- Legendary singer Tina Turner has died after a "long illness," her family said in a statement on Wednesday. She was 83.
- Known as the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll," Turner's mega-hits include "Proud Mary," "What's Love Got To Do With It" and "The Best."
Turner died Tuesday, after a long illness in her home in
Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, according to her manager. She became a Swiss
citizen a decade ago.
“She was truly an enormously talented performer and singer,”
tweeted Mick Jagger, whom Turner helped in shaping his own dynamic stage
presence. “She was inspiring, warm, funny and generous. She helped me so much
when I was young and I will never forget her.”
Few stars traveled so far — she was born Anna Mae Bullock in
a segregated Tennessee hospital and spent her latter years on a 260,000 square
foot estate on Lake Zurich — and overcame so much. Physically battered,
emotionally devastated and financially ruined by her 20-year relationship with
Ike Turner, she became a superstar on her own in her 40s, at a time when most
of her peers were on their way down, and remained a top concert draw for years
after.
With admirers ranging from Jagger to Beyoncé to Mariah
Carey, Turner was one of the world’s most popular entertainers, known for a
core of pop, rock and rhythm and blues favorites: “Proud Mary,” “Nutbush City
Limits,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and the hits she had in the ’80s, among
them “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “We Don’t Need Another Hero” and a cover
of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
Her trademarks included a growling contralto that might
smolder or explode, her bold smile and strong cheekbones, her palette of wigs
and the muscular, quick-stepping legs she did not shy from showing off. She
sold more than 150 million records worldwide, won 12 Grammys, was voted along
with Ike into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 (and on her own in 2021 )
and was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2005, with Beyoncé and Oprah Winfrey
among those praising her. Her life became the basis for a film, a Broadway
musical and an HBO documentary in 2021 that she called her public farewell.
Until she left her husband and revealed their back story,
she was known as the voracious on-stage foil of the steady-going Ike, the
leading lady of the “Ike and Tina Turner Revue.” Ike was billed first and ran
the show, choosing the material, the arrangements, the backing singers. They
toured constantly for years, in part because Ike was often short on money and
unwilling to miss a concert. Tina Turner was forced to go on with bronchitis,
with pneumonia, with a collapsed right lung.
Other times, the cause of her misfortunes was Ike himself.
As she recounted in her memoir, “I, Tina,” Ike began hitting
her not long after they met, in the mid-1950s, and only grew more vicious.
Provoked by anything and anyone, he would throw hot coffee in her face, choke
her, or beat her until her eyes were swollen shut, then rape her. Before one
show, he broke her jaw and she went on stage with her mouth full of blood.
Terrified both of being with Ike and of being without him,
she credited her emerging Buddhist faith in the mid-1970s with giving her a
sense of strength and self-worth and she finally left in early July 1976. The
Ike and Tina Turner Revue was scheduled to open a tour marking the country’s
bicentennial when Tina snuck out of their Dallas hotel room, with just a Mobil
credit card and 36 cents, while Ike slept. She hurried across a nearby highway,
narrowly avoiding a speeding truck, and found another hotel.
“I looked at him (Ike) and thought, ‘You just beat me for
the last time, you sucker,’” she recalled in her memoir.
Turner was among the first celebrities to speak candidly
about domestic abuse, becoming a heroine to battered women and a symbol of
resilience to all. Ike Turner did not deny mistreating her, although he tried
to blame Tina for their troubles. When he died, in 2007, a representative for
his ex-wife said simply: “Tina is aware that Ike passed away.”
Little of this was apparent to the many Ike and Tina fans.
The Turners were a hot act for much of the 1960s and into the ’70s, evolving
from bluesy ballads such as “A Fool in Love” and “It’s Going to Work Out Fine”
to flashy covers of “Proud Mary” and “Come Together” and other rock songs that
brought them crossover success.
They opened for the Rolling Stones in 1966 and 1969, and
were seen performing a lustful version of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You
Too Long” in the 1970 Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter.” Laurence Fishburne
and Angela Bassett gave Oscar-nominated performances as Ike and Tina in the
1993 movie “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” based on “I, Tina,” but she would
say that reliving her years with Ike was so painful she couldn’t bring herself
to watch the movie.
Ike and Tina’s reworking of “Proud Mary,” originally a
tight, mid-tempo hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival, helped define their
sexual aura. Against a background of funky guitar and Ike’s crooning baritone,
Tina began with a few spoken words about how some people wanted to hear songs
that were “nice and easy.”
“But there’s this one thing,” she warned, “you see, we never
ever do nothing nice and easy.
“We always do it nice — and rough.”
But by the end of the 1970s, Turner’s career seemed
finished. She was 40 years old, her first solo album had flopped and her live
shows were mostly confined to the cabaret circuit. Desperate for work, and
money, she even agreed to tour in South Africa when the country was widely
boycotted because of its racist apartheid regime.
Rock stars helped bring her back. Rod Stewart convinced her
to sing “Hot Legs” with him on “Saturday Night Live” and Jagger, who had openly
borrowed some of Turner’s on-stage moves, sang “Honky Tonk Women” with her
during the Stones’ 1981-82 tour. At a listening party for his 1983 album “Let’s
Dance,” David Bowie told guests that Turner was his favorite female singer.
More popular in England at the time than in the U.S., she
recorded a raspy version of “Let’s Stay Together” at EMI’s Abbey Road studios
in London. By the end of 1983, “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit throughout
Europe and on the verge of breaking in the states. An A&R man at Capitol
Records, John Carter, urged the label to sign her up and make an album. Among
the material presented to her was a reflective pop-reggae ballad co-written by Terry
Britten and Graham Lyle and initially dismissed by Tina as “wimpy.”
“I just thought it was some old pop song, and I didn’t like
it,” she later said of “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”
Turner’s “Private Dancer” album came out in May 1984, sold
more than eight million copies and featured several hit singles, including the
title song and “Better Be Good To Me.” It won four Grammys, among them record
of the year for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the song that came to define
the clear-eyed image of her post-Ike years.
“People look at me now and think what a hot life I must have
lived — ha!” she wrote in her memoir.
Even with Ike, it was hard to mistake her for a romantic.
Her voice was never “pretty,” and love songs were never her specialty, in part
because she had little experience to draw from. She was born in Nutbush,
Tennessee in 1939 and would say she received “no love” from either her mother
or father. After her parents separated, she moved often around Tennessee and
Missouri, living with various relatives. She was outgoing, loved to sing and as
a teenager would check out the blues clubs in St. Louis, where one of the top
draws was Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Tina didn’t care much for his
looks the first time she saw him, at the Club Manhattan.
“Then he got up onstage and picked up his guitar,” she wrote
in her memoir. “He hit one note, and I thought, ‘Jesus, listen to this guy
play.’”
In rare moments of leniency from Ike, Tina did enjoy success
on her own. She added an explosive lead vocal to Phil Spector’s titanic
production of “River Deep, Mountain High,” a flop in the U.S. when released in
1966, but a hit overseas and eventually a standard. She was also featured as
the Acid Queen in the 1975 film version of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy.” More
recent film work included “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” and a cameo in “What’s
Love Got to Do with It.”
Turner had two sons: Craig, with saxophonist Raymond Hill;
and Ronald, with Ike Turner. (Craig Turner was found dead in 2018 of an
apparent suicide). In a memoir published later in 2018, “Tina Turner: My Love
Story,” she revealed that she had received a kidney transplant from her second
husband, former EMI record executive Erwin Bach.
Turner’s life seemed an argument against marriage, but her
life with Bach was a love story the younger Tina would not have believed
possible. They met in the mid-1980s, when she flew to Germany for record
promotion and he picked her up at the airport. He was more than a decade
younger than her — “the prettiest face,” she said of him in the HBO documentary
— and the attraction was mutual. She wed Bach in 2013, exchanging vows at a
civil ceremony in Switzerland.
“It’s that happiness that people talk about,” Turner told
the press at the time, “when you wish for nothing, when you can finally take a
deep breath and say, ‘Everything is good.’” -AP