Free Fever by Tim Riley Page A

made his sound at once girlish and manly only hints at its poetry.

CHAPTER 3
    Private Dancer
    Girl groups gave Elvis a giant, collective “Yes!,” but rock feminism really begins with Tina Turner. From her first hit, “A Fool in Love,” in 1960, Turner was far ahead of other popular entertainers in expressing the plight of women with any realism. At key moments (“Fool” in 1960, “River Deep, Mountain High” in 1966, “Proud Mary” in 1971, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in 1984, and “I Don’t Really Want to Fight No More” in 1993) she turned in defining hits about what women were thinking and feeling, and how women were treated by men. As her career saunters through its fifth decade, her persistence and longevity are as much key to her persona as her triumph over her former husband, Ike.
    The evolution of Tina Turner’s image over a half-century reflects the way men have traditionally cast women in pop, and prefigures women’s defiant response in the sixties and afterward. Her role fronting the Ike and Tina Turner Revue typified the plight of women throughout early rock. On the surface, she resembled a lot of female acts: she was managed by a male producer who told her how to dress, placed her onstage in front of a few beautiful backup singers, and fed her songs written by male show-biz impresarios and arrangers. This deceptively simple format of the era’s girl groups stemmed from a gender hierarchy so taken for granted that Ike Turner’s remaining onstage for his share of the applause only made sense.
    But as we’ve seen, these generalizations don’t hold up, and Tina shouted down this stereotype more than anybody else, humbling not just husband Ike but producer Phil Spector, the Who’s Roger Daltrey (in Tommy ), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome ’s Mel Gibson, even Sir Penis himself, Mick Jagger. Even as a teenager, Tina Turner’s jaunty alto was indefatigably compelling, and her dynamism went beyond mere star power. She put her vocal cords through the same contortions that sent her body lurching on stage: whipping her legs around the microphone stand and lunging forward into the music, she pushed the sound so hard her musicians were always scrambling to keep up with her. Wielding an amazingly versatile and fierce instrument, she let fly bolts of strafing notes before stretching out into rough, enticing growls. Her passion came out as a combination of lust and rage, with overtones of fear, imperious confidence, bombast, and layers of tenderness—a grown woman drawing on a heap of abuse from men both on- and offstage. She wasn’t a singer so much as a feminist tsunami.
    These are the qualities Ike Turner spotted and coopted when he met the seventeen-year-old Anna Mae Bullock in 1958. His reaction—and the reaction of producers, critics, and fans thereafter—is nicely illustrated at the beginning of What’s Love Got to Do with It, her 1993 Hollywood bio. After her first spontaneous appearance with his band in a St. Louis bar, Ike sits young Anna Mae down in a coffee shop and tells her, in astounded tones, that she sings “like a man.” Tina, always keenly self-conscious about her sound, explains in her autobiography, I, Tina, how she learned to sing like that.
    Even before her first hit, Tina knew she didn’t have a traditionally “pretty” voice. When she chose songs, she explains, she thought of men: how she could echo male deliveries, and how men would respond to her attack. She points out she had to “keep up” as the only female in Ike’s band when she first joined. All her on-the-job musical and performance training came from these guys, and all their bar-hopping between towns left her few illusions about any “feminine” airs. Holding her own in this context meant sharpening her resolve.
    In Tina’s voice, Ike heard vigor, commitment, and daring, with no