Tumult! Read online

  TUMULT!

  TUMULT!

  The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner

  Donald Brackett

  Guilford, Connecticut

  Published by Backbeat Books

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

  Lanham, MD 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2020 by Donald Brackett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brackett, Donald, 1951- author.

  Title: Tumult! : the incredible life and music of Tina Turner / Donald Brackett.

  Description: Lanham : Backbeat Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The narrative of Tumult! The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner is an extended exploration of the magical transformation of shy country girl Anna Mae Bullock into the boisterous force of nature we know today as Tina Turner”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020010514 (print) | LCCN 2020010515 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493055067 (paperback) | ISBN 9781493055074 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Turner, Tina. | Singers—United States—Biography. | Rhythm and blues musicians—United States—Biography. | Rock musicians—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ML420.T95 B73 2020 (print) | LCC ML420.T95 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010514

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010515

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  This book is dedicated to all those women who were strong enough to leave and also to all those who weren’t.

  “Being righteous is a full time job.”

  —Erikah Badu, Wayback, 1997

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction. No North or South in Dreams: Turning into Turner

  1 I Could Have Been Anyone Anywhere: The Origin Myth

  2 Pass Me That Microphone: One Chance in a Million

  3 Chitlin’ Royalty: Touring Mania

  4 Public Romancer: Deeper and Higher

  5 Please Release Me, Let Me Go: Proud Tina

  6 Nichiren Nights: The Baptist Buddhist

  7 Re-Launch: Firsthand Emotion

  8 Better Than All the Rest: We Need Another Heroine

  9 Heavy Weather in a Dress: The Legacy of Tina Turner

  Discography

  Bibliography

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  Guide

  Cover

  Half Title

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Start of Content

  Discography

  Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the many people who helped make this book possible and to express his appreciation to Aaron Cohen, John Corcelli, and James Porter for sharing their insights into Tina and her music. Thanks also to my musical friends, Gerry Watson and Kevin Courrier, for ongoing and fruitful discussions over the years. And to my partner, Dr. Mimi Gellman, for allowing me to spend so much time with amazing women like Tina.

  INTRODUCTION No North or South in Dreams: Turning into Turner

  “My legacy is that I stayed on course, from the beginning to the end, because I believed in something inside of me.”

  —Tina, Minerva Lee interview, World Tribune, 2018

  How often do you get a chance to paraphrase the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire in the context of rock and pop music? Here goes. If Tina Turner had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. And, strangely enough, that’s exactly what did happen in reality.

  This towering talent started out life as a little giant, Anna Mae Bullock, born November 26, 1939, to a tempestuous family in rural Nutbush, Tennessee, and grew up throughout the southeastern United States. Like many other future soul music queens, she first experienced the joys of singing in the heated reverence of local Baptist church choirs. Also, like many other future funk divas, such as Aretha Franklin and Sharon Jones, among others, Anna Mae didn’t linger for too long in the pews of prayer. She preferred instead a different kind of soul-stirring rhythm, and she found it throbbing in the secular swagger of rhythm and blues–infused soul and bluesy rock music.

  Designations of geography on maps, however, are only mere pieces of paper, and it was quickly obvious to young Miss Bullock that dreams have no north or south, a fact that allowed her to gravitate, like so many others before her, into the large northern urban centers of America, to places that seemed to always be waiting for a storm to happen. East St. Louis, Illinois, was just such a place beyond all maps, and she was indeed, though still in her early teen days, a secret storm waiting to be unleashed. And it was to be there, sixteen years after being born as Anna Mae, that she was reinvented by an aspiring bandleader with a penchant for capitalizing on valuable natural resources.

  The most basic and salient fact about Tina Turner is that she is a master (or mistress) of pure, unalloyed transformation. What that something inside of her to which she refers might actually be is perhaps somewhat difficult to define in concrete terms, but it can certainly be amply described. Yes, this central fact of her life, one of perpetual change, growth, and evolution, is quite simple of course, yet it also helps to guide us through the twisting labyrinth of a very complex, sometimes even contradictory and many-layered woman and artist.

  By believing in that something inside her, even without fully knowing what to call it, she would eventually transform herself from a hot and heavy rhythm-and-blues–oriented soul singer into a rock star, a movie star, and a global feminine celebrity of goddess-like proportions. Her mystique is partially embedded of course in her humble beginnings, her nightmarish domestic relationship, and especially her supersonic abilities as an evocative singer, entertainer, and dancer.

  But what made her into an icon of female survival and human triumph was almost as indefinable as her raspy voice and as breathtaking as her endless legs. If I had to identify what she called that something she believed in, I’d have to resort to the rhapsodic and maybe even ambiguous: the idea of no limits and the ability to live one’s dreams on a daily basis. In that respect, she’s also a radical dichotomy: a figure serving as an enigmatic emblem of victimhood yet also a personification of triumph over physical and psychological adversity and poverty of affection as well as triumph over posttraumatic stress.

  A magnificent sex symbol of fiercely unbridled sensuality who is also a devout and ardent practitioner of gentle Nichiren Buddhism, while it’s true that she morphed herself several times over the course of her full-spectrum life, she also got some unexpected help from what we might call karma along the way. But it was from a surprising source since she didn’t mutate herself from Anna Mae to Tina either overnight or certainly not all on her own. Not by any means.

  The glowering presence of Ike Turner actually bestowed both her name itself and the opportunity to make it as well known as the weather, and heavy weather it was indeed. That’s what makes embodying a paradox the heart of her story, both her life story and her love story: the fact that her menace was also her mentor, a sinister Svengali figure of Phil Spector–scaled lunacy. It was a chance teenage encounter with Ike that changed not only the course of her own life but also the course of musical history. Chance, it turns out, is the fool’s name for fate.

  There are three things about the notorious name of Ike Turner and three reasons why he is still important even after living a long life of self-destructive disgrace through both drug abuse and domestic violence. One, he recorded probably the very first rock-and-roll song in history, “Rocket 88,” in 1951. Mr. Turner was back then the twenty-year-old leader of the Kings of Rhythm, and their rendition, with Jackie Brenston doing lead vocals, of a speeded-up basic twelve-bar blues song hit number one in the charts while also kick-starting an entire musical revolution.

  This of course also long predated Elvis Presley, the white genius who borrowed the raunchy black vibe of Chuck Berry, popularized it immensely, and led us directly into the waiting arms of the Beatles. It’s totally true that Ike heard the future coming, loud and clear. Besides, both Little Richard and Johnny Otis said he did. And Ike flagged it down to jump on board.

  Two, he was definitely a tormented talent on a huge scale himself: musician, bandleader, arranger, songwriter, talent scout, and record producer of considerable skill, especially as the commanding leader of the Kings, until meeting a certain young tornado from Tennessee and forming his famed co-named Revue. You didn’t have to like him—and few did—to appreciate his abilities.

  But we could surmise that it is indeed number three that makes us still utter his name at all today: he invented Tina Turner. While watching his band play one night in 1957 at Club Manhattan in St. Louis, the diminutive teen Anna Mae Bullock approached the stage during an intermission and audaciously asked to sing with them after claiming that the bandleader’s music “put her into a trance.” Soon enough, she’d be putting all the rest of us in a trance, something we can only call that special jittery Tina Trance.

  Together, as a boisterous but brilliant structural unit, Ike and Tina Turner pretty much started out their careers at the top of the pop game. This early acclaim was followed by a series of hits on a variety of small labels and also by one of the most grueling live concert touring schedules in music history.

  Ever the swift cat when it came to seeing his main chance at success, Ike quickly invented a group of backup singers for Tina, called the Ikettes, while he remained as the puppet king mastermind playing balefully in the background.

  The group acquired a solid reputation that audience members soon embraced as one of the hottest and potentially most explosive of all rock/pop ensembles with a show that rivaled that of the James Brown revue in terms of sheer sweaty spectacle. With a raunchy female screamer assuming the Brown sizzling star role, between 1963 and 1966, the band toured constantly throughout the country even in the absence of a hit single, a maj
or accomplishment on its own, as they were fueled by sheer word of mouth and ear power.

  In something like that era’s equivalent of going viral, Tina’s profile rapidly elevated as a result of public appearances on American Bandstand and Shindig!, while the whole Revue spotlit her on Hollywood a Go Go and the Andy Williams Show as well as the Big TNT Show in 1965. This brought her to the attention of not only a large white audience but also a huge pop mainstream public awareness in general. She was ready for her close-up.

  To finally cement their worldwide acclaim, they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1970, which was probably the first real mass encounter with Ike and Tina by music lovers with pale complexions like my own. They had marked a huge turning-point stage in their careers not just by being commercially anointed by Sullivan but also by switching from their prior rhythm-and-blues and soul music vibe to certified rock and roll and then to rock music proper. To some extent, they may even have personally helped evolve rock and roll into rock per se. At the very least, they certainly inaugurated pop rock.

  In a series of interview exchanges with musicians, music critics, journalists, and broadcasters, I have greatly benefited from their shared insights into what makes Tina tick. My exchanges with Aaron Cohen, Chicago-based author of Move On Up: Soul Music and Black Cultural Power; James Porter, broadcaster/author of Wild in the Streets, a history of the black origins of rock and roll and the evolution of black rock; and John Corcelli, a Toronto-based music journalist and author of Frank Zappa FAQ who also kindly wrote the foreword to my book on the soul music of Sharon Jones, have all proven very fruitful in terms of exploring and unearthing the staggering range of Turner’s musical achievements in the context of a broader cultural milieu. Their input into what made Tina so special proved very helpful in navigating the rough waters before, during, and after the Ike storm.

  Ike Turner finally passed away in 2007 (truth be told, he’d already been dead inside for years), and at Ike’s funeral oration, the great but totally loopy master producer Phil Spector started his eulogy by declaring that Ike had turned Tina into a jewel. So far so good, and quite true. But then the psychopathic Phil (currently an imprisoned murder felon) began to explain that any five other singers could have done what she did under his masterful tutelage, especially, he also intimated, if they had been under his own Spectorized production sway, even though he had produced only a single song for her (although it was admittedly a very important song).

  This may have been the first moment when the world at large realized the full depth of Spector’s mental illness since by then everyone on the planet also knew well what Tina was not only creatively capable of but also had already accomplished on her own in the thirty years after escaping from Ike’s paranoid and coke-addled clutches. And this was Ike’s third paradoxical contribution to musical history: the ironic fact that his own pathological possessiveness eventually drove née Bullock away from him and into the welcoming arms of a grateful global audience, into our welcoming arms.