It’s that last line — Give it all or nothing — that illustrates how Tina Turner can wrap her flamethrower voice and engaging personality around a song. In five words, Turner, like a fiery Baptist preacher, deftly marries power and emotion and makes you a believer.
The whole song is as much about Turner as it is about Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the film for which it was written. Give it all or nothing. That’s what 47-year-old Tina Turner (born Annie Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tenn.) has been doing all her performing life.
We may not need another hero, but we’ve got one. Turner, who performs Monday at Hollywood Sportatorium, is not only an example of the consummate singer- performer. She is a role model, an example of how perseverance can take a person from rock bottom to rock star.
Two years ago, Turner was a nostalgia act playing hotel ballrooms to audiences of conventioneers. Three or four years ago, you could have seen her at Mister Pips (later called Mister Days), a defunct 700-seat rock club on Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, which specialized in has-beens and wet T- shirt contests. Turner was playing anywhere to pay debts incurred for canceling numerous concerts when — tired of the beating and the cheating — she left former husband Ike Turner in 1975.
But that’s all over now. Turner is one of rock’s comeback stories of 1984-85, perhaps of the decade.
Turner’s Private Dancer album, recorded in London in two weeks in late 1983, spawned three Billboard magazine Top 10 singles, including the No. 1, Grammy- winning tune, What’s Love Got to Do With It, as well as Better Be Good to Me and Private Dancer. The album is still on the charts and has sold 4 million copies.
When the sales pace of that record slowed down, Turner didn’t.
She had been in Australia filming her dramatic acting debut as antagonist Auntie Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third in that series of postholocaust adventure films. She also sang a pair of songs for the film sound track: We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome ), which reached No. 2 on the pop singles chart, and One of the Living, currently No. 15 and rising like the torrid Outback air.
Last week, a Turner duet with Canadian rocker Bryan Adams, It’s Only Love, made its debut on Billboard’s singles chart at No. 53.
Clearly Lady Luck, as well as the public, has rediscovered Turner. Since 1983, every move she has made, every song she has sung, has been the right one.
But that wasn’t always the case. Turner’s long, battling relationship with former husband and performing partner Ike has been well publicized.
Turner recounted the fight that sent her packing in a 1984 article in Rolling Stone. Turner said they were on their way to the Dallas airport in 1975. “He handed me this chocolate candy. It was melting, you know, and I was wearing a white suit, and I went ‘Uh.’ That’s all — and he hit me. And this time I was pissed. I said, ‘I’m fightin’ back . . . When I got in the car he gave me a backhand just like that . . . and I started hitting back.”
Turner moved in with friends and put her career on hold for a year. When she returned to performing, her solo career, like Ike’s, sputtered.
Sure, they hit big in the ’60s and ’70s with the songs A Fool in Love, It’s Gonnna Work Out Fine, Nutbush City Limits, River Deep, Mountain High, (which though labeled as an Ike and Tina Turner performance, featured only Tina) and Proud Mary. But life on the road with Ike, whose exploits with women and drugs is the stuff of legends, was allegedly brutal.
So when Turner defiantly belts, Out from the ruins/ Out from the wreckage/ Can’t make the same mistake this time, from the Mad Max sound track, she is more than simply singing. She is testifying. This song about postnuclear holocaust is also about postpersonal holocaust.
This song is hers, forever. Her voice erupts in a combination of personal regret and regeneration. Turner is singing the gospel, but it’s not We Shall Overcome; it’s we have overcome. As several of her songs attest, she is a soul survivor.
Looking for something/ We can rely on/ There’s got to be something better out there.
There was. Events started to click for Turner in 1983. Her new manager, Roger Davies, who she had met accidently a year or two earlier, had begun to reconstruct her act. He gave Turner the rock ‘n’ roll image she wanted. No more Vegas or cabaret-style appearances, no more hotel ballrooms to audiences of fast-food executives, no more tuxedo-clad bands. It was time to rock; time to look and sound the part that had been simmering inside her.
In 1983, Davies got Turner a deal with Capitol Records in England. Turner recorded a cover of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. The song hit No. 5 on the British charts and became a dance club staple in America.
Turner had converted music industry skeptics. Capitol gave her $150,000 to record a follow-up album for American release.
There was one catch. Turner had a mere two weeks to record it. And she had to do it during a concert tour of England.
Davies scoured London for songs. Four producers and numerous songwriters and guest musicians — including guitar hero Jeff Beck — helped Turner complete the record on time.
Dire Strait’s brain trust Mark Knopfler, who Turner finally met last month in Canada, sent her Private Dancer. He had originally intended to put the song on his Love Over Gold album. Davies asked his friend, songwriter Terry Britten, to submit songs. He offered Turner What’s Love Got to Do With It, a song Turner initially misunderstood and declined to do.
Holly Knight, who wrote Love Is a Battlefield and Invincible for Pat Benatar, contributed Better Be Good to Me and also wrote Turner’s current Mad Max sound track hit, One of the Living.
Rupert Hine, best known for his work with the Fixx, wrote I Might Have Been Queen for Turner after meeting with her. The song tells Turner’s story: I Look up to the stars/ With my perfect memory/ I look through it all/ And my future’s no shock to me/ I look down/ But I see no tragedy/ I look up to my past/ A spirit running free/ I look down and I’m there in history/ I’m a soul survivor.
Turner’s game, interpretive voice tied the songs together like a ribbon on a fruit basket.
Following the album’s release, Turner joined Lionel Richie as his opening act on an American tour. But she still had some convention gigs she was obligated to do. When Turner took the stage in an Ottowa hotel ballroom to play her last show to Big Mac conventioneers, What’s Love Got to Do With It was the No. 1 song in North America.
Shortly after that, Turner flew to Australia to film the Mad Max picture. In 1984, she also did background vocals on the title cut to David Bowie’s Tonight album and on Foreigner’s No. 1 hit I Want to Know What Love Is. After winning Grammy Awards for Best Female Pop Vocalist and Best Female Rock Vocalist for that year, Turner joined the superstar roster dubbed USA for Africa to record We Are the World.
Turner has been touring nearly non-stop since Let’s Stay Togther hit the British charts, as if the whole thing is a dream that will end if she takes a break. Her current North American tour began five months ago in Canada. Monday’s Sportatorium concert is the final date on this leg before touring Australia.
Despite Turner’s incredible comeback, she is still not the stadium-size act in the United States some had predicted she would be. But that is to her fans’ benefit. Even the barnlike Hollywood Sportatorium is ill-suited for Turner’s sassy, classy rock ‘n’ roll act. A couple of evenings at the Knight Center would have been more appropriate for one of rock’s reigning queens.
Still, the girl from Nutbush, Tenn., has come a long way from Mister Days on Federal Highway. Her jewel of a voice is no longer buried in obscurity.
Monday night, when she gets to the bridge in We Don’t Need Another Hero and sings those last five words — Give it all or nothing — you’ll know she’s singing more than lyrics; she’s singing philosophy.
And when she dives into I Might Have Been Queen with never-say-never intensity and delivers, I look down and I’m there in history/ I’m a soul survivor, you know she’s singing biography.
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Tina Turner performs Monday at the Hollywood Sportatorium, 16661 W. Hollywood Blvd., Pembroke Pines. Mr. Mister opens the show at 8 p.m. Tickets, available at BASS outlets, are $17.50 plus $1.25 service charge. Call 428-0917.
