Fever (8 page)

CHAPTER 3

Private Dancer

Girl groups gave Elvis a giant, collective “Yes!,” but rock feminism really begins with Tina Turner. From her first hit, “A Fool in Love,” in 1960, Turner was far ahead of other popular entertainers in expressing the plight of women with any realism. At key moments (“Fool” in 1960, “River Deep, Mountain High” in 1966, “Proud Mary” in 1971, “What's Love Got to Do with It” in 1984, and “I Don't Really Want to Fight No More” in 1993) she turned in defining hits about what women were thinking and feeling, and how women were treated by men. As her career saunters through its fifth decade, her persistence and longevity are as much key to her persona as her triumph over her former husband, Ike.

The evolution of Tina Turner's image over a half-century reflects the way men have traditionally cast women in pop, and prefigures women's defiant response in the sixties and afterward. Her role fronting the Ike and Tina Turner Revue typified the plight of women throughout early rock. On the surface, she resembled a lot of female acts: she was managed by a male producer who told her how to dress, placed her onstage in front of a few beautiful backup singers, and fed her songs written by male show-biz impresarios and arrangers. This deceptively simple format of the era's girl groups stemmed from a gender hierarchy so taken for granted that Ike Turner's remaining onstage for his share of the applause only made sense.

But as we've seen, these generalizations don't hold up, and Tina shouted down this stereotype more than anybody else, humbling not just husband Ike but producer Phil Spector, the Who's Roger Daltrey (in
Tommy
),
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
's Mel Gibson, even Sir Penis himself, Mick Jagger. Even as a teenager, Tina Turner's jaunty alto was indefatigably compelling, and her dynamism went beyond mere star power. She put her vocal cords through the same contortions that sent her body lurching on stage: whipping her legs around the microphone stand and lunging forward into the music, she pushed the sound so hard her musicians were always scrambling to keep up with her. Wielding an amazingly versatile and fierce instrument, she let fly bolts of strafing notes before stretching out into rough, enticing growls. Her passion came out as a combination of lust and rage, with overtones of fear, imperious confidence, bombast, and layers of tenderness—a grown woman drawing on a heap of abuse from men both on- and offstage. She wasn't a singer so much as a feminist tsunami.

These are the qualities Ike Turner spotted and coopted when he met the seventeen-year-old Anna Mae Bullock in 1958. His reaction—and the reaction of producers, critics, and fans thereafter—is nicely illustrated at the beginning of
What's Love Got to Do with It,
her 1993 Hollywood bio. After her first spontaneous appearance with his band in a St. Louis bar, Ike sits young Anna Mae down in a coffee shop and tells her, in astounded tones, that she sings “like a man.” Tina, always keenly self-conscious about her sound, explains in her autobiography,
I, Tina,
how she learned to sing like that.

Even before her first hit, Tina knew she didn't have a traditionally “pretty” voice. When she chose songs, she explains, she thought of men: how she could echo male deliveries, and how men would respond to her attack. She points out she had to “keep up” as the only female in Ike's band when she first joined. All her on-the-job musical and performance training came from these guys, and all their bar-hopping between towns left her few illusions about any “feminine” airs. Holding her own in this context meant sharpening her resolve.

In Tina's voice, Ike heard vigor, commitment, and daring, with no match or model among the female pop singers of her day. Turner's closest male vocal analog was James Brown—but in 1958 Brown had just logged his first hit, “Try Me,” and was still working out his convict boxer gospel singer persona as leader of the Famous Flames. Ike Turner, himself an incendiary guitarist who cultivated a wildman reputation tearing up stages throughout the Midwest, figured he'd just found his meal ticket. He had started as piano player for Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Nighthawk before forming the Kings of Rhythm. After two years on the road, he and the renamed Tina had their first hit with “Fool in Love,” and they embarked on a career that would symbolize the plight of Woman snared in a Man's industry.

There would be other singers as great as Turner in their own ways: the Chantels' Arlene Smith, the Ronettes' Veronica Spector, or Darlene Love, who sang for the Crystals. Each of these singers had charisma to match her huge voice, each in her own way encountered obstacles as patronizing and forbidding as Tina did, and needed something more than talent to deliver them to the listeners they deserved. But as women began coming out from behind the wall of men in the early sixties to take their place in rock, few secured a lasting hold on their audience like Tina Turner. Jackie DeShannon could write, Dusty Springfield sure could sing (both were packaged as the would-be movie stars they resembled), and Lesley Gore was just odd enough to give her pliant devotions a cloying insecurity. (In the 1980s, many of Gore's songs were embraced by the gay community, which gave songs like “You Don't Own Me,” still standard oldies fare, retro-progressive overtones.)

But Tina not only stole attention from whoever happened to be producing her, she ripped through all the gender, race, and class issues of her music like a twister upending farm houses. Like Elvis's, her talent was too big for most of her songs, and this led to a lifelong struggle choosing material. Even on her earliest hit, “A Fool in Love,” her vocal alone created a new kind of female warrior in what had previously been male territory. With the advantage of hindsight, it's clear how keenly her audience identified with the tension and release of her career over the decades, and how hungry that audience was for a figure of such towering complexity.

“A Fool in Love” epitomizes not only the way Turner used girl-group poses to say subversive things, but how she pointed this conceit in different directions than her contemporaries. Knowing now what we do about her troubled marriage (which began the same year the song was released), the song sounds like unfiltered autobiography. “Oh_____ there's something on my mind,” Tina wails alone at the opening, as if testifying before a gospel congregation: “Won't somebody please, please tell me what's wrong…”

He's got me smilin' when I should be ashamed

Got me laughin' when my heart is in pain …

[backup response] Why he treat you like he do when he's such a good man?

All of Tina's vocal cries spin out around the Ikettes' harmonies, building a huge tension in the sound: she means what she sings quite literally, but her performance is also a struggle to escape, to shake free from the song's (and her man's) hold. And everything the song leaves unsaid—the abuses she would spend a career spelling out—now only makes this tension greater.

Given the surefire hook and rhythmic swagger of “A Fool in Love,” what Turner did with the song is all the more remarkable for what little needed doing. She didn't have to dress it up any to give it kick, and you can easily imagine a lesser singer (Gladys Horton or Wanda Young of the Marvelettes, say) turning the number into a hit. Tina folded the song's fun-loving questions back on themselves: she knew she was a fool to be in love, her performance told you, especially each time she thought through the way this man treated her. Was she having a good time? Certainly. Did this love have its price? Undeniably. Would the woman at the center of this dilemma allow this, or any lover, to define her? Absolutely not, the record screamed, and the defiant teeth she sank into this lyric underlined the core ambivalence beneath all that passion.

This was a radical female posture for its day, when the biggest Shirelles hit would soon be “Soldier Boy,” a cloying greeting card to the man in uniform across the seas. “A Fool in Love” suggested exactly who the fools were—not only the women who would be so mistreated by men, but the men who mistreated feminine royalty with such self-destructive ignorance. This complex point of view is captured in
What's Love Got to Do with It.
Laurence Fishburne brings empathy to Ike, who is somehow a monster yet strangely compelling, just the sort of man Tina might stay with through all his tirades. David Thomson describes Fishburne's Ike as reeling from “the self-destructive force of his own charisma, and riveting.”

Beginning with the success of “A Fool in Love” and continuing throughout the decade that followed, Ike Turner's top billing as bandleader suggested another connection: that of a pimp fronting his entourage. This didn't need to be spelled out: Tina wore wigs so flamboyant that combined with her tight miniskirts, to-hell-and-gone legs, and high-heeled struts, she affected a streetwalker persona that went far beyond parody.

And yet what made Tina great was how fervently she projected right through her costume. She rose above her image as a black woman manipulated by men so fiercely that all that streetwalker imagery boiled right off her. Finally all that mattered was how much refusal she put into her gospel-influenced singing, so that even a potential novelty like “A Fool in Love” broke free like hard-won feminist redemption. The subtext of the record blared contempt: “This is how men treat women in pop—they turn you into a whore.” Did Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem ever express female indignation as brazenly as Tina Turner?

A year after the success of “Fool,” Ike and Tina released “It's Gonna Work Out Fine,” produced by Mickey and Sylvia (“Love Is Strange”). This song was squarely in the girl-group mainstream of the moment, a duet in which Tina pledged her devotion and the Ikettes answered Tina's outbursts with prettily harmonized refrains. Ike played straight man, chiming in with solemn comebacks. It wasn't as big a hit as “Fool,” but it did receive a Grammy nomination for the year's best rock 'n' roll recording, and helped establish Ike and Tina Turner as insider favorites. For the rest of the decade, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue worked the live circuit, playing to small but enthusiastic audiences. As superstardom continued to elude them, Ike's all-consuming ego splayed uncontrollably into hard drugs and violence. But Tina only seemed to rock harder. It was as if Ike's self-destructiveness only sharpened her musical resolve. Where Ike was interested in what he considered long-overdue fame, Tina honed her craft.

*   *   *

Ike Turner may have been a gifted guitarist and bandleader, but he had even less of an idea how to make a career than a marriage. In 1962, he released “I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)” with Ikette Dolores Johnson up front, and Tina adding some lead work, but billed the song as by the Ikettes to sneak past producer Juggy Murray's Sue label, which had taken a chance on “A Fool in Love” and helped make it a hit. Ike was always cutting corners, and he jumped record labels with all the discretion of a sailor on shore leave:

Ike was just as cynical about how he treated Tina during her hospital stay after giving birth to his child. He put another singer who resembled her onstage without letting on that the act had a substitute. One such sub happened to be a prostitute, and kept right on turning tricks to johns who thought they were getting some Tina, and weren't exactly discreet about it—with her or anybody else.

Ike also beat up his prime asset, forcing Tina to use makeup to cover her bruises for photo sessions. It wasn't until the summer of 1965, when he signed with Loma Records, a small R&B outfit run by Bob Krasnow, that things began to look up. Krasnow had managed James Brown until the Watts riots (when Brown repudiated white management), and it was Krasnow who answered Phil Spector's call about Tina. Krasnow also featured the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in
The Big TNT Show,
a rock gig filmed at a Los Angeles club called the Moulin Rouge. On a bill that included the Rolling Stones, James Brown, the Animals, and the Supremes, Tina Turner turned in a star-making performance by barreling through “Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine” and the James Brown number “Please, Please, Please.” Ike wasn't the only pro in that house who sensed Tina's career was a lit fuse.

When Phil Spector called for a session in 1966, there was good reason for Ike and Tina to hope their fortunes had changed. In the movie version of this story, Ike is at first ecstatic, then despondent when he realizes Spector is only interested in Tina. But the film ignores the larger story: Tina Turner produced by Phil Spector represents both the peak and the collapse of the girl-group era. Spector had built his empire producing cathedrals of sound celebrating female power, and at age twenty-five was a pop legend. As these two major players—one famous, the other infamous—partnered for the genre's most ambitious gesture, it was as if the boy King laid his golden touch on the tigress who would be Queen. Turner, who had originally helped define the girl-group sound in 1960 with “A Fool in Love,” had by 1966 been driven into a career ditch by Ike's relentless touring and poor management choices. To pop producers, promoters, and almost everybody who caught her live act, Turner was a champion waiting for her crown: all she needed was the right contender to step in the ring for her knockout punch.

In turn, reviving Turner's career was Phil Spector's gamble to sustain his own; here was another man whose ears told him he was listening to a meal ticket. Unlike a lot of American acts (Elvis Presley, Ben E. King), Spector's hits hadn't dropped off with the British Invasion. With singles like “Walking in the Rain” by the Ronettes in late 1964 and “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'” by the Righteous Brothers in 1965, Spector was weathering the onslaught, but not nearly as often as before. Within two years he had burned enough bridges and pissed off enough talent to find himself stranded, desperate to sustain the sensational heights his best records had promised.