Tumult! Read online

  But first they had a shared and well-deserved stardom together as a creative team albeit something of a tortured partnership on her part. With a new stylistic persona and a much higher profile for Tina, they turned another corner professionally when they recorded an up-tempo version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary,” which forever altered the Turner landscape and made it obvious who was really leading the charge forward musically. It sold more than a million copies and won a Grammy for best duo/group rhythm-and-blues performance. She was obviously branching out both creatively and professionally and clearly moving way, way beyond Ike.

  Not surprisingly, many younger listeners and readers who were captivated by her stellar solo career may be far less familiar with their earlier work as a collaboration. By the mid-1970s, a combination of forces were driving the pair toward a decline of the duo format that had served them so well for more than ten years. Tina was of course coming into her own confident persona, and Ike had descended into a disastrous dependence on Bolivian nasal remedies, not to mention his cascading violence toward the blossoming Tina. Shows started to be missed, and contracts went unsigned.

  In 1976, Tina filed for divorce and fled his company, both personally and professionally, stating that about this time her embrace of Buddhist meditation and chanting practices helped her survive the ravages of their suffocating relationship. To her chagrin, she discovered that by walking out on Ike during the middle of a concert tour, she was then liable to tour promoters for the canceled shows. Their divorce was finally settled in 1978, and she was completely liberated from the overbearing impresario, who had nonetheless contributed to making her a household name, a name that she ironically retained as part of the court settlement.

  Tina made a triumphant return to the stage in 1978, funded by United Artists management and directed by a new manager, Roger Davies, who advised her to drop the revue-format band and remodel herself as a much grittier rock-and-roll performer. She flung herself into a whirlwind of appearances to solidify her newfound identity, opening shows for the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart (a sure way to rock royalty), and then signed a new lucrative solo deal with Capitol Records. A world tour commenced in support of her new comeback album and image.

  Naturally enough, Hollywood also beckoned once again. The new and improved Tina Turner had arrived. The rest is herstory: an incredible life and even more incredible music, both of which are equally mesmerizing. The narrative of Tumult! is an extended exploration of the quite magical metamorphosis of shy Anna Mae Bullock into the force of nature we know as Tina Turner today. Turning into Turner: it is actually of course really the tale of someone who was already just patiently waiting to emerge, not a Svengali-guided Pygmalion creature at all but a fully formed if vulnerable young lady who was inevitably going to burst out of the claustrophobic shell imposed on her one way or the other. And, Lordy, burst out she did.

  As of this writing, Turner is calmly simmering on the back burner of mortality’s stove, having been struggling with intestinal cancer (the same ailment that took away two other soul goddesses: Sharon Jones in 2016 and Aretha Franklin in 2018) and having undergone a kidney transplant that was rejected and followed by numerous seizures and strokes. Her mighty voice and fantastically athletic form may have been stilled by this condition, but her true legacy is only now beginning to come fully into focus: that personal belief in her interior gift that could never be extinguished.

  Even if mortality takes her away, as it appears it must, her spirit has been only quieted down some, not really silenced at all. And the sonic artifacts, records, concerts, videos, and films she left behind still convey that spirit loud and clear. Like my earlier books on two brilliant female musicians (Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece and Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, both from Backbeat Books in 2016 and 2018, respectively), in Tumult! I tend to pass over the soap opera struggles as much as possible, except where essential to the narrative, in favor of a deep dive into the core of her creative sources and her lofty achievements in musical artistry.

  But even the details of her harrowing early pre-solo years do still inform the inspiration and production of that impressive later work. Exult!—that could also be a fitting subtitle to her story as well. Tumult! just feels right, though, given her early and middle beginnings. In the main, it suggests the loud noise of an excited crowd, linking it to adoring rock stadiums for me, as well as a state of change, turmoil, upheaval, ferment, uproar, commotion, ruckus, frenzy, and turbulence, often associated with convulsions, tempests, storms, and maelstroms. Indeed, all these terms are easily identifiable with what happens when Tina Turner starts working her magic on a crowd.

  Yet exult is perhaps equally applicable to her as well, especially in the long post-Ike tumult era we now most associate with her name: to feel or show triumphant elation or jubilation, to rejoice, to be joyful, to be ecstatic, to revel in, to be enraptured, and, maybe most important, to be proud. And just like one of the songs most often connected to her career, Proud Tina keeps on rolling.

  In the example of this uniquely global superstar, we have a case study in sheer creative willpower, and her achievements were lofty indeed by any and all standards, both artistic and commercial. Singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, icon: she had risen to international prominence already as the featured singer in the Ike and Tina Turner Revue but then went on to far eclipse that fame with a new astronomically visible solo career entirely of her own making. Fate would even apologize to her later on for the mistake it made with her the first time and bring a new and vastly improved love interest, Erwin Bach, into her life, almost as if to make amends.

  Becoming one of the best-selling recording artists of all time (no exaggeration) and often referred to as the Queen of Rock and Roll, she has sold more than 200 million records; has received a total of eight Grammy Awards from twenty-five nominations, three Hall of Fame Awards, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991; and also received Kennedy Center Honors in 2005.

  It is definitely as a rock star and pop music goddess, rather than solely as a soul, funk, or rhythm-and-blues artist, that my book begins its appreciation of her truly transcendent popular appeal. I maintain—and always have—that pop music is a serious creative and cultural artifact, one reflecting our planetary cultures in a way often overlooked merely due to the sheer scale and volume of the vast commercial success levels in question among the upper echelons of pop performers.

  A figure like Tina is often taken less seriously as an artist simply because she has also, according to the Guinness World Records, sold more live concert tickets than any other solo performer in music history. But more important for me, in addition to what caused her songs to be expressed so forcefully, is how they were recorded so effectively. The studio, band, and production levels on her albums are all supernaturally fine in their support of her craft.

  In many ways, she was what the early feminist author Anais Nin described as “a spy in the house of love.” She sent back dispatches from the front lines of the heart depicting the dynamics of personal relationships, usually the kind involving copious heartbreak merged with inevitable triumph. It was a signature style she had developed from living as a survivor.

  Being Tina Turner day in and day out required having acres of stamina, and as the consummate spy for love, she shared a certain obscure skill with other experts in emotional espionage. Hers is an outsized talent for survival I can best paraphrase from an apt description I recently encountered in Ben Macintyre’s book A Spy among Friends. In body, she was fragile, but her soul was made of some tensile, almost impossibly resilient material that never broke or even bent in its certainty.

  So, in Tumult!, we try to take her seriously as an artist and unearth what uncanny skills enabled her to connect with so many of her fellow mortals at such a deep heart-to-heart level. She is, in fact, a beating human heart in high heels.

  1
br />   I COULD HAVE BEEN ANYONE ANYWHERE The Origin Myth

  “Physical strength in a woman, that’s what I am. If you’re unhappy with anything, get rid of it. When you’re free, then your true creativity and true self comes out.”

  —Tina Turner, in I Tina, 1986

  One of Tina Turner’s lesser-known records is also one of her most important and revealing. “Nutbush City Limits” is a song released in 1973 as a single and on an album of the same name while she was still working with her partner and producer, Ike Turner. It’s not her most beloved record or even her most popular song. It was, however, a crucial turning point, one we could even call a Turner Point since it was the first song she wrote by herself, for herself, and about herself. It was one that became quite a big hit for the prolific pair, who by that time had already been successful and revered for more than a decade but who were still only three years away from her divorce and hard-won independence.

  It was also a song of deep intimacy, sentiment, and personal nostalgia in which she celebrated her rural roots in a frank and honest manner so meaningful for her that she would release different updated versions of it again and again over the years, notably a live recording in 1988 and several dance remixes in 1991 and yet another rerecording in 1993, long after she had become a stellar solo performer and a megastar in her own right. This raucously danceable ditty clearly had special meaning for her. The hidden truth behind the song was also of course the simple fact that it was always her who made the couple’s music special right from the beginning, a fact that must have grated severely on her insecure and volatile husband.

  This relatively elementary little tune was almost a private kind of national anthem for the sleepy town of Nutbush, Tennessee, a place hardly anyone knew existed apart from the roughly 258 other souls besides Anna Mae Bullock, the future Tina, who lived there. But the song is also elemental in the way it situates her origins and embeds them in a manner that would never quite leave her, no matter how much fame or wealth tumbled her way. Distant from Interstate 40, dropped by an obviously ironic creator in the middle of nowhere between Jackson and Memphis, it was close enough to Highway 19 to make that the escape route for every bored citizen wanting out in search of wider and freer horizons.

  This humble song extols and elevates, even mythologizes, a space and time forever lodged in the heart of a southern girl like Miss Bullock. And though basic in its fondly recalled message of home and hearth, “Go to the store on Fridays, go to the church on Sundays . . . ,” it is nevertheless propelled along in a full-charging way as fueled by Ike’s admittedly swift arrangements and his own powerful throbbing electric organ and twanging guitar playing, both coupled with their Kings of Rhythm’s customary swaying swagger.

  As Nick Hasted effectively characterized it in Classic Rock, the 1973 song was clearly ironic, maybe even schizoid, considering the lifestyle she was trapped in during the period of her writing it: being forced onstage each night despite health issues such as bronchitis leading to tuberculosis, a collapsed right lung and infected legs, and a permanently bruised jaw from Ike’s abuse. She called it “living in hell’s domain,” and Hasted mournfully referenced her claim that she was “brainwashed” during that period.

  Indeed, it must have felt something like being stuck in a cult: “Her nightmare parody of suburban domestic bliss required her to treat Ike like a king while looking after their four children, and the musical life which once inspired her wasn’t much better. On stage, the once blisteringly inspiring Ike and Tina Turner Revue could now be a sad, exhausted spectacle.” So, perhaps it was natural enough, in the midst of the Ike cult, for her lonely imagination to return to her idealized country memories of the quiet hamlet where she first saw the light of day.

  Now of course, though she was clearly utilizing her hometown motif as a survival mechanism until the effects of her own personal Stockholm syndrome could be evaded, neither Nutbush itself nor her childhood in general was anything remotely idyllic. It probably just seemed that way compared to Ike. Nutbush is an unincorporated rural community in Haywood County in the western part of the state of Tennessee. It was established in the early nineteenth century by European American settlers who brought along enslaved African Americans as workers to develop the area’s plantations. Those African American forced migrants built houses and churches there that still stand to this day.

  Historically, the town had been devoted to the cultivation and harvesting of cotton, a commodity crop since the antebellum years, when its processing and transport depended on institutionalized enslavement. Other notable musicians also emerged from this unlikely area, among them some prominent blues recording artists, including Hambone Willie Newbern, Noah Lewis, and the great Sleepy John Estes. There’s even a famous line dance named the Nutbush, which survives still and was performed in an episode of the television show Glee of all places. Nutbush was basically the blues incarnate.

  Her immediate family consisted of her mother Zelma Priscilla and father Floyd Richard Bullock, two mismatched souls with the misfortune to be married to each other, and two older sisters, Evelyn Juanita and Ruby Alline. After her birth in nearby Brownsville (where her actual delivery took place, at the Haywood Memorial Hospital, a tiny municipal building whose basement was set aside for the care of black patients), Anna Mae’s extended family of maternal and paternal grandparents raised her in Nutbush and also in neighboring Ripley.

  That larger clan also included a strong and distinct heritage from Anna Mae’s maternal side. Her mother Zelma’s parents—Josephus, a sharecropper, and Georgiana Currie—were from different dispossessed cultures that both formed a sad but crucial part of American history. He was three-quarters Navajo, while his wife, Anna Mae’s grandmother, was three-quarters Cherokee, the first nation whose ancestral lands had been seized in the forging of Tennessee itself. Both of them were one-quarter black.

  This might account for some of the exotically alluring features that always struck me as most appealing about the future Tina: a sharply defined Native bloodline as strong as her own impressive cheekbones. I’ve always enjoyed Kurt Loder’s description of her when he helped her write the first of her two memoirs. He described her sisters and cousin as wearing their hair in the tight plaits customary for young black daughters, whereas Anna Mae, perhaps already genetically inclined toward rebellion, has “undone her mother’s patient braidwork and gathered her full reddish hair into a rough ponytail at the back, revealing an exotic facial geography of elegant broad bones, richly sculpted lips, honey-toned skin, smooth as a breezeless sea, and eyes like tiny brown beacons.”

  And it was into this mixture of transported African migrants forced into slavery and the remnants of a once grand nation of Native dwellers that Anna Mae would be merged. She would be born into a world of conflict and trauma, both in her personal domestic family life of perpetually fighting parents at war with each other for unknown reasons as well as on a grand scale in the world at large, a world at war for equally questionable motives.

  Two months before her birth on November 26, 1939, England and France declared war on Nazi Germany, which had invaded Poland with Soviet acquiescence if not outright assistance. Tumult was already latently active in the world outside her, just waiting to fully erupt within. Welcome to your childhood.

  Unfortunately for Anna Mae, though she felt some warmth in her grandparents’ home, there was zero in her own since her parents Richard and Zelma seemed to have no time or energy left over after their constant battles to ever care for their youngest daughter. She clearly felt like an unwanted child, and she evidently was, for her sister Alline had been lucky enough to be born into a marriage that had yet to deteriorate into open domestic warfare.

  This left Anna Mae with much solitary time on her hands, often wandering through the natural backcountry domain outside the home, if only to escape the violent storms inside its unhappy walls. Equally impressive, along with her general psychic survival of potential parental harm at any moment, whether from violence
or neglect, was her personal claim on that obscure force within her that permitted an out-sized optimism and hopefulness.

  She didn’t remember being poor exactly (perhaps a basic and simple life would be more accurate) largely due to her father’s standing on Poindexter farm as the leader or manager (officially designated as overseer) of the other sharecroppers. The rigid southern social strata did impact on her from a segregation aspect of course, but that was apparently just the way of the world to a young girl, incapable of understanding why her kind of folks were accepted as long they knew and kept in their place.

  The only pleasure she occasionally had, apart from roaming the fields and streams, was attending large barbecue picnics at which live music would be played. Not even blues really, it was what she thought to call country music at the time, but it thrilled her to witness a live band of revelers whooping it up and making a joyful noise, at least until the picnic was over. That was regrettable, the music’s ending, because it meant she had to return indoors to a mother who didn’t communicate with her at all and a father who she felt sure just didn’t want her around at all. The music was her only friend.

  The trouble might have been, she used to surmise, because she heard her mother had stolen her father way from another girl, not because she loved him but just out of spite. So it was clear and obvious, even to a little girl, that the reason they didn’t get along was simply that they didn’t even like each other, let alone love each other. It’s hard not to imagine, even at this early life stage, the faint echo of a future long-distant song, “what’s love but a second hand emotion, who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”