Fever (9 page)

Then, shortly after “Lovin' Feelin'” took off, the Righteous Brothers, Spector's last hope, left his clutches for (supposedly) bigger things. The wunderkind profiled as the reigning teen music millionaire by Tom Wolfe in early 1964 (“The First Tycoon of Teen”) was in danger of becoming a has-been. After flops from the Ronettes (“Is This What I Get for Loving You?”), Darlene Love (“Long Way to Be Happy”), and the Modern Folk Quartet (“This Could Be the Night”), Spector hoped that Tina Turner would bring enough sheer vocal power to his new song to help him hold his place as a major player. If any singer could hurdle Spector's fabled Wall of Sound, it was Tina Turner.

This desperation was apparent during the recording sessions, in which Tina remembers Spector working her butt off. In
I, Tina,
she recalls singing the opening line, “When I was a little girl…,” about a thousand times, and Spector was still on the fence about whether she'd sung a good take. He kept telling her she was close and asking for another try. Soon she was drenched from sweating over each phrase this way, and finally took her shirt off to cut loose in her bra. She couldn't remember working harder on a session.

Bob Kransow remembers when Tina first heard the tracks she would sing over, her reponse was “Are you kidding?” For Tina, Krasnow thinks, it must have been like hearing Wagner for the first time—the Spector sound was so immense she found it startling. But once she started singing, Krasnow reports a pro at work, responding to Spector with increasing determination, refusing to let the situation get to her. Finally, she tore off her shirt, asked for another take, and took her shot. In a way, Spector had been right: asking for more, he kept getting more, until finally, in a battle of wills, she tore into the song in the only way that could have redeemed its ambition: an unstoppable singer shutting down a producer's obsessive appetite. Krasnow's hair stood on end, and called the session “magic.”

Plenty of Spector productions turned songs into platforms for the production or the singer, usually in that order. As a male producer of girl groups, Spector routinely marshaled forces for a recording that epitomized the cooped-up genius control freak who idolized women to distraction; he dreaded the day his singers would lose that lovin' feeling (his magic touch) and leave him. These terms don't quite suit Turner, and her vocal style doesn't mesh with the forces Spector has in mind. The threat of Turner drowning beneath Spector's brass and bombast gives the record its monumental tension—it's the triumph of Tina walking on water, strutting her majesty across an ocean of sound.

Turner knows enough not to compete with her backdrop, but to let it carry her, and her resolve is never threatened by Spector's sonic storm. You can hear this in the way she draws out the melody on the words “And it gets bigger, baby, as it grows_____.” Tina's delivery saves this desperate, obsessive love lyric from its own excess; she makes all of Spector's paranoia and emotional claustrophobia sound almost reasonable. And the overtones are unmistakable: Turner makes you believe that she loves her man like a child obsessively loves its rag doll. In the same way, Spector loves Tina's sound nearly as much as he loves his own obsessive vision of teenage symphonies; loves it maybe even more than the joyous ache in Ronnie Spector's throat (otherwise, why call Tina to do the session?).

When “River Deep, Mountain High” didn't become a hit (it sputtered out at number 88 on Billboard's chart), it drove Spector to retreat from music no less pathologically than Brian Wilson did after
Pet Sounds.
But the idea behind the recording—Spector finds his ultimate love object—cues the passion in the sound: imagine anybody else singing “River Deep, Mountain High,” and you'll hear something less challenged, less frightening, and less monumentally confused about its own greatness. It's probably the greatest rock 'n' roll recording that wasn't a hit in the whole history of the genre. It's also the most abused record in the history of pop: more critics disagree about it than almost any other great record. In one corner, Dave Marsh in
The Heart of Rock and Soul
calls it “wildly overrated” and “a muddle … an album's worth of sounds jammed onto one side of a 45, with a little girl lyric that completely contradicts Tina Turner's true persona as the Queen of R&B Sleaze.” In the other corner, Greil Marcus devotes an entry in his book
Stranded
's highly selective discography to simply quoting Phil Spector: “That record sounds like God hit the world and the world hit back.”

A bomb in the U.S., “River Deep, Mountain High” rocketed to number three on the British charts in mid-June and stayed in the Top Fifty for thirteen weeks. This led to Ike and Tina opening a British tour for the Rolling Stones in September 1966, where an important relationship was forged with Mick Jagger (who had admired her
TNT
show appearance). But while Tina became an instant star in Britain, back home little had changed. For the rest of the 1960s, Ike and Tina worked the show-biz circuit from top to bottom, opening for headliners like Ann-Margret in Las Vegas, then barnstorming the rest of the country. The only chart record worth noting in this period was Tina's cover of the Otis Redding number “I've Been Loving You Too Long” on Bob Krasnow's Buddah Records, which hit number 68 in 1969. Not that Ike was out of tricks to win attention. The LP that followed “Loving You,” called
Outta Season,
featured the usual array of blues and R&B standards. But the cover photo stands out even for Ike's bizarre behavior and remains a classic of poor rock taste: Ike and Tina in whiteface makeup, chomping down on slices of watermelon.

On one level, “River Deep, Mountain High” marked at least the symbolic end of girl groups, a coda to almost eight years of a gender struggle in sound that either fell on its own sword (Spector) or became a victim of its own success, as we'll see with the Supremes. But if you're Phil Spector, once you've reached the heights of “Be My Baby,” “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling,” and “River Deep,” are there any more romantic peaks to conquer? For four minutes, Tina Turner holds her own, and finally trounces Spector, and even if the Supremes carried the genre to mainstream living rooms many a Sunday night on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
girl groups were never again such a source of joy and buoyancy in pop. The three years between “Be My Baby” and “River Deep, Mountain High” are Spector's colossal stride, and his work spans vast reaches of feeling (records like “Spanish Harlem” by Ben E. King, “Then He Kissed Me” and “Girls Can Tell” by the Crystals, and “Strange Love” by Darlene Love—not to mention his Christmas record, where Love made “Christmas [Baby Please Come Home]” sound like wall-to-wall sex).

If rock has an epic denouement, it is Tina's voice punching exultant holes in Spector's wall—one imagines Ike listening to the record with no small amount of trepidation (although he made sure the record was billed as by “Ike and Tina Turner”). Tina went extra rounds with the champ, and the fact that she had effectively held her own only made Ike feel more insecure next to what he had set loose. Tina's is the only voice Spector heard as ample competition to his production pretensions, a voice that wouldn't just be supported by his wall but might stand atop it, allow it to lift her up, even tap its male bravado as a source of female strength. “River Deep” is the sound of the Svengali in thrall to the ingenue he cannot completely dominate.

*   *   *

From there, Tina Turner's career surfed on choppy waters and threw up odd jolts of pleasure. “We never do anything nice and easy,” she explained over the opening vamp of her first top-ten hit, “Proud Mary” in January of 1971. The insinuating way she growled “nice and easy” told you how she felt about such a laid-back approach—all very well in its place, but certainly not what she was about. After a brief ritard, the song came to a virtual standstill. Then Tina frees the brakes, and suddenly the bottom drops out of the song: the band sounds like a runaway train, careening into a breakneck tempo in hot pursuit of Tina's energy. The writer, Creedence Clearwater Revival's John Fogerty, had steered it toward minor-hit status two years earlier. But what Tina brought was unimaginable from a Berkeley white boy—she spat Fogerty's virginity out with the song's hapless New Orleans color. The echoes of New Orleans are still with Tina, but she's outstripped its uptempo jive; it's not so much a matter of speed as of levitation. The force of the number vaulted Tina to number one, christening her the star she deserved to be, and won her a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance—another signal that the industry knew all along what her audience wasn't ready for.

Ralph J. Gleason, who cofounded
Rolling Stone
magazine, captured Tina's outlaw spirit and sexual menace in his description of her performance at a Rolling Stones concert in 1969: “The climax to her act was the most blatantly sexual number I have ever seen at a concert. Tina Turner caressed the microphone as if it were a high-tension erogenous area, all the while squirming and twisting and emitting a series of vocal sounds that came closer to simulating a sexual climax than any record ever barred from any radio station.”

The success of “Proud Mary” finally began to change things for Ike and Tina. They moved to Los Angeles, where Ike went nuts with his cash: when he showed his newly decorated house to Bob Krasnow, Krasnow remarked, “You mean you actually can spend seventy thousand dollars at Woolworth's?” But the couple's new success slumped off quickly. Of the next four records they released in 1971 and 1972, only one reached the top hundred. That song, “What You See Is What You Get,” hit number 25 in 1971, and was featured in
Soul to Soul,
a concert documentary that had been filmed in Ghana on the fourteenth anniversary of that African nation's independence (Ike and Tina did the title track). They also appeared briefly in Milos Forman's
Taking Off,
in which they were seen whipping out a hot version of “Goodbye So Long,” their 1965 R&B hit. Then Tina wrote one of her defining songs, “Nutbush City Limits,” an R&B rewrite of “Penny Lane” minus the optimism. (It reached
Billboard's
number 22 in September 1973.) “Well, by the time ‘Nutbush City Limits' hit, I was turning thirty-four years old,” Turner recalled in
I, Tina.
“I started thinking about this career I had, about how when I'd started out I thought it would be such a glamorous life. But there was nothing glamorous about it. It wasn't even
my
career—it was
Ike
's career. And it was Ike's songs, mostly, and they were always about Ike's life—and I had to sing them. I was just his tool.”

Tina's only break during this period came in 1974, when producer Robert Stigwood cast her in Ken Russell's movie adaptation of the Who's
Tommy
(which she carried along with Elton John and Eric Clapton). Tina also released her first solo album,
Tina Turns the Country On,
covering Hank Snow, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and James Taylor. The next year, 1975,
Tommy
was released. June saw Ike and Tina's final hit, “Baby—Get It On,” chart at number 88.

By that time, the Turner marriage had finally reached an impasse, and Tina left Ike for good in November of 1977; the divorce was made final on March 29, 1978. That year, Tina released her first post-Ike solo record,
Rough.
Ike countered with
Airwaves,
which he cut before Tina's departure. 1979 brought
Hollywood Nights,
a television special mounted for Olivia Newton-John, hot off her starring role in
Grease.
There Tina met Newton-John's manager, Lee Kramer, who would ultimately introduce her to Roger Davies, the man who engineered her comeback.

*   *   *

After her divorce from Ike, Tina's career was hampered by mounting debt and poor material, so every break counted. She sang the Temptations' song “Ball of Confusion” for British producers Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh (who dubbed themselves B.E.F., short for British Electric Foundation) on a compilation album called
Music of Quality and Distinction.
This, along with well-timed shows at the Ritz in New York and her imperious version of the Infernos' “Disco Tramp,” gradually built up her British faithful and an American cult. Her Ritz shows were star-studded affairs, with listeners like the Rolling Stones and David Bowie in attendance. It was Bowie's suggestion that Capitol Records check out her live act that led to her 1983 comeback contract with the label, a solo career leap that would make everything else seem like foreplay.

But the struggle was not over. Turner's career echoes Jimi Hendrix's at this point: she had to rely on a British launch to secure her success in America. Capitol was reluctant to let her record in England, so Davies had to book a show for her in Stockholm in order to find time to work the production team Heaven 17. The first two songs she recorded with them were “1984” and “Let's Stay Together,” the Al Green classic. After “Let's Stay Together” hit in America, peaking at number 19, Capitol demanded an album, which had to be recorded in and around thirty British touring dates Davies had already booked. Capitol wanted her to renege on the dates, but Davies persisted, and while she went off to sing, he gathered material: “Better Be Good to Me,” a song off a Spider album (cowritten by Holly Knight); “Show Some Respect,” by Terry Britten, a former guitarist with Australia's Twilights, and “What's Love Got to Do with It,” by Britten and Graham Lyle on assignment. Davies also brought in Rupert Hyne, producer for the Fixx, to produce “Better Be Good to Me,” and Hyne wrote “I Might Have Been Queen” for Tina. And finally, there was a leftover Dire Straits song contributed by Mark Knopfler called “Private Dancer.”