
Tina Turner has lived a full life. A life of lots of music, travel around the world, fame and success, but also lots of loneliness, abuse and lack of love that made her unhappy for many years. “It was not a good life,” as she says in the documentary Tina by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin that airs on HBO and reveals her fascinating story. “Maybe some aspects of her were good, but that didn’t balance out the bad things that happened to me, so I don’t want to remember her. You don’t want to wear your old clothes again…”
And it’s true that all the things she boldly and bravely left behind in the late 1970s that she wanted to forget forever come back to haunt her every time she’s interviewed. It is the same in this one hundred and eighteen minute documentary, which devotes more than sixty minutes to her relationship with Ike Turner, her first husband, the man who put her into music, the man who made her a famous singer from a little girl and then married her, “imprisoning” her in a state of violence and terror. Their twenty-year relationship will follow her forever, no matter how many years pass, because it’s part of American culture and it’s not easy to erase it from history.
A few days before the documentary premiered, it was announced that Tina Turner is nominated for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, this time for her solo career. In 1991 she had made it into it thanks to her career alongside Ike as lead singer of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
Her words proved prophetic. A few years later she became an iconic woman, creating from her ashes a rock star, mega star, who sold two hundred million records and performed live in front of the largest audience ever played by a female artist in pop history. For a black woman to launch a career at forty was unthinkable.
Daughter of a very poor family of cotton plantation workers, born in Nutbush, Tennessee, and living a deprived childhood in almost every southeastern state in the United States, she began singing by joining the gospel choirs of local churches. Her mother abandoned her when she was very young and her father soon left home, leaving her alone at the mercy of her relatives. “I never received any love in my life, not even from my father and mother as a child, I just survived,” she says in a poignant moment in the film. “Not a single one of them loved me.”
With grit and perseverance she managed to join Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm band in 1958 and become their lead singer. At first Ike’s relationship with the seventeen-year-old “Little Ann” was very tender, almost sisterly. He then christened her “Tina Turner”, married her and in 1960 the group was renamed the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Together they had a great success and a series of major hits, including “A fool in love”, “River Deep Mountain High” (1966), “Proud Mary” (1971) and “Nutbush city limits” (1973), a song she wrote herself. She never loved him. Raised as a Baptist, she converted to Buddhism in 1971, thanks to the psalm “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo”, which she says helped her through difficult times.
The documentary focuses on her relationship with Ike, which shaped her artistically, while also opening many wounds, and the years following her moment of emancipation in 1976, when she decided to leave him half-asleep in the middle of a tour at the Dallas Statler Hilton Hotel at all costs. He had once again attacked her for a trivial reason (for not taking a chocolate he gave her!), brutally beating her.
Her “escape”, at night, through desolate and dangerous streets, was the trigger for her to embark on a gruelling journey of defeats, incredible hardship and reinventing herself, which was painful but led to an incredible restart. “It was dawning on a momentous day,” she says in the documentary, “It was the 4th of July when I won my freedom. And I didn’t get anything from the divorce, no house, no money, no car, and Ike kept all the rights to the songs. He wanted to own me, but I said, “You don’t own me. If you want everything I earned from my work, take it, in exchange for peace of mind.” All I asked the judge for was something I wanted, and that was my name – Tina.”
And he got it. It was all she had left of all those years with Ike. Along with four children. Two were Ike’s from his first wife, whom she took with her, even though she had no help. “When we divorced, I had all the bills and debts of my own, but no money, I had to support myself and the children on my own, while Ike didn’t give one,” she says. So she had to show up at fast food joints and casinos to make ends meet. She started booking appearances on TV shows, as many as she could, because it was her only income. In her forties, she started building a career from scratch.
In 1984 she embarked on a path to success that lasted until 2009, when she did her last triumphant tour and made another brave decision to retire, something few mega stars dare to do. “The album ‘My private dancer’, no, I don’t consider it a comeback. Tina was never here,” she says in the documentary talking about her rebirth. “It was Tina’s debut, the first time, and that was my first album.”
Tina Turner is a woman who grew up in a time when violence and abuse had no name. Of very humble origins, with few prospects and socially oppressed, she found in Ike a saviour who not only lifted her out of poverty and misery but helped her to shine and show her worth. For many years she remained trapped in a state of dependency and terror, isolated and friendless. Until she could go no further.
“Our generation is the generation that began to break the silence,” Oprah Winfrey says in the documentary, “and spoke out about sexual violence, physical violence, violence in the home.” Tina Turner did something courageous, which was not easy for a black woman in 1976. Shortly before, at a live performance, she had prefaced a song by talking to the women present about respect, what she demanded but never got from her then-husband:
“Now I’m going to talk to you about respect, because we all want respect and we don’t always get it, especially us women,” she had said. “Because men somehow always get what they want, they do what they want, when they want, and even with whoever they want. Now we, women, want to go out on the street and take what’s good, too.”
Her words proved prophetic. A few years later she became an iconic woman, creating from her ashes a rock star, mega star, who sold two hundred million records and performed live in front of the largest audience ever played by a female artist in pop history. For a black woman to launch a career at forty was unthinkable.
For all its faults and shortcomings, the film is full of music and scenes from Tina’s lives throughout her career, and that makes it very interesting. The way she moves around the stage and the information that she was always the one responsible for her image is a lesson for the younger generation of musicians and her contemporaries – the headline in the People issue, which hosted her in ’81 for her first interview after her split with Ike, was: “Tina Turner, the woman who taught Mick Jagger how to dance, is back in business.” Tina was a role model for white stars like Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart.
Her life and the bad times with Ike is a story she told to forget about it and move on with her life, yet she was always reminded of it in every interview, whether she was talking about her new album, her autobiography or the film made about her life in 1993.
“If you don’t address the wounds of the past, they never stop bleeding,” she says. “I lived sixteen years with a man I knew I would never be happy with, but I felt I had to stay with him. My ex-husband was a very abusive man, I was tortured, I lived a life that resembled death. I didn’t exist. But I survived, and when I left, I left for good. And I didn’t look back.”
In general, no matter how much she tried to distance herself from the difficult times in her life, there was always a reason to bring them back. In 1985 she had been offered the lead role in Color Purple and had almost agreed to play the part of Shung Avery, a southern musician whose life had much in common with her own. In the end, she opted to star in Mad Max. “I turned down the role because the role was almost me,” she had said on Larry King’s show. “And it was too soon to remember what I went through.”
Tina of today, introduced at the beginning of the documentary, is a Tina overwhelmed by illness and old age, but proud and satiated by wealth and fame, mature and wise, far from the image that had marked her as a star. Dressed in a serious black suit, in her mansion in Switzerland (and with Swiss citizenship, having renounced her American citizenship since 2013), married to the first man she loved, at sixty, Erwin Bach, a music industry executive who changed her life, she speaks of Ike with detachment, but with the bitterness that the years have not managed to completely erase. The second half of the film follows her from 1984 and “What’s love got to do with it” on the road to triumph, with many gaps and little detail.
The film follows her from 1984 and “What’s love got to do with it” on the road to triumph.
Tina’s story doesn’t need much to draw you in. Tina is a documentary with touching moments, illuminating many parts of her life, but presenting nothing new or unfamiliar. Let’s just say it’s a short tribute to a woman who fought against patriarchy and won, managing to change the music industry’s view of “washed-up” stars.
For the record, Tina Turner has won twelve Grammy Awards, three Grammy Hall of Fame Awards and one Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the only artist to receive consecutive Grammy Award nominations in the pop, rock and R&B categories. In 1993, the World Music Awards recognized her years and contributions to the music industry and presented her with the Legend Award. In the United Kingdom, she is the first artist to achieve Top 40 success for six consecutive decades. For a legendary woman like her, a documentary about her life should contain more of her personal triumphs.
Tina Turner – What’s Love Got to Do with It
.
Yiota Kotseta
Music Producer
In 1997, Tina Turner appears on Larry King’s CNN show. At one point he asks her if she knows she is a “feminist icon” and she is mildly surprised. “I’m slowly becoming aware of it,” she replies, “more and more as time goes on.”
Tina Turner was abused like no other. She got the worst of it from Aiko (ex-husband-teenager). Bleeding. She swelled. She covered up with tons of makeup. She was getting on stage. She sang, danced, flew. And then he’d crawl back to the ground and the beatings would rain down. He was bleeding. He was swelling up. Covered in tons of makeup. He’d get on stage. He sang. Dancing. He was flying. Books have been written about it all, movies have been made, documentaries have been made. They tell it all accurately.
One day Tina Turner leaves. Those were the last of the “bouquets”. She leaves the hotel, her husband, the Iko & Tina Turner brand and everything she had built over the years with hard work and endless patience. She changes her life, her social security number, her zip code. He changes his air, gains self-esteem. And from her former junk life, she keeps Turner. And then comes her finest musical moment. In 1984, Tina is a 45-year-old with a body that refuses to keep up with the times, who makes the most imaginative comeback in music history. The album “Private Dancer” and the single “What’s love got to do with it” breaks all records.
I bought it years later, not because it was my favourite but because I sensed in her voice her liberation. The fear that had become an air of certainty. Aiko eventually went into coke overdose and Tina, for many years, just got on stage, sang, danced, flew.
Hilda Papadimitriou
Writer, translator
Of the forty-five years of Tina Turner’s career, I prefer the five years 1960-1965, before Ike and Tina signed with major or even mid-sized labels. The sound of the duo sounds dirtier, funkier than the embellished sound of Motown, more primitive than the Stax recordings. On these first 45s, Tina lets her mezzo soprano voice run wild with a versatility that makes a lasting impression on the listener’s ear.
On the discs “A fool in love”, “I idolize you”, “It’s gonna work out fine”, the production may seem poor, but it epitomises the austerity of rhythm’n’blues, from which rock evolved later in the same decade. Her explosive stage presence is due to Ike Turner’s idea of presenting her as a black primitive goddess at a time when black was still strictly segregated from white.
Tina crossed over to the big adult audience thanks to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, but those early songs of Ike’s were closer to the little girl from Natbush, Tennessee, who was picking up daddy with her parents and going to the local Baptist church with her grandparents.
Fonta Trousas
What we lived through cannot be forgotten. We don’t forget the panic in bars and clubs with Tina Turner’s songs in the 80s, with “What’s love got to do with it”, with “We don’t need another hero” (from Mad Max of the era), with “Typical Male” or “The Best”. Songs you heard everywhere that set a new foundation for the great singer’s career, a career with many dark spots that slowed her down for years – at least until she found the strength to stand firmly on her own two feet and, on her own now, reach the top.
As much as we may associate the ’80s with her voice and persona, however, it is still the ’60s that made Tina Turner an icon. With anthemic songs, along with Ike Turner, like “Beauty is just skin deep” or Phil Spector’s famous “River deep mountain high” (1966), and albums like “The Hunter” (1969), which highlighted the ever-powerful foundation of her work, which was none other than the blues, Tina Turner, with or without Ike, was-was a “goddess” of soul music, an icon of black music.
#img#
Tina Turner in the movies
Her documentary appearances:
The Big T.N.T. Show (1966, in the sequel to T.A.M.I. Show), It’s Your Thing (1970, in the documentary about the Isley Brothers performing at Yankee Stadium), Gimme Shelter (1970, in the documentary about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour), Soul to Soul (1971, in the documentary about the Independence Day concert in Ghana), Taking Off (1971), Good Vibrations from Central Park (1971), Ann-Margret Olsson (1975), Poiret est à vous (1975), Chuck Berry: Live at the Roxy with Tina Turner (1982), Tina Turner: Girl From Nutbush (1993), Ike & Tina on the Road: 1971-72 (2012) and Tina (2021)
Her film credits:
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Our Guests at Heartland (1978), Tommy The Acid Queen (1978), in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as Aunty Entity (1985), What’s Love Got to Do With It, she is the voice in the songs narrated by Angela Bassett (1993), in Last Action Hero as The Mayor (1995).
The documentary “Tina” is airing on HBO through May 4.
.
This article was published in the print LiFO.
The new issue of LiFO free on your doorstep with one click.
