The first time he hit her with a wooden shoelace. In the following years, her husband slapped her, kicked her, and burned her. He broke through her jaw, nose and rib. He also spat at her, shouted at her, insulted her at every turn and confiscated her money. In everything she did, she had to ask his permission first. And on top of that, he systematically cheated on her. He started right on the wedding night.
So it is not surprising that the fate of the American singer Tina Turner, who died this Wednesday at the age of 83, is told with an emphasis on the heroism of a woman who survived a suicide attempt and was finally able to leave her abusive husband Ike Turner. What’s more: as a divorced, debt-ridden black woman in her forties, she completely overwhelmed the then predominantly white world of American show business and paved the way for followers from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé.
That story is as strong as her voice, for Tina Turner was truly an extraordinary singer. It was always true, but in the 80s of the last century, she unexpectedly combined preparation from black rhythm & blues and a voice shaped by church choirs with elements of rock shows, flashy vaudeville and the sound of the new wave. With a novel combination, she reached eight Grammy awards.
Tina Turner on the Eiffel Tower in Paris was photographed by Peter Lindbergh in 1989 for the single Foreign Affair. | Photo: Capitol / EMI / Peter Lindbergh
She conveyed raw soul emotions with her four-octave husky contralto. She could scream amazingly. She had the voice of someone who knew pain, yet sounded hopeful. She often started in lower positions, then rose to ecstatic heights in the chorus. Even though she didn’t write many of her own songs or look for autobiographical songs, she gave authenticity to the ones she took over. She didn’t need dance rhythms or opulent string accompaniment.
Besides, Tina Turner danced brilliantly. In her youth, Mick Jagger copied some of her moves, and in return she fronted his band The Rolling Stones several times. Like him, she was a born entertainer, an animalistic, explosive personality, and of course also a provocateur and a sex symbol. She performed mainly in wigs, even after her 60s she wore leather miniskirts. Few describe her image as well as a promotional photo from 1989, when she confidently holds on to the Eiffel Tower in Paris with only one hand at a height of a few hundred meters, in a mini dress and high heels.
Its temperament can be witnessed by the people of Prague, who have experienced it three times. For the first time during normalization in 1981, when to the large hall of Lucerna she arrived newly divorced, shortly before her most famous era. In a glittering gold dress, she coordinated dance moves with two female vocalists, singing Honky Tonk Women and Jumpin’ Jack Flash from the Rolling Stones or Help from the Beatles repertoire, unusually slowed down to a soulful piano ballad.
The second time, in the summer of 1996, she briefly greeted President Václav Havel at the Bohemians stadium in Ďolíček. To the highlights of the performance, which some watched from the adjacent roofs, already she belonged the title song from the then fresh Bond film Golden Eye. Tina Turner, now almost 60, began singing it while hanging from a trapeze, with a giant golden eye prop behind her back.
Say goodbye she arrived in April 2009, when she already split the O2 arena concert into two halves and sang a few songs on a bar stool, she still danced amazingly in a tight dress and stiletto heels.
“I’ve done a lot of dangerous things and a lot of them have happened to me, but I’ve always managed to get out at the last minute. Maybe I was meant to live to tell this story,” writes Tina Turner in her second autobiography, My Love Story, published in 2018. from her as a tough, independent personality, which, however, took a long time to reach such a position.
Like on a pony
She was an unwanted child from a farm in the southeastern US. Her mother beat her as a child until she left her when she was eleven. Two years later, the father disappeared. The girl, whose real name is Anna Mae Bullock, grew up with her grandmother. She started earning as a domestic worker and assistant nurse in the big city of St. Louis. It was there that she heard the band The Kings of Rhythm for the first time.
Its guitarist Ike Turner was a household name in the late 1950s: an early rock and roll hit writer Rocket 88, the owner of a pink Cadillac and a big house. He performed in a suit, newspapers wrote about him. And he was accompanied by a reputation as a brawler with a dark side, the depth of which no one has yet seen, Tina Turner wrote years later.
She amazed the conductor with the power of her voice hidden in a slender body. Shortly afterwards, she recorded her first joint hit with Ike Turner A Fool in Lovetypically about a woman abused by her husband.
Before long, they married, had a child, and combined their lives and careers. Her husband invented her stage name, renamed his band The Kings of Rhythm the Ike and Tina Turner Revue and launched her fame. However, she soon overshadowed him both as a singer and as an entertainer, when she matched clothes with the female vocalists and started inventing special dance choreographies like this one imitative riding in the saddle on a pony.
A Fool in Love is the first joint hit between Ike and Tina Turner. The recording dates from 1965. Photo: Profimedia.cz | Video: Sue Records
Their career was helped when they preceded the Rolling Stones in 1966, first in Great Britain and three years later in the USA. Tina Turner’s singing career was moved by collaboration with producer Phil Spector. And their concerts with white audiences added to their attractiveness as soon as they supplemented the black repertoire with cover versions of rock hits.
They are captured in their best form in the Rollingstone documentary Gimme Shelter, where Tina Turner is in a fantastically felt ecstasy he sings song I’ve Been Loving You Too Long by Otis Redding and caresses the microphone sensually.
For his biggest hit Proud Mary, taken from rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival, won a Grammy and made so much money that Ike Turner built a recording studio for them. In it, however, he already began to close himself with cocaine for thousands of dollars a week, his wife describes in her autobiography.
He attributes his violent nature to Ike Turner’s subconscious desire to take revenge on the world: for the father who was beaten by a white man, for the school he did not finish, for being overshadowed in music by a woman. She describes dozens of truly brutal incidents in the book. At the same time, she explains that even though Ike Turner cheated on her for the first time in a brothel on her wedding night, she repressed the experience for years. She simply rewrote them into a romantic fantasy in her head to suppress the disappointment. “I convinced myself I was happy, and for a while I really was,” she writes.
Also the Washington Post later she saidthat the husband’s behavior worsened gradually, corresponding to Ike Turner’s increasing drug addiction.
Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long is sung by Tina Turner in the documentary Gimme Shelter. Photo: Reuters | Video: BBC
New backdrops
She definitely left him in 1976, when he beat her again. She escaped from the hotel in Dallas, USA, through the kitchen with a bloody face, thirty-six cents in her pocket and a credit card in the ceiling. She slept over with friends for a few months, spent two years dealing with a divorce, and spent a few more years paying off debts due to the canceled Ike and Tina Turner Revue concerts. She never saw her husband, who was later arrested six times before he died in 2007.
It was only after this emancipation that her most glorious era came. Determined to fill sports halls, Tina Turner found a manager, moved her repertoire closer to rock music and, through the recommendation of friends such as Rod Stewart, recorded the groundbreaking record Private Dancer in 1984. She released it as a forty-five-year-old divorced black woman associated with rhythm & blues and soul, i.e. less commercially attractive genres. However, she was able to make unusual use of this preparation on the album in the background of the so-called new wave.
Instead of wind sections or gospel elements, such as when choristers respond to the preacher in church, she opted for synthesizers and brought the sound closer to popular synthpop groups such as Spandau Ballet or Eurythmics.
The album features an unconventional cover version of the hit Let’s Stay Together by Al Green, a dramatic story about a woman with a broken heart What’s Love Got to Do With It or title song: a beautifully structured, full-length seven-minute song about a prostitute. It was written by Mark Knopfler, the guitar solo is played by Jeff Beck and Tina Turner gradually applies the full range of her voice here.
Title song Private Dancer from Tina Turner’s most successful album. The original version of the song is three minutes longer. Photo: Reuters | Video: Capitol Records
Although most of the compositions were created by men, they tell the story of a strong, independent woman who masks a broken heart with a tough exterior. Although it is largely stylization and acting, after all, Tina Turner probably put a lot of effort into those songs personally.
The Private Dancer album sold over 12 million copies, received four Grammys for it, and thanks to the continuous rotation of video clips on the popular MTV television, she became a star comparable to the most famous black artists of the time, Michael Jackson or Prince.
She consolidated her position I’m a hit for the third part of the post-apocalyptic film series Mad Max and the Thunder Dome, where alone she played alongside Mel Gibson, then a duet Tonight with David Bowie or the hilariously lewd performance at the Live Aid charity concert where Mick Jagger eats in front of the cameras on the edge skirt. She pretended to be surprised, but as she admits in the book: of course they had arranged it.
Soon after, she published her first autobiography, in which she described her relationship with Ike Turner and according to which arose Hollywood film starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. It wasn’t until 1988 that an unprecedented 180,000 people came to Tina Turner’s concert in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
She was at the top, although she was far from done with the hits – starting with the favorite The Best from 1989 to the song from the Bond movie Golden eyewritten by Bono and The Edge of U2 in the mid-1990s.
The song from the Bond film The Golden Eye, as sung by Tina Turner in 1996 in Amsterdam. Photo: Reuters | Video: Parlophone Records
After returning from retirement, Tina Turner continued to perform successfully in the new millennium. But it was more important for her that she found happiness. On a yacht near the Greek islands, she agreed to marry a German music publishing manager, Erwin Bach, 16 years her junior. Although they had lived together in Switzerland since the mid-1990s, they only got married ten years ago, when she turned 73.
In her autobiography, she describes how she goes alone to the table by the lake after the wedding reception. It is warm and quiet, the sky without a cloud. The moon is slowly emerging on it. “I worked all my life. No one ever gave me anything. Only after so many years of hard work did I learn to live here and now. For the first time I was perfectly happy. For the first time I had everything I wanted and I didn’t want more,” she writes about the feeling , which she did not know until then.
That feeling is said to be complete nirvana.
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