You shut your fool mouth!
Tina Turner was one of the greatest voices of the soul era, but didn’t get her full due until the age of synth-pop. Most people are aware her 1980s popularity was a comeback. But what lots of people either forget or never knew was that was her second comeback.
Tina first hit the charts waaaaay back in 1960, with “A Fool in Love.” More hits quickly followed, such as “I Idolize You” and “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” But the hits dried up just quickly as they came. Partly this was because booming competition from powerhouse soul labels such as Motown and Stax made it hard to stay on top.
But it was also due to the other half of the act and Tina’s spouse: Ike Turner. Ike Turner was many things: a talented guitarist and arranger, a great judge of talent (and a meal ticket,) a sadistic abuser, and a total control freak. He was also a reasonably crappy marketer, businessman, and promoter, whose attempts to control every single aspect of the act just didn’t pay off on the business level. So while soul music was soaring during the mid 60s, Turner’s career stalled.
Asshole control freak Ike Turner tried to stage Tina’s first comeback in 1966 by teaming up with fellow asshole control freak Phil Spector (at the time the world’s hottest record producer) to record Tina doing “River Deep, Mountain High.” It didn’t work: the single flopped. In retrospect it’s obvious why - Tina had a truly colossal voice, but Spector’s elephantine production style just washed it out and made it sound smaller than it really was. (Spector would make the same gilding-the-lily mistake more than a decade later with the Ramones. You don’t need a wall of sound if you have Johnny Ramone.)
So Ike and Tina Turner turned to live shows to make their way during the late 1960s. And because of Tina’s astonishing voice and incredible stage presence, it worked. Their act became a live legend not just with black R&B audiences but also with white rock audiences, making them a mainstay during the booming concert years of the late 1960s (they were the opening act for the Rolling Stones during their 1968 tour.)
Tina’s first comeback came in 1971 when they finally hit the US pop top 10 with a studio cover of Creedence’s “Proud Mary” that mirrored the version they had been doing in their live act. Another period of widespread fame followed, culminating in Tina’s appearance in the movie version of “Tommy” in 1976. Tina finally left Ike that same year with no money in the bank, meaning she had to start over from scratch. Another career stall followed. But she made it back to the top, hitting number one with “What’s Love Got to Do With It” in 1984.
Pretty much every Motown and Stax track from the 1960s has been lovingly remastered and rereleased. But thanks to Ike’s wayward ways, most of Tina’s records from that era have only been rereleased on crappy low-budget labels with no remastering. Only soul music fanatics and record collectors even remember them these days. Which is a shame: there’s a lot of great stuff in there, and the live tracks and Tina’s takes on different songs of the era are often a revelation. Rest in peace.
I remember the story of John Fogerty, years after the Creedence split, relenting to finally play Proud Mary live again after Bod Dylan told him everyone would start to think it was a Tina Turner song!
Tina Turner was a massive phenomenon in Australia - she fronted a hugely successful advertising campaign for one of our football codes in the late 80s / early 90s; the The Best is still inextricably linked to rugby league to this day. This is the ad that started it:
Also, for reasons even experts can’t agree on, almost every school kid in Australia learns to line dance to Nutbush City Limits… to the point that basically the entire population knows it by heart.
RIP
She was one of the greats, but the year “What’s Love Got to Do With It” came out I worked in my old college’s dish room during summer term 1984 for a month or so after I’d gotten my BA, and the dude in charge had pop music radio on full blast all the time, and that damned song was played at least once an hour. I was close to tearing my hair out.
I remember that as well on the local radio station. A steady rotation of that plus When Doves Cry, Footloose, Hello, All Night Long, Dancing in the Dark, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Jump, and so many others I know the lyrics to even when it was a song I truly hated.
I remember Tina’s Private Dancer video on constant rotation on MTV/VH1 as well.
Man, the 80s were quite the time for massive comebacks: Hall & Oates, Yes, Heart, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin.