Fever (10 page)

At first, Turner refused to sing “What's Love Got to Do with It?” because it sounded too poppy: “I didn't know that ‘What's Love Got to Do With It' had been written for me. I just thought it was some old pop song, and I didn't like it. I didn't think it was my style. By that time, I felt that I had
become
all the songs that I was covering—by the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart—that I had become rock 'n' roll. I had just never thought of singing pop.” That quote is exhibit A in anybody's cross-examination of singers who believe they're in complete control of their interpretations.

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“What's Love Got to Do with It” has become Turner's signature, the culmination of all her struggles condensed into a single record. She takes aim at several targets: for starters she's talking back to Ike, who may have given lip service to love but always put ambition and money first, and had no trouble casting himself as pimp to his wife's tramp. On another level, she's addressing the men's club of pop music, which set the restrictive terms for so much of her career. And on a third level, in the celebrated rock tradition, she's addressing her audience, and her struggle with her own professionalism, saying “This is business, this is a
job
—and as a woman they try to turn you into a whore if you do this kind of work.” It didn't just catch the subtext of a very different song, Cyndi Lauper's “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” it caught something bigger, more substantial. Lauper's anthem was about the playful freedom that any female feels a right to seize; Turner's epic ballad—ominous, threatening, and finally liberating—was about women's struggle for self-respect in a man's world, even through something you love as much as music.

The irony, of course, is that listening to Tina sing this song, everything she's gone through notwithstanding, you come away knowing that for her, love has everything to do with her talent and success: love of the music, love of performing, and love of where the music can ultimately take a performer and her audience.

With “What's Love Got to Do with It,” and the revelations in her 1985 autobiography,
I, Tina,
Turner stepped forward to embody the ultimate liberated woman who refused to be kept down by her man or held back by having no man. Here was a new kind of gender pose: a singer who refused to be defined by her sex, genre, or race. In her mid-forties, Turner recaptured a huge female audience without sacrificing any of her masculine aggression—or losing male fans who admired her ferocity, humor, and sex appeal. Tina sang for a vast, until-then-silent majority of women who had endured domestic abuse, struggled for decency, and fought for not only professional and personal parity, but a new self-respect that suffrage and bra burning only hinted at.

On the basis of her recording breakthrough, Tina was suddenly cast opposite Mel Gibson in a sequel to an action franchise (
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,
1985). (Who would be the male analog to Tina Turner in the 1980s—Sly Stallone's Rambo?) And alongside Mick Jagger at the close of Live Aid that summer (singing “Honky Tonk Woman”), Turner made it clear who had shown this white dandy all his moves. Who else could intimidate Jagger so sexually in front of 1.5 billion viewers worldwide—at his own invitation?

As she seized her moment, and strung out her comeback into a dizzying series of tours well into the 1990s, Tina Turner became one of the biggest gender conundrums of our time: a woman with the kind of strength men can only envy. In her realm as queen of pop, subsuming Debbie and Madonna and Courtney and Alanis and Britney and Celine with her vast experience, imperious sexuality, and interest-bearing industry dues, Tina Turner reigns as a pillar of female success in a man's world who makes Germaine Greer look like Doris Day.

CHAPTER 4

I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

“What's Love Got to Do with It” has a lot of history in its grit, a hard-won resilience that testifies to all the pop experience it builds upon. You can even hear “Be My Baby” in Turner's record, not just in its sonic scope but in the way it sweeps over past triumphs and redirects its feminist passion. “Be My Baby” can still send a tingle down your spine, and it's still a key teenage sentiment about a young woman's desire for control. It puts Ronnie Spector in a class with Tina Turner; there's almost nothing racial about this sound—it's all about the poetry and possibilities of gender talk.

But with Veronica Bennett Spector being a gorgeous young half-breed (her mother was black and Cherokee, her father white), and Phil Spector being a balding Jewish music nerd, race has become part of “Be My Baby” and its legacy. In 1963, these outsider credentials must have sent powerful signals to listeners in the throes of the civil rights movement as well as to a pop industry anxious to bare its liberal stripes. If Elvis could turn a Southern railroad junction like Memphis into rock 'n' roll's Mecca, and minorities could seize the levers of power in the pop centers of New York and Los Angeles, the regional music circuits—especially Detroit, the north's oasis of jobs—couldn't be far behind. Poring over pop history, it's hard to separate how the civil rights movement helped sell Motown records from the way Motown records fueled the high spirits of civil rights protest; but the prominence of its racial politics overshadowed its equally daring gender themes. Founder Berry Gordy called his shop “the sound of young America,” and he meant it to be as embracing a slogan as it implied, and not just in the racial and class-conscious sense. In a way, Gordy presided over a family of performers, sorting out its own customs and traditions with its own rules and hierarchies, and with gender conflicts between brothers and sisters, lovers and strangers, discoveries and influences.

With acts as diverse as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and Marvin Gaye, and signal female singers like Mary Wells, Diana Ross, and Martha Reeves, all making music under the same roof, the distinctions between soul (the black market) and pop (everybody) became less and less important. Gordy's shop understood how white ears responded to black indefatigability as much as black talent clamored for white crossover success.

The gender geometry of Motown's accomplishment is keener than commonly assumed: white men responded to flirtatious black women just as much as black women responded to flirtatious white men. And in keeping with how Europeans taught Americans how to love black music, the Beatles admired Smokey Robinson at least as much as Dusty Springfield admired Marvin Gaye.

More than any other label in the sixties, Motown aimed itself at gender meritocracy (at least aesthetically), even if Gordy, its patriarch, ran a tight ship. Gordy's crossover ambitions were manifest: Motown's men may have been nattily dressed and groomed for success, but their ecstatic singles told of outright sexual delight and pleasure with women—both as another metaphor for freedom in the white man's world and as another leg up on traditional male stereotypes. It was hard to imagine any young man more handsome in song, or more of a gentleman, than Marvin Gaye. And although Motown women wore sky-high beehives, sequins, dinner gloves, heels, and deliciously long eyelashes, they sang for a larger biracial sisterhood, and their songs were often cool put-downs of the male ego (“Back in My Arms Again,” “Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right”).

To be sure, Diana Ross wanted to be a star far more than she wanted to be a feminist. But the pleasure men took in Supremes songs told of the more complex feelings that passed between couples. “Come See About Me” meant something more than “drop by when you get lonely,” and “You Keep Me Hanging On” treated love as an addiction that bespoke as much pleasure as dread—and the insistent beat landed somewhere in between. The Supremes' hits in particular, while overshadowed by titans like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, are generally underrated in the critical canon. The way these Motown men and women regarded each other epitomized the new male-female dialogue in pop, from Eddie Holland's “Leaving Here,” to the hits that Smokey Robinson wrote for Mary Wells (“My Guy”), to the duets Marvin Gaye sang with Kim Weston (“It Takes Two”) and Tammi Terrell (“Your Precious Love,” “If I Could Build My World Around You,” “Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “You're All I Need to Get By”).

Motown's gender politics was in keeping with the rhythm-and-blues tradition it siphoned into pop. On the sidelines, the R&B scene was where you heard more about long-term adult relationships, more frank female voices, and more embattled struggle for equality than in mainstream pop. Think of songs like “Let's Straighten It Out” by Clarence Carter, which posed an alternative to breaking up, “Good to Me” by Irma Thomas, “We're Gonna Make It” by Little Milton, “Stay By My Side” by Jo Ann Garrett, or “Hold On to What You've Got” by Joe Tex. The irony was that for a time in the sixties, Motown produced as many ideal men and women as any other label, and the better duets mentioned above and partnerships between Robinson and Wells, and ultimately Gladys Knight and her Pips, suggested how much good pop energy was flowing between the sexes.

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Before it was a crossover phenomenon, Berry Gordy shrewdly modeled Motown after white labels like Red Bird and Philles. Girl groups captured the female perspective with sympathy, cunning, and grace, and ambitious secretaries inspired producers to mold them into stars. The Supremes were all dolled up with dinner gloves for men, but in songs like “Stop in the Name of Love” and “Love Child” women heard female power shared on a mass scale that couldn't be reduced to pithy tag lines. First-person girl-group point of view galloped forward as the genre leapt into celebrity status; here was female royalty that whispered confession as come-on, with the thrill of secrets told in public, and feminist subtexts bobbed ever closer to the surface. The parity went the other way, too. The label's handsome boys not only leapt into soaring falsetto to pledge their desire atop tireless R&B rhythms; they did so with immaculate style, the kind only ladies' men could summon.

If Motown began as a “family” business that poached greater Detroit's high-school musical casts and downtown's secretarial talent for its beginnings, its longer arc had a traditional curve. Gordy rode out his decade with the Supremes, who came to symbolize the crossover reach of the sound for several pop generations. He ultimately succumbed to corrosive ambition for sex and power in the tired old show-biz fashion. That the Supremes would take the girl-group concept and turn it into something glamorous enough for Hollywood, and cliché enough for Vegas, illustrates how ambitious Gordy was for black acceptability.

Although the Supremes, the Miracles, and the Temptations had already been signed and were busy working on material, the company's first number one was “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, in April 1961 (on the Tamla subsidiary—with Marvin Gaye sitting in on drums). And the label's first big star was Mary Wells, who wrote her own hit with “Bye Bye Baby” in 1961, emerged with “The One Who Really Loves You” (by Smokey Robinson) and “You Beat me to the Punch” (by Smokey Robinson and Ronald White) in 1962, while still a teenager. Wells followed these up with a hit at the end of the year that packed a wallop: “Two Lovers” (another Robinson number) flirted with the idea of simultaneous lovers, until you thought the lyric through to uncover a woman's dilemma at one man's duplicity.

But that the idea of two-timing and enjoying it was put forward at all shows how far girl groups were pushing things. For men, this was among the more advanced views of female behavior. By the time Wells put out the smash “My Guy,” in 1964, it didn't take Smokey Robinson long to figure out that he could answer his own song with one for a guy group—so he wrote “My Girl” for the Temptations. Here, the gender dialogue wasn't happening between singers and writers, it was happening with the same writer composing for two separate acts, one female, one male. Smokey was becoming a Svengali to Motown's gender politics, in thrall to the beauty and complexity popping up all around him. Wells paired with Marvin Gaye for “Once Upon a Time,” and “What's the Matter with You Baby” in 1964, and toured with the Beatles in England as the first Motown act overseas. Brenda Holloway was groomed as Well's successor, but Holloway's voice had more grain, and she leaned more toward soul ballads, so she never broke the top ten. “Every Little Bit Hurts,” her 1964 debut, shaped a confessional mold that pop wasn't quite ready for. And even though Holloway worked with Smokey Robinson on two promising numbers (“When I'm Gone” and “Operator”), the song she's remembered for most, “You've Made Me So Very Happy,” broke wide for Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1969, two years after her version barely cracked the Top 40.

The best Motown girl groups were fronted by singers who didn't really need any support. Martha Reeves, a member of the Checkmate label's Del-Phis, joined Motown as a secretary for Mickey Stevenson in A&R, but a voice like that was not for answering the phones—she was a nascent star waiting for the right song. She sang backup on Marvin Gaye's “Stubborn Kind of Fellow” and “Hitch Hiker,” and filled in for Mary Wells on a number called “There He Is (At My Door),” only to see her first solo vocal released as by “the Vels” on Motown's Melody label. After “I'll Have to Let Him Go” came “Come and Get These Memories,” and in 1963, she finally hit with “Heat Wave,” a torrent of female desire that had nothing to do with the weather.

The next year, “Dancing in the Street,” originally intended for Kim Weston, became Reeves's signature: a song about taking to the streets that picked up where Chuck Berry's “School Days” left off (“Out of the class and into the street”). In the tradition of song travelogue (like Berry's “Sweet Little Sixteen” and Brian Wilson's rewrite, “Surfin' U.S.A.”), it followed through on the broad overtones of “Be My Baby,” both in sound and theme. “Dancing” became a code word not just for sex, but for protest, especially with that season's ongoing civil rights demonstrations and Freedom Rides. “This is an invitation across the nation” meant something more than joining a single cause; it meant joining a new political mentality (in this way, it prefigured Aretha Franklin's “Respect”). Reeves never hit it this big again, but her vitality on that single song had a lasting feminist charge, and it's among the most notorious Motown hits never to reach number one (it stalled for two weeks at number two, edged out by Dean Martin's “Everybody Loves Somebody” and then the Supremes' “Where Did Our Love Go”).