Free Fever by Tim Riley Page B

match or model among the female pop singers of her day. Turner’s closest male vocal analog was James Brown—but in 1958 Brown had just logged his first hit, “Try Me,” and was still working out his convict boxer gospel singer persona as leader of the Famous Flames. Ike Turner, himself an incendiary guitarist who cultivated a wildman reputation tearing up stages throughout the Midwest, figured he’d just found his meal ticket. He had started as piano player for Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Nighthawk before forming the Kings of Rhythm. After two years on the road, he and the renamed Tina had their first hit with “Fool in Love,” and they embarked on a career that would symbolize the plight of Woman snared in a Man’s industry.
    There would be other singers as great as Turner in their own ways: the Chantels’ Arlene Smith, the Ronettes’ Veronica Spector, or Darlene Love, who sang for the Crystals. Each of these singers had charisma to match her huge voice, each in her own way encountered obstacles as patronizing and forbidding as Tina did, and needed something more than talent to deliver them to the listeners they deserved. But as women began coming out from behind the wall of men in the early sixties to take their place in rock, few secured a lasting hold on their audience like Tina Turner. Jackie DeShannon could write, Dusty Springfield sure could sing (both were packaged as the would-be movie stars they resembled), and Lesley Gore was just odd enough to give her pliant devotions a cloying insecurity. (In the 1980s, many of Gore’s songs were embraced by the gay community, which gave songs like “You Don’t Own Me,” still standard oldies fare, retro-progressive overtones.)
    But Tina not only stole attention from whoever happened to be producing her, she ripped through all the gender, race, and class issues of her music like a twister upending farm houses. Like Elvis’s, her talent was too big for most of her songs, and this led to a lifelong struggle choosing material. Even on her earliest hit, “A Fool in Love,” her vocal alone created a new kind of female warrior in what had previously been male territory. With the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear how keenly her audience identified with the tension and release of her career over the decades, and how hungry that audience was for a figure of such towering complexity.
    â€œA Fool in Love” epitomizes not only the way Turner used girl-group poses to say subversive things, but how she pointed this conceit in different directions than her contemporaries. Knowing now what we do about her troubled marriage (which began the same year the song was released), the song sounds like unfiltered autobiography. “Oh_____ there’s something on my mind,” Tina wails alone at the opening, as if testifying before a gospel congregation: “Won’t somebody please, please tell me what’s wrong…”
    He’s got me smilin’ when I should be ashamed
    Got me laughin’ when my heart is in pain …
    [backup response] Why he treat you like he do when he’s such a good man?
    All of Tina’s vocal cries spin out around the Ikettes’ harmonies, building a huge tension in the sound: she means what she sings quite literally, but her performance is also a struggle to escape, to shake free from the song’s (and her man’s) hold. And everything the song leaves unsaid—the abuses she would spend a career spelling out—now only makes this tension greater.
    Given the surefire hook and rhythmic swagger of “A Fool in Love,” what Turner did with the song is all the more remarkable for what little needed doing. She didn’t have to dress it up any to give it kick, and you can easily imagine a lesser singer (Gladys Horton or Wanda Young of the Marvelettes, say) turning the number into a hit. Tina folded the song’s fun-loving questions back on