[ Nothing could ever scare the fire out of her voice, which
carried the whole story of American music in it. Tina Turner’s voice
will never go silent. In the end, she is the big wheel who keeps on
turning, forever. The Queen of Rock and Roll.]
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WE’LL NEVER LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT TINA TURNER  
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Rob Sheffield
May 24, 2023
RollingStone
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_ Nothing could ever scare the fire out of her voice, which carried
the whole story of American music in it. Tina Turner’s voice will
never go silent. In the end, she is the big wheel who keeps on
turning, forever. The Queen of Rock and Roll. _

Tina Turner, The Farewell Tour - City Stadium Velika Gorica, Croatia
- 18th August 1990, Les Zg, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
4.0

 

Tina Turner didn’t just pull off the greatest comeback in music
history — she invented the whole concept of the comeback as we know
it. She became a solo superstar when she was 44. Things like that
simply don’t happen. That’s how old Brandy, Usher, Adam Levine,
Lance Bass, and John Legend are right now. At that age, Tina Turner
was just beginning.

Turner, who died Wednesday at 83
[[link removed]],
carried the whole story of American music in her voice, because in so
many ways, she _was_ that story, but she was also a lot more. She
was Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, daughter of
sharecroppers, fighting her way in and out of the chitlin circuit. She
was just a kid when she got famous, as half of Ike & Tina Turner. Her
deep-country voice and his guitar always made a fearsome combo, in
Fifties hits like “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “I Idolize
You.” “The emotions I expressed were real because I lived those
feelings,” she wrote in _Rolling Stone_ in a 2019 essay.
[[link removed]] “Even
‘Private Dancer’ — which seems to be about prostitution, but is
also about wishes, hopes, and dreams — tells the story of women like
me, caught up in sad situations, who somehow find a way to go on.”

Her defining hit was “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” a shocker
from the summer of 1984. The song has gotten so familiar, it’s easy
to overlook how it shocked the audience, on the radio in between
Madonna, Prince and Cyndi Lauper. Unlike anyone else near her age,
she had zero interest in passing for young. This woman had _lived_.
She’d stared down more hard times than your miserable Smiths-loving
teenage mind could imagine. The audience didn’t know what she’d
been through — she wasn’t telling those stories yet. But even a
kid could hear the rage and pain in her voice. A grandmother, and
tougher than anyone.

She emerged in the Sixties as a one-woman genre — too rock for R&B,
too R&B for rock, too brawny for girlie novelties, too raw-voiced for
youthful romance. Her most famous hits with Ike were about how much
hard road she’d already traveled, like “Proud Mary” and
“Nutbush City Limits.” But her never-quite-youthful youth was just
the opening act, because she truly became Tina Turner in 1984,
with _Private Dancer_. It was a whole new kind of blockbuster,
shimmying over generational, racial, cultural, musical boundaries. She
was the first rock star who made a big deal about being a grandmother.
Lots of stars had claimed to be the Queen of Rock & Roll, but
after _Private Dancer_, nobody came near that crown.

She had a new audience of Eighties fans, but hardly any of them knew
any of the music she’d made with her ex-husband. For them, Tina
Turner was right now. Neither she nor they wanted to recall her past.
“Rhythm and blues to me has always been a bit of a downer,” she
said. She couldn’t stand it when the press used the word
“victim.” She had rocking to do.

Tina told her life story many times — in interviews, her books (the
keeper is the 2019 memoir _My Love Story)_, the Broadway
musical _Tina_, the classic biopic _What’s Love Got To Do With
It._ (Your mom is probably watching it on Lifetime right now.) The
story turns on her escape from and triumph over her abusive marriage.
But people still underestimate the cultural importance of Turner
telling that story. Strange as it might seem today, she was the first
star to talk aloud about domestic violence, to insist on it as part of
the story, not to gloss over it or act coy. Until she came along, the
idiom “domestic violence” wasn’t even part of the language. “I
admire her survival as a battered wife,” Gloria Steinem
told _Rolling Stone_ in December 1984. “For someone well-known to
talk about it helps.” 

Hero worship for Tina Turner is practically an industry, yet we’re
still underrating what she did and how much interior resources she had
to call on to get it done, at a time when there was no precedent or
protocol. She still doesn’t get enough credit for that, but it’s
not the kind of credit she really wanted. Part of her greatness is
refusing to be the professional survivor the media wanted her to be.
She didn’t need another hero.

She epitomized the story of rock if anyone did. She sang her
ferocious “Come Together”
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after _Abbey Road, _breathing m*** s** and dread into it than even
John Lennon could have imagined. Many years and several lives later,
she was onstage with Paul McCartney in 1986, when he sang “Get
Back” live for the first time since the rooftop
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It’s a star-studded charity event with Elton John, Eric Clapton,
Mark Knopfler, etc. Yes, obviously, Phil Collins is on drums. Tina
sings the verse about Sweet Loretta, an American girl who leaves a
home she can’t get back to. She’s the only Black artist here,
almost the only American, definitely the only woman. She lived
Loretta’s story before Paul even wrote the song. The jam keeps
rolling, but after Tina, nobody goes near that microphone. She has
just shut up the planet’s most un-shut-uppable men. She’s the
grown-up on this stage. Every other rock star here is a child.

JANUARY, 1975: _Ann-Margret Olsson
[[link removed]]_, a TV variety special,
from the golden days of TV variety specials. Ann-Margret introduces
Tina as her best friend. They duet on “Nutbush City Limits,”
Tina’s life story, and then “Honky Tonk Women,” the Rolling
Stones’ ode to Memphis queens. (Ann-Margret screams the line “He
blew my nose and then he blew my mind!”) Then they bump and grind to
— what else?— “Proud Mary.”

What could be a more American duet? Ann-Margret, the Swedish
song-and-dance girl, star of _Kitten With A Whip_, the Hollywood
bombshell who shook her hips with Elvis in _Viva Las Vegas_. Tina
Turner, the sharecropper’s daughter from Nutbush, Tennessee. They
bonded when they were filming The Who’s rock-opera
movie, _Tommy. _(In the movie, Tina plays the Gypsy Queen who
symbolizes acid; A-M gets drowned in baked beans. Times were hard for
rock & roll queens in 1975.)

But here they are singing about rollin’ on the Mississippi River
steamboats. They’re laughing so hard as they dance, they’re
practically falling over. Neither of them really belongs on a
steamboat, and neither did the guy who wrote the song, a white
suburban kid from El Cerrito named John Fogerty. He’s never set foot
on the bayou, but he’s gotten drafted, served his time, and worked
his way back into the bar-band scene with Creedence Clearwater
Revival. This song is a fantasy, but all three of them traveled a long
distance to get here, and the song is a generous river that carries
them all. “_You _on a riverboat?” A-M asks. “There hasn’t
been one of those around in 75 years!” Tina laughs, “I wear my
eighties well!” 

Tina already had a hit with “Proud Mary” in the Sixties, but in
1975 she has no idea what this song will mean to her in years to come.
She’ll turn “Proud Mary” into a feminist rock anthem,
representing all the unspeakable (and unspoken) violence she escapes
and her determination to claim her own story. But right now, she’s
still trapped in her marriage to Ike. In less than a year, she will
finally leave him, on the Fourth of July. She’s got nothing to her
name but 36 cents, a gas-station credit card, and the blood-stained
white suit on her back. Ann-Margret takes her in, hooking her up with
designer Bob Mackie and a divorce lawyer.

But right now, it’s just Ann-Margret and Tina, singing on a TV
soundstage in London. They can’t stop laughing hysterically. Two
women sharing a weirdly private joke in a public place. The big wheel
keeps on turnin’.

AFTER SHE ESCAPED Ike, Tina was written off by the whole music
business. She was a Black woman in her forties. It was time for the
oldies circuit. But she discovered that there was a rising Eighties
generation of New Wave kids, especially in the U.K. And they idolized
Tina Turner. She did a 1982 duet 
[[link removed]]with Heaven 17’s Martyn
Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, in their side project as B.E.F., the British
Electric Foundation. She was shocked these kids didn’t see her as
washed-up. They saw her as a vibrant, relevant legend in her prime. As
she wrote in _My Love Story_, “Martyn, who was practically a boy,
though a very talented one, happened to think that this middle-aged
singer had a bright future.”

Tina sang “Ball of Confusion” with them, in one take. To her
amazement, it took off on a brand new cable network the kids were
into. MTV had a nationwide audience and a playlist full of
unconventional Black rockers who didn’t fit into radio: Prince,
Grace Jones, Joan Armatrading, Peter Tosh, Bob Marley. “Ball of
Confusion” made her an MTV star, even though American radio
wouldn’t touch her. She cut another single and video with Martyn
Ware, a remake of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” an even
bigger hit.

That led to the night that changed her life, in NYC, January 1983.
David Bowie was having dinner with his new record label, right
before _Let’s Dance_ came out, getting wined and dined, but he
informed them he had plans for the night: He was going to see Tina
Turner live. He wouldn’t dream of missing her. He dragged everyone
along with him. Her manager Roger Davies got a last-minute call,
asking for 63 spots on the guest list. “My Cinderella moment,” she
called it in her book. “That night at the Ritz was the equivalent of
going to the ball (minus the part about Prince Charming) because it
changed my life dramatically.” 

After the show, she raised hell all night with Bowie, Keith Richards,
and Ron Wood, sitting around the hotel piano, singing Motown classics,
guzzling Dom Perignon. They posed for one of the coolest rock photos
of all time: Tina, Keith and Bowie all drinking from the same bottle
of Jack Daniels. She was a rock star now, forever. Her story was just
beginning. 

It was funny for fans how she was so into old-school rock, but she
spiced up her live set with ZZ Top’s “Legs” (she had them) and
Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” (she wasn’t). At Live Aid,
dueting with Mick Jagger, the song they did was “It’s Only Rock &
Roll But I Like It.”

But she was really ahead of her time. The concept of “classic
rock” didn’t exist yet. (Not until the radio format began in
1986.) Rock culture was still so stuck on the mythos of youth and
newness that her Seventies-retro concept was kinda ahead of her time.
In a way, it’s an underrated Tina innovation: the Black grandma who
invented dad rock.

ROLLING STONE BLEW up _Private Dancer_ with one of the most
influential reviews
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magazine has ever run, from the brilliant critic Debby Miller. The
review framed the Tina Turner comeback narrative, as the world has
known it ever since. The final lines: “Last year, I heard Tina
Turner sing that awful Terry Jacks song ‘Seasons in the Sun’ on
television, and she found something in it that broke her heart.
Imagine her doing the same thing to _good_ songs.” 

She and Bowie always had one of the most endearing rock-star
friendships — they always brought out the weird in each other. They
duetted on his strange Pepsi commercial
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Frankenstein and Tina as the rock goddess in his laboratory, both
singing on “Modern Love.” They also duetted on a weirdly
touching synth-reggae version of “Tonight”
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separated by death, their voices meshing for the payoff lines “I
will love you till I die/I will see you in the sky/Tonight.” She
found her permanent home in Zurich, becoming a Swiss citizen. In so
many ways, her closest career twin was Leonard Cohen, a fellow
Nicheren Buddhist devotee. They were both born in the Thirties, but
blew up in the Eighties as icons of middle-aged cool, after decades in
the game. They showed everyone else how to age gracefully, flaunting
the cracks in their voices, living their long weird lives in the tower
of song.

When her life story became the Angela Bassett movie _What’s Love
Got To Do With It_, she stole the show at the end with “Proud
Mary.” But she couldn’t bring herself to watch it. As she wrote
in _Rolling Stone_, “I never saw _What’s Love Got to Do With
It_ because I was too close to those painful memories at the time,
and I was afraid it would be upsetting, like watching a
documentary.” She resisted the idea of the 2019 Broadway
musical _Tina_ for the same reason, saying, “I didn’t feel like
talking about that stuff from the past because it gave me bad
dreams.” But she loved the musical when she saw it with an audience.
She said, “I want to pass the baton, so to speak, to them, and
anyone facing a challenge, so they leave the theater standing proud,
with their chests out and chins up, inspired to believe, ‘I can do
it.’” 

Really, she spent her whole life doing that. And that’s why Tina
Turner’s voice will never go silent. In the end, she is the big
wheel who keeps on turning, forever.

* Tina Turner
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* Music
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* R&B
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* rock and roll
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* Rock Music
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* soul
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* soul music
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* pop music
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* sexual abuse
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* survivors
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* spousal abuse
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* domestic violence
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* Proud Mary
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