Cheerleading Yourself
Soul Survivor: How Tina Turner kept the faith and became the ‘best’
Tina Turner lived the blues even if she rarely sang them. She thrived because she refused to let past trauma define her, because she stayed true to herself, because she was her own cheerleader.
Sharad Kohli
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Backs-to-the-wall tales, emotional comebacks, and rousing returns from the cold are universal. But there’s something about Tina Turner’s journey – from the depths of an abusive marriage and a stalled career to the highs of peer respect and superstardom – that still resonates. Born an American citizen in a racially segregated country, Tina died a Swiss national, having confronted her destiny with a mix of gumption and self-belief. This is a life story that continues to be as empowering as it is motivating.
A Google search for Tina Turner will take you to a page atop which is posed a question: Did you mean simply the best? Few are those singers defined by a single song; fewer are they who have braved the vicissitudes of fate and emerged unbowed, ready to take on the world.
Being a woman in showbiz is hard, being a woman of colour doubly so. But this uphill battle was one Tina was destined to win. Born Anna Mae Bullock in Brownsville, Tennessee, she stayed only intermittently with her mother and father, being brought up instead by her paternal grandparents and, subsequently, her maternal grandmother, upon whose death Tina would move to St. Louis to live with her mother. And it was in the Gateway City, a hub of musical endeavour, where Anna Mae would find her calling.
So, we’re in the nightclubs of St. Louis and East St. Louis, and it’s the 1950s. Ike Turner, the Svengali-like figure who would become her husband, just happens to hear Anne belt out B.B. King’s lovelorn ‘You know I love you’. He takes her under his wing, and gives her a new name. Listeners would first hear of Tina Turner through the single, ‘A fool in love’, followed by ‘It’s gonna work out fine’, a song that earned the duo a Grammy nomination for Best Rock and Roll Performance. Thus was born the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
Between 1960 and 1965, the ‘Revue’ gained plenty of attention and won rave reviews, even being compared to the stage fire of the James Brown Revue. But it was in the decade between 1966 and 1975 that the fortunes of Ike and Tina really took off. The single, ‘River deep, mountain high’, echo-infused with Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, took them to no. 3 in the UK singles chart, and got them an opening slot on the Rolling Stones UK tour in late 1966.
Album success ensued, and so did appearances at festivals, on iconic TV shows, and in political fundraisers too. The Ike & Tina Turner Revue became a high-profile, headlining and top-grossing phenomenon, more rock than R&B act. Tina, meanwhile, began writing her own songs (nine out of the 10 tracks on the 1972 long-player Feel Good), and in 1974 came out with her first album (Tina turns the country on!). A year later, she put in a star turn as a hooked-on-drugs call girl in the rock opera, ‘Tommy’.
With a powerhouse of a voice that was all rhythm-and-blues (and plenty else besides), Tina Turner stood on the cusp of something special, that rare female performer who straddled genres and owned the stage. But with an abruptness that can disorient even the most unflappable, she was about to find out how lonely life can be in the shadows, away from the spotlight, a time when you realise that you’re your only cheerleader.
From the hurt, the healing
On 1 July 1976, on the way to perform at the Statler Hilton in Dallas, Ike physically attacked Tina. The beatings, however, had been going on since 1960. Over the years, Ike had been both abusive and adulterous towards Tina, on one occasion driving her to overdose on Valium pills, and to the brink of suicide. Meanwhile, his growing addiction to cocaine made him even more unpleasant, and put an intolerable strain on their marriage.
Bleeding from the attack, shaken, and fearing for her safety, Tina fled the moment she reached the hotel, to a Ramada Inn on the other side of the highway. With only 36 cents and a Mobil card on her, she asked for a room, but what she desperately sought was sanctuary from a violent partner. On 27 July, Tina filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences; they would be legally separated on 29 March 1978.
“It was my relationship with Ike that made me most unhappy,” she would reveal later. “At first, I had really been in love with him – look what he’d done for me. But he was totally unpredictable.” Such ambivalence would not be out of place in the world of any woman who has endured an abusive relationship, who has questioned whether the blame lies with her. It’s a torment only the victim can understand.
Ahead, though, lay the long road to recovery, and revival. Tina picked herself up and looked for a way back into life. For close to two years, she lived on food stamps, and would play small clubs to settle her debts. Tina kept herself afloat through appearances on TV shows but resumed touring to pay off promoters who had lost money on the back of cancelled Revue gigs. So, in 1978, having topped the bill in a run of cabaret shows at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas (which act she would bring to minor venues across the US), she set off on her first solo tour, to Australia.
Her third and fourth albums (Rough, 1978, and Love Explosion, 1979) failed to generate a buzz, which led Tina to part ways with United Artists Records. She continued to perform on TV, including a regular slot in an Italian TV series in 1979. In the same year, in a move that left many puzzled and angered, Tina undertook a five-week tour of South Africa, then under apartheid. It was, possibly, indicative of a desperation – a frazzled state of mind, perhaps – to keep on keeping on, to search for a way out of the darkness and into the light.
If this wasn’t Anna Mae at her lowest ebb, at her loneliest, it was very close.
Queen of rock ‘n’ roll
“Sure, I’ve slapped Tina. We had fights and there have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her,” wrote Ike in his autobiography, ‘Takin’ back my name’. As a reflection, after the passage of time, this is of a piece with the way many men would react to having been accused of resorting to violence against their partners: Sure, I got angry, but I never hit her.
If Ike couldn’t move on, Tina had no option but to do so. Still, there was no turning point, just the acknowledgement that here was a woman with an aura so extraordinary, she could fill a rock stadium; an entertainer with a talent so resplendent, she could not afford to be ignored by the entertainment industry. Tina knew what she was about; all she had to do was remind herself of what she had achieved, and reclaim her soul.
Slowly, surely, Tina returned back to where she belonged, away from performing in hotel ballrooms and clubs to sharing space with the Rolling Stones, who she opened for on their 1981 US tour. In 1983, Tina released a stunning cover of Al Green’s yearning ‘Let’s stay together’ (no. 6 in the UK, no. 26 in the US), and signed with Capitol Records, which gave her the go-ahead to work on a studio album. The next year, Private Dancer came out, and Tina could finally put behind her seven years of despair and disappointment.
A number-one smash (‘What’s love got to do with it?’), three Grammys (Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance-Female), and a comeback-consolidating second world tour to support Private Dancer (180 dates from February to December 1985, in North America, Europe and Australasia), made up Tina’s self-assured and compelling re-introduction to the charts and the music business.
“I’m a new pair of eyes / Every time I am born / An original mind / Because I just died,” she sang on ‘I might have been queen’, a cut off Private Dancer. “And I’m searching through the wreckage / For some great recollection / That I might have been queen.”
Tina Turner lived the blues even if she rarely sang them. But she wasn’t about to let the “wreckage” of the past weigh her down, insisting that ‘I lived through it all, and my future’s no shock to me’, and signing off, ‘Oh, I’m a soul survivor’. Not only did she survive, Anna Mae Bullock (1939-2023) thrived in an industry dominated and controlled by male egos. Anna Mae gave it ‘all or nothing’ (‘We don’t need another hero’) to relish the limelight again, to be embraced and appreciated by her equals. She thrived because she refused to let past trauma define her, because she stayed true to herself, because she was her own cheerleader.