Tumult!, page 16
Tina had some predictable responses at first to “What’s Love?”—not her style, even calling it too “wimpy.” But the writers and producers were willing to let her play around with it and change it into any key or tempo she desired. Also at this time and by pure chance, she came on an unfinished song that had been written by Mark Knopfler of the band Dire Straits, just a little track without a vocal put on it yet that had been left off their next album, Love over Gold. It had been deemed too “girly” for them.
Knopfler was a friendly and amenable kind of guy, not your average rock star really, and he offered to sing a vocal just to give them a sense of the melody, but he also gave them permission to rerecord the track with Tina’s pipes on it any old way they liked. Meanwhile, Capitol was monitoring the progress from afar and dispatched producer John Carter over to ensure forward momentum. The band was missing its lead guitarist at this point, but an able-fingered guitarist happened to be available who was willing to play sessions on the song: none other than legendary rock superstar Jeff Beck.
They added another song by Ann Peebles from 1973, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” as well as “Let’s Stay Together”; a raunchy romp called “Steel Claw” by Paul Brady; and Bowie’s “1984,” in addition to what they’d already been able to squeeze together through some kind of strange alchemy. Rupert Hine, producer of the Fixx, agreed to produce the upcoming album. Davies was as pleased as he could be while also having utterly fried his nerves.
Capitol quickly released “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in order to whet the public’s appetite for the soon-to-be-released upcoming record. It swiftly became a Top 50 pop hit. Tina had morphed far away from her initial rhythm-and-blues roots, equally distant from her rock-and-roll spirit and light-years away from her rock vibe, and had arrived in a bright and shiny place. This was what pop can be when it works perfectly, like a well-oiled machine. With multiple producers and a shimmering technical quality associated with that decade, the album had a title now as well, a title that capitalized on that discarded little unfinished song that Knopfler had so generously let them have. It was a little ditty called “Private Dancer.”
If the first half of her career was all about the Big Wheel Rolling, both together and apart, the second half would be about her remarkable skill at Reinventing the Wheel, as her comeback feverishly continued, with no sign of abating anytime soon. Indeed, it still hasn’t. In her solo career, Tina Turner released nine spectacularly successful record albums (well, five great ones anyway), each one first approaching and then eclipsing the admittedly high-water marks she had achieved in her prior partnership.
She released two sound track records, six compilations records, three live concert albums, eighteen video albums, and forty-seven music videos, a medium that hadn’t even existed yet when she was collaborating with her earlier bandleader. In addition, after her liberation, she also released sixty singles, only eight short of the number they had delivered together over the course of their sixteen-year collaboration.
How this evolution took place is still something of a mystery. The times changed of course, and she was smart enough to change right along with them. Even if there’s some cosmic vibration that she tapped into through her chanting practice, as a means of both surviving her abuse and balancing her subsequent solitude, that still can’t ever explain the unexpected return and phoenix-like rise again of this stalwart rock goddess or her morphing with such seeming smoothness into a mega pop star of such grandiose proportions.
Talk about your transformations! After already evolving from a scrappy young rhythm-and-blues singer with a penchant for a spectral and soulful blues holler into a state-of-the-art rocker chick with Stones-scale arena credentials, Tina Turner was about to mutate yet again, this time, most surprisingly, into a scintillating pop star of epic proportions. And it took only half a decade of being off the grid long enough to shed her skin in the most shocking midlife crisis ever recorded.
So what do you do if two years after leaving your abusive husband and after two albums that were less than warmly received with open arms by your legion of former fans you have some time on your hands to reflect? Well, perhaps you begin reflecting. The main impetus for all her actions, apart from clearing her personal slate emotionally before her comeback, also seemed to be finding a way to get people to stop asking her questions about her troubled marriage and musical partnership.
She must have been deeply pondering how she could ever bring to a halt the incessant curiosity about the struggles of her youth and her early creative career. How to stop the relentless memorializing of what she hoped would eventually fade away (in what decade? she had famously wondered). She privately harbored a hope, in perhaps a too-innocent expectation, of just being allowed to get on with her life and make new music.
Yet embedded in that dilemma also lies the key, she suddenly must have realized. Yes, make new music, she deduced, but not just new: music drastically different from anything and everything we’ve ever heard from her before. It’s not rhythm and blues, it’s certainly not soul or funk, it’s not even rock and roll or even rock; it’s kind of bluesy but not in any traditional way.
It has a slightly postmodern torch song feeling about it but only if you happen to subscribe to the technique so vividly described in that punchy Bowie song “Putting Out Fire with Gasoline.” In the end, it can really be accurately described only as Tina goes pop!
PRIVATE DANCER (CAPITOL RECORDS)
Released May 29, 1984. Farmyard Studios, Mayfair, Wessex, Abbey Road, and CBS (London). Produced by Rupert Hine, Terry Britten, John Carter, Martin Ware, Greg Walsh, Joe Sample, Wilton Felder, Ndugu Chancler. Duration: 44:02.
I Might Have Been Queen (Jeanette Obstoi, Jamie West-Oram) 4:10 / What’s Love Got to Do with It? (Terry Britten, Graham Lyle) 3:49 / Show Some Respect (Terry Britten, Sue Shifrin) 3:18 / I Can’t Stand the Rain (Ann Peebles, Don Bryant, Bernard Miller) 3:41 / Better Be Good to Me (Mike Chapman, Holly Knight) 5:10 / 6) Let’s Stay Together (Al Green, Al Jackson, Willie Mitchell) 5:16 / 1984 (David Bowie) 3:09) / Steel Claw (Paul Brady) 3:48 / Private Dancer (Mark Knopfler) 7:11 (The international pressing also included her version of the Beatles tune “Help!”)
Some things in life are well worth waiting for. For a forty-five-year-old entertainer who had been in show business for almost thirty years, this was one of them. Her fifth solo studio album was the charmer. Recording sessions took place in one of her favorite places, England, engineered by no less than four different production teams of eight people and with material in almost as many different styles. It’s fair to call it a radical departure from everything she’d been known for with the Revue and even everything else that came after Ike as well.
Up-tempo tunes mixed with sad ballads and a difficult-to-describe jazzy blues element, all expertly superimposed over her unique vocal talents, made it not only a blockbuster solo record but also one of the most successful crossover products in music history: a masterpiece of reinvention. It was rewarded with global success, garnered multiple platinum certifications, and reaped a commercial bonanza for Turner in her new identity, a spiky-haired vixen posed somewhere between Aunty Entity and the Acid Queen but also way beyond both.
Slick in its production values to the extreme but in a good way, it ideally captured the opulent essence of the mid-1980s and provided her with a long-range legacy: the creation of a landmark event in the evolution of not only pop rock but also pop pop. It was perfect pop, period. She would promote it vigorously with a dazzling stage show in a 177-date concert tour across the planet: the Private Dancer Tour. Several songs on this album would be such suitable embodiments of her ethos that they remain permanently etched in our memories, not only of her record but also of her challenging private life leading up to it.
“Better Be Good to Me,” “Show Some Respect,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” and of course the title track (weirdly written originally by Mark Knopfler for his Dire Straits band but held back by the hand of fate for Tina) all became massive single hits. The album remains the only Tina Turner record to have been reissued in a digitally remastered format.
Accolades of course poured in like rain. The Los Angeles Times review claimed that her voice “melts vinyl.” Rolling Stone called it a consummate and powerful comeback, “rasping but strong, in a modern rock format neither detached nor fussy.” Robert Christgau praised its ability to “deliver with honesty the middlebrow angst of professional songwriting, while remaining in control of an album with four different production teams to give it all seamless authority.” Allmusic stated that it “was slicker than her r & b classics with the Revue but she was still able to sing with throaty passion to deliver her finest solo production yet.”
Stephen Holden in the New York Times wrote that by using her English producers to soften her raw southern style, “discarding the blaring horns, frenzied percussion and gospel calls and responses, the album became a classic in the development of pop-soul music.” Michael Lydon, in 1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die, said that the album’s lyrical themes “embodied her persona as a tough, sexy woman in a tough world, one whose vocal delivery overcomes the slick production styles with her indomitable soul unifying the multiple disparate producers.”
Slant Magazine listed the album on its list of best albums of the 1980s, saying that “both a personal liberation and sonic redemption, Private Dancer established Turner not only as a genuine diva, but a bone fide force of nature.” I second that emotion, except for the diva part: she was always too down to earth to ever be described by that overused term. Strangely enough, it was also its multiple producers and manifold songwriting styles with varying emotional temperatures that made it a perfect pop record. In pop, perfection means it had something for everyone, of every taste, age, and style demographic, meaning also that it sold big and that Tina was back, big time.
Although the process of its planning, production, and release was very rushed and she wasn’t entirely sure about the new high-tech pop musical material, she had learned by then to have faith in Roger Davies and his perhaps younger musical tastes. She was a clever enough show-woman to know that even if she could say these were not quite her kinds of songs, their backs were against the wall to get the album out. So she simply agreed to whatever formula was going to give them a hit record. And clearly her flexibility paid off.
One thing she especially liked about the record once she got used to the synthesizers and digital production was how hard it rocked yet also avoided certain rhythm-and-blues conventions that had always bugged her, things about its moaning and pleading attitude that were a downer for her. For quite a while before this outing, she had come to really prefer the straight-ahead energy of rock and roll and how you wanna put it on to get you going, as good a definition of rock as any.
No less a luminary than rock specialist Keith Richards, possibly her biggest fan, agreed with both her tastes and her motivations on this record, telling Newsweek, “She’s probably even more energetic than she was twenty years ago!”—and that’s saying something. No doubt it was partly her newly won freedom, her working only for herself and not for a music maestro anymore, and partly just the desire to have as much fun as possible in life in general from now on.
In Off the Record, she is referenced as saying that she felt better than ever about performing. “I’m a strong healthy person, it comes from being homeopathic and never abusing my body. I’m an unusual person, I could get onstage right now and do a show. Had I abused myself (with drugs or drink) in the early days, I would never have gotten as far as I did. I’m healthy and I’m in control.”
As finishing touches were being put into place on the record, Tina, never being one to linger around patiently waiting for much of anything, went off on a four-month tour opening for Lionel Ritchie while Private Dancer was undergoing its arcane surgical production process. Much of the album harkened back to her own personal, professional, and private life, even though none of the songs was in any way about her per se, instead being a cleverly sculptured techno-dance record of distinctly different parts, but it just happened to catch the zeitgeist feeling of that moment in time. The literal meaning of the German word Zeitgeist, strikingly similar to Poltergeist (which means “noise ghost”), is “time ghost.”
And that’s what Tina Turner had in some exotic way proven herself to be—not necessarily timeless exactly (though she is some of that as well) but more in the sense of being displaced from one time and emerging into another, a person out of time entirely and definitely a person ahead of her time in many ways.
Listeners and critics alike also fell in love with both Private Dancer the album as well as the new Tina Turner behind it. She made appearances in every conceivable venue and for every imaginable show, all over radio and television, spinning endlessly on MTV and being extolled by magazines as the grittiest rock-and-roll singer in the world despite the fact that she was no longer exactly a rocker and instead was “something else.” My contention is that she had already been a rock star for years, but this venture made her into a bona fide pop star, which by my definition is music so universally appealing that it is successful for vastly diverse audiences and crosses over every conceivable taste border.
By September 1984, Private Dancer had arrived at number 3 on the pop charts and stayed put for three months. The LP naturally also encouraged erstwhile Capitol to release yet more singles from it: “Better Be Good to Me,” “Private Dancer,” and a Euro hit, “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” The album stayed in the Top 100 for more than two years and eventually sold 19 million copies.
She ended 1984 by touring in a variety of American and Canadian concert dates that had already been planned prior to the release of her new record, which went full ballistic during its ascent. Returning to America on January 28, 1985, for the American Music Awards, she picked up several top prizes in female vocals and video performer slots before joining a small group of forty-two of her fellow musical super-stars for a ten-hour recording session targeted as a charity record in support of African famine relief. It was an emotional, humanist anthem called “We Are the World.”
* * *
I asked James Porter how a historian of black rock like him might address the shift from harder to softer stylistic vibes in Tina’s later music. “I think her solo records are ‘lighter’ but only in that they’re not as bluesy as when Ike was around. The influence was still there—she covered a Tony Joe White song or two—but it was not as pervasive. I do however think the later records are just as serious musically as the earlier sides . . . but just in a different direction. You listen to songs like ‘Private Dancer’ now, and they might sound like an ironic dry run for a INXS album, but then Tina’s Voice of Experience comes in and sets the record straight.” Indeed, setting the record straight was always what she was about, from start to finish.
At the Grammy Awards ceremony in February 1985, the reborn Tina Turner commanded the whole show with a performance of “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” and she was bestowed a Grammy for best female pop vocal, best female rock vocal, and finally record of the year for “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” When she soaked up the roaring love of the crowd, perhaps expressing their spirited admiration for her tenacious survival almost as much as her tremendous musical achievement, she intoned in that distinctive breathy rasp of hers, “We’re looking forward to many more of these.”
About this same time, her now extremely prescient manager Roger Davies shared with Vogue one of the things that bothered her to no end: people and the press continuing to refer to her as a victim in her earlier life. “She was so unhappy for so long, she can’t stand it to get too dark, and she hates it when people feel sorry for her.” As she herself succinctly told GQ magazine, “The victim thing, it’s put in our heads, and I don’t think it does anybody any good really.” The only ones she considers real and actual victims are the innocent people suffering from starvation around the world, which is why she loaned her energies to the “We Are the World” charity single.
Maybe not so surprisingly, Hollywood was also calling yet again. She had often mused, mostly just fantasizing out loud really, that she would love to get another larger-than-life movie role, something even more over the top that Tommy’s Acid Queen part, something along the lines (so she mused) of the Grace Jones part in Conan the Destroyer. As part of the icing on her cake, back while she was playing the Ritz, Roger Davies had come to her hotel and told her he’d just received a call from director George Miller offering her a big part in his next Mad Max film. Suddenly, her life seemed to truly be an actual dream rather than the toxic nightmare it had been before.
In Beyond Thunderdome, Tina would be playing the wild role of Auntie Entity, a surreal kind of Amazon figure who is the matriarchal warlord of an outpost city called Bartertown. She loved the fact that for her second role in ten years, she’d be playing yet another Queen. Not only that, but she would also be performing two songs in the film: the iconic “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” a curious counterpart to one of her favorite Bowie lyrics about being heroes but “just for one day,” as well as “One of the Living,” which ended up in a massively visible position playing over the Maurice Jarre film titles. Naturally, it also meant the release of a sound track album.
MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (CAPITOL RECORDS)
Released in 1985. Movie sound track recording produced by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle (who also wrote her hit “What’s Love Got to Do with It”). Personnel: Tina Turner, vocals; Charlie Moran, drums; Kings School Choir; Nick Glennie-Smith, keyboards; Graham Bond, percussion; Tim Cappello, saxophone; Terry Britten, guitar; Holly Knight, keyboards; Gene Black, backing vocals; Charles McMahon, didgeridoo. Duration: 44:27.
