Tina Turner - Classic or Dud?

so true, I love that song, for so many reasons

xp to Alfred

yeah it’s gorgeous

her vocal on the "i don't wanna fight" bridge might be the best of her career

“I’m so saddened by the passing of my wonderful friend Tina Turner,” Jagger captioned a series of photos of him performing with the late icon from decades past. “She was truly an enormously talented performer and singer. She was inspiring, warm, funny and generous. She helped me so much when I was young and I will never forget her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wyuwJP-u9Q

RIP, Cher is talking about this right now on MSNBC

I don't know why, and this makes no sense, but I never thought about the possibility that Tina Turner would die

Martyn Ware, perhaps unsurprisingly given his role in her renaissance, has turned into a one-man RT machine of just about every last tribute to her he can find:

https://twitter.com/martynware

I don't know why, and this makes no sense, but I never thought about the possibility that Tina Turner would die

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

exactly my first reaction

the ike adulation looks terrible totally separate from what it means to use it to handwave away what tina was

but tbh it always struck me as tryhard muso opinion *even aside from that aspect* because any glance at a sixties/seventies tina live performance clearly demonstrates a goddess

Tina Turner hanging off the Eiffel Tower.

One of Peter Lindbergh’s most iconic photographs. pic.twitter.com/TzkhHadVpX

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 24, 2023

RIP Tina, queen, goddess, auntie

i'd forgotten how nasty some ILM threads used to be back then, tear down the old gods or what have you

was inspired to look up the date of my first stadium concert which had mentioned way upthread Aug 5, Capital Center in MD Aug 85 so 13 at the time, Tina was really a force of nature - and truly seemed immortal

she will be missed

and that Eiffel tower photo is iconic

Yeah it felt for a while the popular opinion was her solo material paled to the Ike and Tina stuff, but I grew up on her solo songs, love many of them, and I know that era far better than the Ike and Tina one. RIP

Temporarily breaking silence for a RIP VMIC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9F942fNKIc

IIRC there's no satisfying compilation of the Ike & Tina years, partly because no one wants to go through the hassle of licensing across so many different labels. Time-Life did a three-disc set that comes sort of close, but it's still missing some EMI-owned tracks and most egregiously the original "River Deep - Mountain High" (probably still owned by Phil Spector's estate but possibly easier to license now that he's dead). A shame because a two-and-a-half hour collection of that era or even a broader one extending into her solo years would be absolutely essential. I probably lean towards those years with her ex-husband, but no LP from that era matches the statement she makes with What's Love Got to Do with It and no single, not even "River Deep - Mountain High," gets under my skin as strongly "What's Love Got to Do with It."

My favorite Tina cover is Missing You

she absolutely belts the shit out of this live version, it gives me goosebumps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTVEE3id7Kc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEw0FSxCO5g

fkn iconic… so good!!

can we go back to when she was alive
this sucks so hard

I don't know why, and this makes no sense, but I never thought about the possibility that Tina Turner would die

^^^ I mean this is like finding out that Wonder Woman is mortal.

i also love love love her cover of Help
she does it in the style of the John Farnham version from 1980 (which i also love) and wow talk about taking you to church

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoQKXdQ3U8Y

jfc this starts off even worse than the Bonnie Raitt thread. og ilm was a hellhole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTlK4E2gaU

Brian Johnson auditioned for AC/DC with Nutbush City Limits, which is such an insane vocal performance but presumably he nailed it, or got close enough anyways

But yeah fuck Ike and boo to the start of this thread, what a legend

I too assumed she was immortal. I had the same feeling when I heard James Brown died, like hearing someone say, “oh, the sun, yeah, it stopped, it’s not a thing anymore.”

Among the many things that piss me off about corporate media consolidation is the fact that individual radio DJs (or even program directors) apparently no longer have any control. That is, all the Clear Channel stations are so tightly controlled that, when I flipped around the radio hoping to hear tributes to Tina Turner today, it was the usual playlists on the oldies stations. I’m reminded of what Carlos Santana said about how broadcast media in France immediately switched over to all-Miles Davis programming when he died; something like that seems sadly inconceivable these days. When James Brown died, I was driving through the northeast, and throughout the whole trip from DC to Massachusetts I could easily find 3-4 stations simultaneously playing all JB.

I had no idea Pepsi had Bowie and Tina in a commercial at the height of the cola wars.

I remember the Pepsi ad - which reminds me of a photo should find from her 83 Ritz residency I believe with Tina pouring champagne down Bowie's throat while Keith Richards lurks in back clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels

but saw George Miller sharing his memories of Tina in the Guardian and starting off with 'When someone was such a life force, you don’t expect them to go.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/25/tina-turner-remembered-by-mad-max-director-george-miller-she-was-the-opposite-of-a-diva

Tina's Pepsi ad We got the taste sampled here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2yaNQvmbI

hmmm. it didn't add the timestamp. is at 4.10.

H - saw it just this morning -

pic.twitter.com/TcLaiHfkOO

— Bowiesongs (@bowiesongs) May 24, 2023

RIP Tina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrLl1o1shos
I think this may have been the footage that made me sit up and listen to Tina. If so I saw it in a bill in the Scala one New Year in the early to mid 80s. I did think it had a version of I Can't Believe What You Say in it.
Anyway extremely energetic performance.
the Kent Years cd is really good too but is lacking versions of songs I thought were on it. What is on it is pretty solid though from what I remember. Mid 60s r'n'b/soul that largely rocks. When it's not being more atmospheric like.

Looking at that Big TNT Show clip again alongside some slightly later footage, and it's striking how modernly and openly sexual Tina & the Ikettes are, particularly given the standards of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq1mEX08DYs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdinfZKA_Fw

^^"The Acid Queen" from the Tommy movie.

I'm sad about this death, but in some ways it's good to encounter this sort of untainted closure. Did anyone really have anything bad to say about Tina Turner? She got to live to a respectable age, got to be wildly successful, inspired millions, doesn't really have any dings against her name. This is how you live a life, or relive a life, in her case.

I get all that. Kinda felt the same way about Aretha. Will feel the same way when we (hopefully a long, long, long time from now) lose Dolly.

Is it Claudia Lennear upfront in that TNT clip?

Looks like she didn't write much after leaving Ike, but I cannot imagine a better autobiographical song than Nutbush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_written_by_Tina_Turner

The Bowie/Turner/Keef pic is supposedly from the night that Bowie told the EMI crew "Yeah thanks for your party but I'm going to see my favorite singer" so they all tagged along and that led to her signing eventually and etc. Per Rob Sheffield's story in RS, Ron Wood and the three of them apparently just took over a hotel piano and did Motown covers the rest of the night while getting sloshed. How to live, if you ask me.

Holy shit

Yeah, typical masterful Bowie PR tactics at work.

bendy: in my obit I mentioned a couple other Tina-written numbers. I'm fond of this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUZQWLw84MM

I love this line Sheffield quotes from Debby Miller's Private Dancer review: "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.”

That did of course start out as a decent song before somebody translated it mawkishly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J-5NfXbSiA
I got a really good 2cd of Brel on something like Primo a few years ago that i got into quite heavily at the time.

Did anyone really have anything bad to say about Tina Turner?

I remember, in the 80s, that her performing in apartheid-era South Africa was controversial enough for them to ask her about it in a TV interview.

Pete Townshend:

https://www.thewho.com/tina-turner-1939-2023/

“Sad to hear we have lost Tina Turner. She had been ill for a long time, and struggling to stay in touch with old friends. She will have some peace now.

An astonishing performer, and astounding singer, she was also an R&B groundbreaker. We don’t want to say too much about Ike Turner – her abusive husband – but her early records with him were simply out of this world. She always took flight when she worked with him, leaving him like a fifth wheel, chipping away at his basic riffs. When she was finally free of him her work ascended to new, even higher heights. It didn’t seem possible.

If you ever had the privilege of seeing Tina perform live you will know how utterly scary she could be. She was an immense presence. A female Little Richard. She seemed like a giant: shaking, sexual, physical and stunningly beautiful. In the flesh she was fragile, vulnerable and a truly sweet and empathetic person.

She was of course my Acid Queen in the Tommy movie, and it is often my job to sing that song with The Who, so she always comes into my mind. It isn’t easy to deal with. The song is about abuse at the hands of an evil woman. How she turned that song on its head! All the anger of her years as a victim exploded into fire and bluster and a magnificent and crazy cameo role that will always stay with me.

She has been in my mind for the last ten years, I kept meaning to track her down, and see how she was. I truly thought she would live forever.”

The South African show was before Private Dancer, which is not to let her off the hook.

Good read, this:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tina-turner-country-music-album-legacy-1234741627/

Always wondered why she recorded so little after the 80’s

Pretty amazing even aside from obv. context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUCm99rKA28

During the blog days I downloaded her country album -- it's no hidden classic but it deserves recognition and absolutely needs to be written about.