Tumult!, page 18
Suddenly, by the 1980s, she was about as busy as she’d ever been in the 1960s, but it was a different kind of busy, a second blossoming, without the obvious strains attached to her first frenzied ride into fame and misfortune. She’s admitted that it was seemingly a case of instant romance, that mythical at-first-sight experience we’ve all heard of. Indeed, it was definitely a heart-going-boom moment, but her natural caution in these matters caused her to wait for three years before finally committing to what her heart was telling her so clearly.
Subsequent to their literally just bumping into each other, she had been throwing a birthday party for a friend in West Hollywood at Wolfgang Puck’s original Spago, and they all then retired to her home in Sherman Oaks. Bach was among them, again by chance. Many observers have noted that at that party, something magical started to happen. After their first chance encounter and openly interested in pursuing him further, she had then deliberately rented a house in Switzerland and invited him to a Christmas party there with mutual friends in 1988. The relationship just continued to blossom naturally and grow from there, having taken on a life of its own.
Now, in addition to her mature second career flowering, her love life seemed to be doing likewise. Against all odds, including being introduced to a family who may have been a little apprehensive about his new relationship with someone older than him (she was by then forty-eight, he was thirty-one), being an American black rock star to boot, and despite the fact that they may have harbored some secret desires that the woman of his dreams might be a German one (and a white one), they quickly fell in love with her too. Everyone seems to sooner or later.
Her busy career was still flying high, however, and that had to be attended to as well, especially in 1989. She performed before not only the biggest crowd of fans she’d ever had as an audience but also the largest audience ever recorded by anyone anywhere. In Rio de Janeiro, when headlining at the Maracana Arena during her Break Every Rule Tour, she drew more than a quarter of a million adoring people, which caused the Guinness World Records to make an official entry to that effect. She also continually broke all house records when the tour concluded in Osaka, Japan.
Things continued to speed up even faster. Shortly after visiting New York in January 1989 for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where she inducted her old producer Phil Spector into the hallowed ranks of music legends, she attended the Grammy Awards, where she won her seventh trophy in the category of best rock vocal performance for her Live in Europe album. Then her aptly titled next album, Foreign Affair, was released to high acclaim, rising to number 1 in the United Kingdom and number 31 in America. The first single from that album would go on to become one of her signature tunes, “The Best.”
On November 26, 1989, she celebrated her fiftieth birthday with close rock pals such as Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, and Bryan Adams, and even though it sounds like a long time, half a century was just beginning to feel like warming up to her. To say she’d hit her stride in the following decade of the 1990s would be a gross understatement, even for someone with legs like hers.
FOREIGN AFFAIR (EMI/CAPITOL RECORDS)
Released in 1989. Produced by Dan Hartman, Tina Turner, Rupert Hine, Roger Davies, Graham Lyle, Albert Hammond, Tony Joe White. Personnel: Tina Turner, vocals; Tony Joe White, guitar; Dan Hartman, acoustic guitar; Eddie Martinez, rhythm guitar; Neil Taylor, guitar; Mark Knopfler, guitar; Elliot Lewis and Nick Glennie-Smith, strings; Gary Barnacle, saxophones; Edgar Winter, saxophone; Phil Ashley, keyboards; Jeff Bova, synthesizers; Casey Young, keyboards; Carmine Roja and Rupert Hine, bass; J. T. Lewis and Art Wood, drums; Albert Hammond, percussion; Lance Ellington, Sandy Stewart, and Tessa Niles, backing vocals; Roger Davies, Graham Lyle, and Holly Knight, additional vocals. Engineers and sound mixing: Chris Lord-Alge, Andrew Scarth, Mike Ging, Nick Froome, Tom Fritze. Overdubs done at Ezee, Mayfair, and Swanyard studios. Duration: 52:16.
Steamy Windows (Tony Joe White) 4:03 / The Best (Mike Chapman, Holly Knight) 5:30 / You Know Who (Tony Joe White) 3:45 / 4) Under-cover Agent for the Blues (Tony Joe White, Leann White) 5:20 / Look Me in the Heart (Tom Kelly, Billy Steinberg) 3:46 / Be Tender with Me Baby (Albert Hammond, Holly Knight) 4:18 / Can’t Stop Me Loving You (Albert Hammond, Holly Knight) 4:00 / Ask Me How I Feel (Albert Hammond, Holly Knight) 4:46 / Falling Like Rain (David Munday, Sandy Stewart) 4:03 / I Don’t Wanna Lose You (Albert Hammond, Graham Lyle) 4:20 / Not Enough Romance (Dan Hartman) 4:04 / Foreign Affair (Tony Joe White) 4:27
Tina was in the midst of having a foreign affair of course, the one that would eventually lead to her second marriage. One consistent irony in Tina’s career was also that she was always having a foreign affair with music lovers in Europe and the rest of the world, one that usually far outdistanced her American listeners. It was just an intriguing demographic to her backstory.
Her seventh solo studio album and the third release since her huge comeback hit six years earlier, this outing did not perform quite as well as Private Dancer or Break Every Rule, but it was still a gigantic hit in Europe and internationally. It reached number 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart and sold more than 6 million copies, also reaching number 1 in both Germany and Sweden as well as topping the overall European charts for more than a month.
In Europe, six of the record’s twelve tracks became number 1 hit singles, with “Foreign Affair” and “The Best” going on to become stalwarts of her concert performances ever afterward. By this time, she was globally recognized as a pop star, and some younger listeners may not have even been very aware of her long earlier history as either a rhythm-and-blues torcher or a rock queen.
With her latest single “Steamy Windows” steaming up the charts, on April 27, she leapt into her international 121-date concert tour to promote Foreign Affair, ostensibly while still conducting said affair privately. Commencing in Antwerp, Belgium, and ending the roller-coaster ride in Rotterdam, Holland, during the course of the concert travel binge, she’d entertained more than 3 million joyous followers.
At about the same time, she was jubilantly, even exultantly, bringing pleasure to half the planet, her ex-husband was also making vague headlines of his own albeit for the opposite kind of reasons. In his fourteen years of Tina-less life, he’d been arrested eleven times for a variety of crimes, and finally, in 1990, he was put in prison for cocaine violations, transporting drugs, and a few other miscellaneous bad lifestyle issues.
Meanwhile in October, on the brighter side of life, Tina’s new album, Simply the Best, a greatest-hits package, came out, with all her most popular tunes from the 1980s and featuring a brand-new version of “Nutbush” in addition to three new songs by her: “I Want You Near Me,” “Way of the World,” and “Love Thing.”
SIMPLY THE BEST (EMI/CAPITOL RECORDS)
Released in 1991. Various producers, as per originals. Her first greatest-hits compilation, released on October 22, 1991, featured her most popular tracks recorded between 1973 and 1991 with an emphasis on her tracks since the big comeback in 1984. The collection is her biggest-selling record in the United Kingdom, with sales in excess of 2.4 million copies, certified 8x platinum, and staying on their hit charts for more than 140 weeks straight with worldwide sales of more than 7 million.
The Australian special edition featured five new bonus tracks, including a rerecording of “The Best” as a duet with Jimmy Barnes retitled “Simply (The Best),” released as a single, as well as a new song, “I’m a Lady,” released as a single and B-side to “Love Thing.” Personnel as per original recordings. (Understandably, perhaps, no songs were included from either her Rough or Love Explosion albums.)
The Best (Mike Chapman, Holly Knight) 4:10 / What’s Love Got to Do with It (Terry Britten, Graham Lyle) 3:50 / I Can’t Stand the Rain (Ann Peebles, Bryant Miller) 3:44 / I Don’t Wanna Lose You (Albert Hammond, Graham Lyle) 4:18) / Nutbush City Limits (Tina Turner) 3:44 / Let’s Stay Together (Al Green, Al Jackson, Willie Michell) 3:39 / Private Dancer (Mark Knopfler) 4:01 / We Don’t Need Another Hero (Terry Britten, Graham Lyle) 4:14 / Better Be Good to Me (Holly Knight, Mike Chapman) 3:40 / River Deep, Mountain High (Jeff Barry, Phil Spector, Ellie Greenwich) 3:37 / Steamy Windows (Tony White) 4:02 / Typical Male (Terry Britten, Graham Lyle) 4:14 / It Takes Two (Sylvia Moy, William Stevenson) 4:13 / Addicted to Love (Robert Palmer) 5:10 / Be Tender with Me Baby (Holly Knight, Albert Hammond) 4:17 / I Want You Near Me (Terry Britten, Graham Lyle) 3:53 / Way of the World (Albert Hammond, Graham Lyle) 4:19 / Love Thing (Holly Knight, Albert Hammond) 4:28
Simply the Best shot up to number 2 in Britain, and on her fifty-second birthday in 1991, she was also awarded a Quintuple Platinum Award to commemorate sales of 1.5 million copies of Foreign Affair. She rounded out the middle of 1992 by celebrating the completion of her longtime Capitol Records contract in July and signing a fresh new deal with a spanking-new company, Virgin Records, thus offering a new lease on her creative life as well. Life was good, and the future looked brighter and brighter.
The past, however, is never really dead; in fact, as William Faulkner once rued, it isn’t even past. And the long shadow of her ex-husband continued to interrupt her activities—not disrupt them so much but definitely sour them slightly. He would work on penning his own wonky “side” of the story, Takin’ Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner, written with the assistance of Nigel Cawthorne and released in 1999, in which he grumbled publicly about his ex-wife’s open reportage of events surrounding their life together.
By this stage in her life, she always spoke haltingly about her ex-husband in general (if at all), but in my opinion, she still managed to express considerable compassion for someone who treated her the way he did. Friends knew well that her newfound peace of mind included never feeling any vengeance or animosity. It just wasn’t her Buddhist way, so instead, she later demonstrated authentic happiness for him when he was eventually released from prison, perhaps conscious that he might even return to making his own music, which was always a primary cause for any happiness he ever experienced in his rough-and-tumble life.
I suspect most readers might agree with my sense that this deep feeling that Tina shared was being expressed by a person of extremely strong character indeed—and one with considerable compassion under the circumstances. By then, at the awkward time of his heavily skewed book’s attempt at name rehabilitation (or rewriting history), Tina had already moved permanently to Europe, and she no longer wanted to memorialize that earlier part of her life.
She left America mainly because her biggest success was always in another country, and Europe had always been so supportive of her music. Besides, her new boyfriend lived there, in addition to which she openly admitted that after trying England for a couple of years, then her new partner’s home of Cologne, Germany, they settled comfortably in Switzerland. Although obviously American to the bone, she still felt like she had never known her real home until she moved to Europe.
* * *
It’s one thing to escape from your life, even your country, but it’s quite another to escape from your history. The first two are achievable if you’re brave enough; the third is more stubbornly persistent and requires an even more steely spirit to withstand. Tina Turner had turned a corner in terms of music, career, and love, but she still had to deal with the fallout from her own earliest sorrowful life experiences. She’d been popular before of course, but now she was a mega pop star, so naturally an even greater number of newfound fans wanted to know her personal backstory.
Her ex-husband’s ongoing illegal shenanigans always spawned a whole new raft of news stories and interviews, as had her 1986 testimonial book that morphed into that huge Hollywood biopic in 1993. That film seems to have pushed Ike right over the edge that he was already teetering on. Fortunately for her, the induction of Ike and Tina Turner into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 took place before his release from prison, so she at least didn’t have to contend with the regrettable episode of either accepting a hugely important award with him near her or else not attending one of the most crucial events in her career.
She lucked out and was inducted along with LaVern Baker, John Lee Hooker, the Impressions, Jimmy Reed, and the great Wilson Pickett, soaking up the adulation of a massive audience of both attendees and viewers around the world, some of whom were only old enough to know her since her triumphant return in 1984. At that stage, during her Hall of Fame induction, Ike could only watch the official induction of his namesake Revue partnership from the comfort of his jail cell. But everyone on the planet seemed to now be aware of her harrowing youthful ordeal once the movie based on her life hit the big screen. It was déjà vu all over again.
Disney Corporation and Touchstone Films had purchased the rights to make the film based on her testimonial, I, Tina, for which they also paid her ex-husband a large enough sum that he would agree to accept the portrayal without recourse to lawsuits if dissatisfied. They knew of course he would be miffed given how he was being depicted for public consumption.
He would later claim that he signed the deal only because he was still under the influence of drugs and didn’t realize what he was doing.
In a GQ magazine profile during the time of its release, she admitted that the film was both true but also narratively contoured to fit the dramatic format, as always happens during the shift from story to screen. “I’ve got to admit that they took the idea of my life and sort of wrotearound it.” She definitely felt that much was left out of the story, such as the quite valid parts of the creative process of making music in the early days before they went off the rails and also her positive family life with her children.
But she understood their cinematic decisions to not only take certain liberties with facts but also focus mostly on her meeting, singing, and recording with, marrying, battling abuse from, and later on escaping from her maniacal husband. It’s not that what they showed wasn’t true, except for certain “poetic liberties” taken with chronology or events for the purposes of dramatic compression into two hours. She just wished they had showed more of the occasional good times and interpersonal relationships that made it all at least bearable—and eventually maybe survivable.
Some of the narrative differences she detected were of course very noticeable to most people who had followed her life and music: Ike did not sing or play guitar on his early song “Rocket 88” as depicted, instead writing the song and playing piano; the song Anna Mae first performs onstage with Ike, “You Know I Love You” by BB King, was actually a much slower down-tempo blues ballad than depicted; the first song Anna Mae records, called “Tina’s Wish” in the film’s story line, was actually a 1973 track written by her on 1973’s Nutbush City Limits.
In the film, a theater marquee announcing a 1960 show starring Otis Redding, Martha and the Vandellas, and Ike and Tina Turner is shown, but in reality, Martha’s group was known as the Del-Phis until 1961, and Otis did not become a solo act until 1962; in the film, Anna Mae learns of her name change to Tina Turner after a song is played on the radio where she has just given birth, but in reality, Tina had already seen a vinyl copy of the song that showcased Ike and Tina Turner. She reported that her first physical argument with Ike occurred after she expressed her concerns about the name change and he hit her with a shoe stretcher.
The film suggests or implies that Tina’s firstborn son, Craig, was Ike’s biological child, but in reality, Craig was the son of Ike’s saxophone player Raymond Hill, with whom Tina was briefly allied; the film shows the couple getting married after Ike and his gang sneak Tina out of the hospital, but in reality, Ike was not present for the birth of their son, and Tina checked herself out of the hospital when she discovered that Ike had hired a prostitute to impersonate her while she was recuperating; they married in 1962, two years after the birth of their son, for the purposes of preventing a former spouse of Ike’s (probably his earlier singer and piano player Anna Mae Wilson) from demanding property rights.
The film showed a reenactment clip of an interview the couple did in 1964 rather than in 1971, when the real-life pair were in a similar context (Tina speaking throughout the interview with Ike remaining silent with his back to Tina and smoking a cigarette); in a scene dated 1968 in the film, the couple opened for the Rolling Stones, performing “Proud Mary,” but in reality, they didn’t perform that song until after it was released by Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1969, and the Rolling Stones did not have any concerts in 1968, with Ike and Tina opening for them only in 1966 and 1969.
Most perilously, the film depicts Tina’s suicide attempt in 1974 (for reasons that are unclear) when it actually occurred in 1968; during the time that Tina is planning her comeback in the early 1980s, in the film, a reenactment of an interview features her rehearsing her song “I Might Have Been Queen,” but that song wasn’t recorded until her album Private Dancer was produced; and in the film, before performing “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” at the Ritz in New York, the emcee announces that it was her first appearance, although she had actually first appeared there in 1981. Her 1983 appearance there occurred before the recording of her signature song and led to Capitol Records signing its recording contract with her.
Some details needed correcting, and Tina was never proud of the way the film portrayed her as a “victim” when her own actual take on her narrative was considerably more complex and nuanced. But, hey folks, it’s Hollywood, and movies are magic lanterns selling both dreams and nightmares. Directed by Brian Gibson and produced by Doug Chapin and Barry Krost, the screenplay was adapted by Kate Lanier, with the film grossing about $40 million and $20 million in rentals, while in the United Kingdom, ever her supreme fan base, it grossed £10 million alone.
