Tina Turner - Classic or Dud?

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.

Haven't heard that!
xpost May not be the best take of this from the vast post break-up spills, but close enough (& omg Bill Withers strikes again)

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


I suspect there were unscrupulous promoters for Sun City who misled many of the acts regarding the true nature of the situation (e.g., that Sun City being in Bophuthatswana meant it wasn’t “technically” part of South Africa, so performing there didn’t violate the boycott). I wouldn’t be surprised if Tina Turner had essentially been tricked into the gig, or at least that the truth about the situation in South Africa, as it relates to performing there, was kept from her.

(To be removed from the UN blacklist, an artist had to issue an apology and refuse to return to South Africa. The O’Jays did, and were apparently deeply embarrassed about the situation. I’m not aware of any others who made an apology. Linda Ronstadt made a point of refusing to do so.)

xps Don't forget, she more or less retired from recording and performing in 2000 after she had enough of showbiz and came back only for a 50th anniversary tour before retiring again. I think she just had enough - she was in her 50's by the time the '90s rolled around and she toured relentlessly since she was 20. She already recorded a LOT of records, and I think as the '90s wore own, she started winding down. I don't think she really lived both comfortably and happily in luxury until the mid '80s (she was still paying off massive debts for a few years after her own breakthrough) so it kind of makes sense if she wanted have more time off for herself.

okay so there's no good way to do this other than acknowledging he was a fucking monster, but I think Townsend's framing here:

"She always took flight when she worked with him, leaving him like a fifth wheel, chipping away at his basic riffs."

is pretty bogus. Ike was a great guitarist, an arranger, session musician. you could argue "Rocket 88" is the ur-text for rock n' roll, a full four years before Chuck Berry releases "Maybelline". His ratty almost proto-punk tone on stuff like "Nutbush City Limits" is striking today. Those Ike & Tina records sound great, even as you have to acknowledge the suffering that went into them.

True. Ike Turner is exhibit A when it comes to great talents who are exactly the opposite of what we would hope they would be in their personal lives. In terms of the records he made without Tina, I have Rhythm Rockin' Blues from Ace (a collection of Modern recordings he was involved with) and Trailblazer from Charly (a collection of Federal recordings). The latter probably features his best work, particularly for the guitar playing - it's the closest thing to the 1976 Red Lighting' compilation I'm Tore Up on CD, an LP Robert Palmer highly recommended in Deep Blues. I also have the 1993 Cobra Records box set where he plays on a lot of tracks and has some credited to him and his band. Nearly all of these recordings feature a lot of different singers fronting them, all before Tina.

One thing that's frightening about Ike is when I first saw him on a PBS special on Sun Records. He was interviewed with Sam Phillips and there was no mention of his wrongdoings, just his involvement at Sun (which took me by surprise - I didn't know or forgot that "Rocket '88" among others was recorded there). He was actually jovial and turned on the charm. If you didn't know better, you'd think he was an all right guy who may be a lot of fun. To be honest, I'm sure that's why he was able to abuse so many women - if he didn't have any charisma, I don't think he could've drawn so many under his influence and manipulate them the way he did. It's not until I saw his other TV interviews (check for Arsenio Hall and I think Whoopi Goldberg on YouTube) that he revealed himself to be an unrepentant shit. Not an iota of remorse when he was questioned about his past.

The take of "Use Me" I have (somewhere) is on the apparently legit comp Golden Empire, with the Pre (?)-Princely/totally I & T title track and other analog funktronic support, incl. a bit of pleasingly primitive synth (or something), going good w guitar & voc; some of these were demos for the Stones, according to liners

you could argue "Rocket 88" is the ur-text for rock n' roll, a full four years before Chuck Berry releases "Maybelline".

If you haven’t already checked this out, I highly recommend it: https://500songs.com/podcast/rocket-88-by-jackie-brenston-and-the-delta-cats/

it’s a natural digression so i’m not saying don’t talk about him ever… but if there is to be extended deep diving into him then i’d appreciate if you could do that on another thread (there’s at least three or more)

Tina is not synonymous with Ike and hasn’t been for 40 years and i want to make sure that boundary is clear to everyone ITT

FWIW, even if Ike wasn't such a monstrous shit, there was still something missing about his overall body of work - maybe a lack of artistic vision, but it says a lot that once Tina came into the picture, she seemed to remedy the problem to a certain extent, and you really see what she had when she found success with other collaborators. It's probably a good basis for an entire book, how the right singer fronting the band isn't necessarily just a voice or an interpreter for someone else's songs. I think that's partly why someone like Rod Stewart had such tremendous respect for Tina, because he knew what she was bringing besides her voice and stage presence.

Sounds right, thx
btw xpost

and other analog funktronic support

Are: Tina in the 2000s

She cut a handful of tracks for hits collections, but mainly stuck to touring occasionally and working in Vegas. Her 2009/10 tour was pitched as a farewell. She had a major stroke in 2013, which she a few years recovering from.

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

📹

VG - totally understood, apologies for the digression I think there something about Townsend's dismissiveness of R&B playing as basic that rankled me but as you said it's not the time

Ike was a horrible person who was a marvelous producer. We talk about his guitar -- what about his Moog touches? Wonderful.

Townsend's dismissiveness of R&B playing as basic

Not to drag this out, but Townshend absolutely revered Jimmy Reed and Steve Cropper. And I think what he said about Ike was primarily“this is neither the time nor place to discuss him.”

(Apologies for the “Yeah! Stop replying-all, everyone!” but I just thought that point needed clarifying.)

Re Tina playing South Africa, had a vague memory of this from reading I Tina for a college class and if I recall correctly the South Africa tour was right after divorce when Tina was saddled with all the debts to promoters, IRS etc and supporting 4 kids and taking any job she could get.

She later described herself as naive about the South Africa situation - knowing it was segregated but feeling ‘well I grew up in a segregated country, and the shows are integrated, not white only’ and she later turned down offers from Sun City and other gigs and apologized.

OK, google tells me shows were in 79 and knew Dusty Springfield was deported from South Africa in 64 for insisting her shows be integrated, and I just found out Gram Parsons quit the Byrds in 68 rather than play in South Africa so there were def. people who were aware enuf but others continued to play even after the UN Cultural Boycott came into effect in 1980.

(Side note, my passport growing up had a stamp in it - good for all countries except South Africa - and the first Olympics old enuf to remember watching ’76 Montreal was boycotted by most African countries to protest New Zealand’s participation as they were breaking the sports boycott with the All Blacks playing in South Africa)

Reason I’d originally come back to thread was I found myself oddly moved yesterday when looking at the Martyn Ware twitter thread Ned had posted above.

He’d been happily posting about football and going to Wembley, then posted “Tina’s gone” and then there was an hour gap before next post when he paid tribute to her. It just felt like he saw the news, had to say something and then gather himself before writing a statement.

Thread

I have a story about Tina Turner. I worked for CBS News in the 1990s, and one assignment I had at "60 Minutes" was to watch old raw (unedited) interview footage, for some reason I can't recall. So I watched the raw footage of a 1996 Mike Wallace interview with Tina Turner.

— Leslie Molson (@lesliemolson) May 25, 2023

https://t.co/YRY0NBJZU9

Wow

Lizzo. Did. That.

That’s a fucking tribute. 💜pic.twitter.com/6FAAf9M9Ft

— LoLo Vonz (@LoLoVonz) May 26, 2023

this is wild and awesome

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

Sirius/XM's Soul Town channel #49 is all-Tina for at least today!

Sirius/XM is also free this weekend for curious how listeners.

They just played this Bowie-penned number:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvpZd1Bn5

^^"Girls", from Break Every Rule

That Lizzo clip is amazing.

Barely remember this:

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

TIL that Ike & Tina borrowed half of their "Proud Mary" arrangement from the Checkmates Ltd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvMGW9dLQVg

as C grisso mentioned, Soultown on sirius XM, which is ostensibly concerned with the soul diaspora from, say, 1961-1975, has been the Tina channel since saturday. I've heard "A Fool in Love" twice, a very clearly not 1963 recorded remake of "It's Gonna Work Out fine," "Nutbush City Limits" (i do love that moog break) each once, and "Proud Mary" and "River Deep" not once… the overwhelming majority played is the Private Dancer and post-Private dancer music… and since I never fucked with her 90s shit, hearing whatever song she does with Barry White is a treat! as is her version of "Unfinished Sympathy"… but its giving me the impression that, unlike peers like Aretha, before P.D., she doesn't have a lot of hugely enduring hits…like, have normies who like soul/R&B ever heard "A Fool In love?" or is it like expecting said normies to know "Rocket 88"? It appears that before P.D., her legacy rests on her live show, where she would do Stones covers or whatever songs happened to be big that she could do nice andf rough… what other songs did she do prior to PD other than the five I mention above could someone interested in R&B in the 1960s reasonably be expected to know?

and when I hear "The best" or "Steamy Windows," it makes me think that she must have had access to the same pool of songs and songwriters that Cher had in the late 80s… I can hear Tina doing ""heart of Stone" or " I Found Someone," same production ethic, same everything, really…

Ace of Base's "Don't Turn Around" was written for and performed by Tina.

Re your original point: no, she was never in the U.S. a major crossover artist other than the exceptions.

She is NOT Aretha.

this is wild and awesome

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

there's a special place in my heart for tina turner singing "gonna give you every inch of my dick"

wow there are dogshit opinions at the beginning of this thread

saw a cool post on facebook, paraphrasing:

the jist was "Nutbush City Limits" was a big hit in Australia the year that AC/DC formed. It was also apparently the first song they asked Brian Johnson to sing during his audition for the band. Listening through that lens the influence is very apparent especially in the guitar riff/tone...Johnson is such a dude I wouldn't think Tina until now but I could definitely see her influence on him.

hadn't heard this one before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPZFBU_aUVo
Tina Turner - Unfinished Sympathy (Extended Olympic Mix)

I didn’t hear it until after she passed, but the original mix of her take on “Unfinished Sympathy” was really kind of an eye opener for me. I think I had a tendency to think of her post-PD material as a bit of a “Well, it’s nice she had the chance to come back and get her due” thing. But she certainly gives an incredible performance here that, if it doesn’t necessarily surpass Shara Nelson’s certainly matches its power and intensity – while also having a certain resonance because it’s Tina. The same is true of that performances linked upthread of “We Don’t Need Another Hero” and “Help.”

In retrospect, its kind of hilarious that Xgau was trying to tell us her voice was “shot” like forty years ago. Um, no.

what grade did he give dylan's latest phlegmfest?

it is so infuriating how little respect critics gave her throughout even when praising the material as if she was incidental to what made those records sound great