By HILLEL ITALY (AP National Writer)
NEW YORK (AP) — Tina Turner, the irrepressible singer and stage performer who teamed up with husband Ike Turner for a dynamic string of hit records and live shows in the 1960s and 1970s and survived her gruesome marriage to triumph in middle age with chart-topping ” What’s Love Got to Do With It,” has died at the age of 83.
Turner died Wednesday after a long illness at her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, her manager said. Ten years ago she became a Swiss citizen.
Few stars have traveled yet—she was born Anna Mae Bullock in a secluded Tennessee hospital and spent her final years on a 260,000-square-foot estate on Lake Zurich—and conquered so much. Physically battered, emotionally devastated and financially ruined by her 20-year relationship with Ike Turner, she single-handedly became a superstar in her 40s, at a time when most of her peers were headed for ruin, and she remained a top concert-goer for years to come.
“How do we say goodbye to a woman who owned her pain and trauma and used it as a means to help change the world?” Angela Bassett, who played Turner in the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It, said in a statement.
“Through her courage in telling her story, her dedication to staying the course in her life no matter the sacrifice, and her determination to carve a place in rock and roll for herself and others who her corpses, Tina Turner showed others who lived in fear what a bright future full of love, compassion and freedom should look like.
With admirers ranging from Mick Jagger to Beyoncé to Mariah Carey, the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll” was one of the world’s most popular entertainers, known for a core of pop, rock, and rhythm and blues favorites: Proud Mary,” “Nutbush City Limits,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and the hits she had in the 1980s, including “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” and a cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stick Together.”
Her trademarks included a growling alto that could smolder or explode, her bold smile and strong cheekbones, her palette of wigs, and the muscular, fast-stepping legs she wasn’t afraid to show off. She sold more than 150 million records worldwide, won 12 Grammys, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Ike in 1991 (and single in 2021), and was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2005 along with Beyoncé and Oprah. Winfrey among those who praise her. In 2021, her life became the basis for a movie, a Broadway musical and an HBO documentary that she publicly said goodbye to.
Until she left her husband and revealed their backstory, she was known as the voracious foil on stage to the steady Ike, the leading lady of the ‘Ike and Tina Turner Revue’. Ike was billed first and ran the show, choosing the material, arrangements and backing singers. They toured constantly for years, in part because Ike was often short of money and didn’t want to miss a concert. Tina Turner had to go on with bronchitis, with pneumonia, with a collapsed right lung.
Other times, Ike herself was the cause of her misfortunes.
As she related in her memoir, “Me, Tina,” Ike began beating her not long after they met, in the mid-1950s, and only grew more vicious. Provoked by anything and everything, he threw hot coffee in her face, strangled her or beat her until her eyes were swollen shut, then raped her. Before a show, he broke her jaw and she went on stage with her mouth full of blood.
Terrified both to be with Ike and to remain without him, she credited her emerging Buddhist faith in the mid-1970s with giving her a sense of strength and self-worth, and she eventually left in early July 1976. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was slated to open a tour to mark the country’s bicentenary when Tina snuck out of their Dallas hotel room, carrying only a Mobil credit card and 36 cents, while Ike slept. She hurried down a nearby highway, narrowly avoiding a speeding truck, and found another hotel.
“I looked at him (Ike) and thought, ‘You just beat me for the last time, dork,'” she recalled in her memoir.
Turner was one of the first celebrities to speak candidly about domestic violence, becoming a heroine to battered women and a symbol of resilience for all. Ike Turner did not deny that he abused her, although he tried to blame Tina for their problems. When he died, in 2007, a representative for his ex-wife simply said, “Tina is aware that Ike has died.”
Fans of Ike and Tina knew little about this during the couple’s prime. The Turners were a hot act for much of the ’60s and into the ’70s, evolving from bluesy ballads like ‘A Fool in Love’ and ‘It’s Going to Work Out Fine’ to flashy covers of ‘Proud Mary ‘ and ‘Come Together’. ‘ and other rock songs that brought them crossover success.
They opened for the Rolling Stones in 1966 and 1969, and were featured in a lecherous version of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” in the 1970 Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter.” Bassett and Laurence Fishburne gave Oscar-nominated performances in “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” based on “I, Tina,” but she would say reliving her years with Ike was so painful she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie.
Ike and Tina’s reworking of “Proud Mary,” originally a tight, mid-tempo hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival, helped define their sexual aura. Against a background of funky guitar and Ike’s singing baritone, Tina started with a few spoken words about how some people wanted to hear songs that were “fun and easy.”
“But there’s one thing,” she warned, “you see, we never do anything nice and easy.
“We always do it nice – and rough.”
But by the late 1970s Turner’s career seemed to be at an end. She was 40 years old, her first solo album had flopped, and her live shows were largely confined to the cabaret circuit. Desperate for work and money, she even agreed to tour South Africa when the country was widely boycotted by the racist apartheid regime.
Rock stars helped bring her back. Rod Stewart convinced her to sing “Hot Legs” with him on “Saturday Night Live” and Jagger, who had openly borrowed some of Turner’s on-stage moves, sang “Honky Tonk Women” with her on the Stones’ 1981-82 tour . At a listening party for his 1983 album Let’s Dance, David Bowie told guests that Turner was his favorite singer.
“She was inspiring, warm, funny and generous,” Jagger tweeted Wednesday. “She helped me so much when I was young and I will never forget her.”
More popular in England than in the US at the time, she recorded a raspy version of “Let’s Stay Together” at EMI’s Abbey Road studios in London. By the end of 1983, “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit all over Europe and was about to break through in the United States. An A&R man at Capitol Records, John Carter, urged the label to sign her up and make an album. Among the material presented was a reflective pop-reggae ballad co-written by Terry Britten and Graham Lyle and initially dismissed by Tina as ‘mushy’.
“I just thought it was an old pop song, and I didn’t like it,” she later said of “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”
Turner’s album “Private Dancer” was released in May 1984, sold over eight million copies and featured several hit singles, including the title track and “Better Be Good To Me”. It won four Grammys, including Record of the Year for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” the song that came to define the bright image of her post-Ike years.
“People look at me now and think what a horny life I must have lived – ha!” she wrote in her memoirs.
Even with Ike, it was hard to take her for a romantic. Her voice was never “pretty” and love songs were never her specialty, in part because she had little experience to draw from. She was born in Nutbush, Tennessee in 1939 and is said to have received “no love” from her mother or father. After her parents divorced, she often moved around Tennessee and Missouri, living with different relatives. She was outgoing, loved to sing, and attended the blues clubs in St. Louis as a teenager, where Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was one of the biggest draws. Tina didn’t care much for his looks when she first saw him, at Club Manhattan.
“Then he got up on stage and picked up his guitar,” she wrote in her memoir. “He hit a note and I thought, ‘Jesus, listen to how this man plays.'”
Tina soon made her move. During the intermission of an Ike Turner show at the nearby Club D’Lisa, Ike was alone on stage, playing a blues tune on the keyboards. Tina recognized the song, “You Know I Love You” by BB King, grabbed a microphone and sang along. As Tina recalled, a stunned Ike shouted “Giirrlll!!” and demanded to know what else she could perform. Despite her mother’s objections, she agreed to join his group. He changed her first name to Tina, inspired by the comic book heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and changed her last name by marrying her in 1962.
In rare moments of Ike’s clemency, Tina enjoyed success on her own. She added roaring lead vocals to Phil Spector’s mammoth production of “River Deep, Mountain High,” a flop in the US when released in 1966, but a hit overseas and eventually a standard. She also appeared as the Acid Queen in the 1975 film version of the Who’s rock opera ‘Tommy’. More recent film work has included “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” and a cameo in “What’s Love Got to Do with It”.
Turner had two sons: Craig, with saxophonist Raymond Hill; and Ronald, with Ike Turner. (Craig Turner was found dead in 2018 from an apparent suicide). In a memoir published later in 2018, “Tina Turner: My Love Story,” she revealed that she had a kidney transplant from her second husband, former EMI record executive Erwin Bach.
Turner’s life seemed like an argument against marriage, but her life with Bach was a love story the younger Tina couldn’t have imagined. They met in the mid-1980s, when she flew to Germany for record promotion and he picked her up from the airport. He was more than a decade younger than her — “the prettiest face,” she said of him in the HBO documentary — and the attraction was mutual. She married Bach in 2013 and exchanged vows in a civil ceremony in Switzerland.
“It’s that happiness people talk about,” Turner told the press at the time, “when you don’t wish for anything, when you can finally take a deep breath and say, ‘All is well.'”
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This story has been corrected to reflect that Turner passed away on Wednesday.
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Associated Press Writer Hilary Fox contributed to this report.