2023-05-24 23:39:42
Tina Turner died this Wednesday in her adoptive country of Switzerland. The 83-year-old vocalist had suffered a chain of serious ailments that even led her to consider resorting to assisted suicide. We want to imagine that in the end she preferred to resist and fight.
Tina was essentially a survivor. Born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939, she left her life in rural South Tennessee when she settled with her mother in St. Louis, Missouri. She went from singing in church to frequenting the city’s nightclubs. There she met Ike Turner, the leader of the Kings of Rhythm, in 1957, with whom she began to sing. Ike was a veteran who subsisted in a tough business, always bordering on illegality; he understood that there was a vein in Tina’s acting fierceness and made her his wife in 1962.
Like Ike & Tina Turner, they racked up chart-topping hits rhythm and blues, that is, in the African-American market. Ike’s moves, who preferred to jump between record companies, did not help to establish them as leading figures. However, in 1966 they accepted a proposal to record with producer Phil Spector, who really only wanted to work with Tina. The result was an orgasmic theme, River Deep, Mountain High, which failed in the United States, but had an impact in Europe. In the UK, Tina became a cult artist. The fascination of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart or David Bowie would lead to her arrival at the mainstream.
The Rolling Stones would hire Ike & Tina Turner for their 1969 US tour: white audiences gasped at the turbocharged sexuality of Tina and her dancers, the Ikettes. Ike, who rarely thought beyond the short term, understood that it was time to establish himself in the rock market. They did it with steamy versions of hits like Proud Mary (Creedence Clearwater Revival) y Come together (The Beatles), apart from resounding original songs like Nutbush City Limitsa Tina creation that celebrated her origins.
What Tina kept quiet about: life with Ike, a cocaine addict, was hellish. And she herself caught the environmental evil, starring in episodes of jealous violence. She until in 1976 she left Ike in Dallas (Texas) and filed for divorce. That would be the central point of her made-up autobiography, later reflected in the corresponding biopic -where she was played by Angela Bassett- and in the musical Tina.
He had to start all over again and had to accept all kinds of food boluses, flirt with the disco music and appear in the circuit of nightclubs or, to his eternal shame, in the South Africa of the apartheid. It was not easy: precisely, on this day, in 1979, he made his debut in Spain with a concert at the Palacio de los Deportes in Barcelona… which he did not fill (he would return more times, already with public success).
That same year, he connected with Roger Davies, a manager Australian who developed a clever plan to boost his career. She signed with the multinational Capital Records and dedicated herself to making albums with selected songs to highlight her image as a sensual and empowered woman; In order to guarantee the power of her offer, she had different producers that covered from the techno pop to rock. your album Private dancer (1984) would sell millions and be the prototype of a new way of understanding broad-spectrum pop, later imitated in the release of Whitney Houston and other divas.
It dominated the airwaves and the stages during the eighties and nineties. The truth is that she did not stop: she signed up for duets with her British admirers and she appeared powerful in a movie of the saga Mad Max. And he remade his life with a record executive, the German Erwin Bach, with whom he shared Buddhist beliefs. She retired from it in 2000, although she would still star in a farewell tour for her in 2008. By then, she was already residing in Switzerland, a country that was good to her. In gratitude for her, in 2013 she became a naturalized Swiss and renounced her US citizenship.
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