Tina Turner Page 15

  The following year came her fourth solo album, Love Explosion, her next excursion into defining her own solo sound. She did a fun version of The O’Jay’s “Backstabbers” and she made her first forays into disco music with songs “Love Explosion” and “Music Keeps Me Dancin’ ” She even performed a ballad made famous by Barbra Streisand “Just a Little Lovin’ (Early in the Morning).” The album was produced by Alec R. Constandinos.

  Neither of her first two post-Ike solo albums sold a significant amount of copies. Tina was happy just the same. She had a career, and if she survived with what she currently had, she considered herself blessed. “Once you’ve experienced a type of bondage and then gotten free, you really learn what being free is all about, and it’s about just being comfortable and free. So I didn’t put any value on not having an immediate hit record or not being in the limelight. I was fine where I was. I watched myself to see what I could do with people. It was a studying time after I left Ike” (10).

  While Tina was releasing solo albums, Ike was busy releasing more Ike & Tina Turner albums. In 1979 United Artists brought out a greatest hits compilation called Soul Sellers. In 1980, Ike sold more tracks from in the vaults to Fantasy Records, yielding an album called The Edge. It included cover versions of Shirley & Company’s “Shame Shame Shame,” Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom,” and Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed”

  Ike had no idea how good he had it with Tina until she was gone. He walked around grumbling about how he made her a star. In reality, she made him a star. Sure, he was the businessman who gave her the breaks, but he would never have achieved the greatness he did without her.

  Furthermore, his resources were now dwindling, and the demand for audiences to see Ike without Tina was pretty nonexistent. Once the cash ran out, the party that didn’t look like it was ever going to end suddenly came to an end. Observed Ike, “Before Tina and I broke up, I had twenty-five people around me every day, telling me they loved me. ‘Oh Ike, I love you, I love you, I love you.’ All that bullshit. To them bastards it ain’t nothing but a word, man. They don’t mean shit. Then I found myself alone for the first time in, what, thirty years? None of the ‘I love you’ assholes were there then. None of them. When they thought I had no money, they was all gone” (17).

  While Ike was falling apart, Tina was getting herself in tip-top physical shape. To clear up many of her health problems, she sought the advice of a homeopathic doctor. According to her, “After my second visit to the hospital, my eyes became clear. The whites of my eyes were never clear. They were always just not white. And I started to feel healthy. I had a glow, a light about me. I started to get energy, to feel strong, to enjoy my work more” (5).

  In 1979, Tina Turner taped a TV special called Olivia Newton-John’s Hollywood Nights. On the show, Olivia invited several female rock and pop stars to be her guests for a big all-girls production number. Olivia asked Toni Tennille, Karen Carpenter, and Tina Turner. Other guests on the show included Olivia’s Xanadu film co-star, Gene Kelly, as well as Andy Gibb and Elton John. It aired on April 14, 1980, on ABC-TV.

  It seems like an odd TV project to change Tina Turner’s career, but that was the outcome of this one. Rava Daly, who was one of Tina’s dancers in her cabaret act, kept suggesting to Tina that she should get in touch with Olivia’s boyfriend at that time, personal manager Lee Kramer. Daly knew that Kramer was on a quest for new management clients. After Tina appeared on Olivia’s show, she felt confident enough to make the phone call.

  She came in for a meeting with Kramer at his office, and she brought Rhonda Gramm along with her. Kramer introduced her to a business associate of his, Roger Davies. Tina liked both of them, especially Davies. She was very frank in outlining the fact that she was in debt and was looking to turn her career around. At the time she owed Mike Stewart $200,000, she owed the IRS $100,000 in back taxes, plus penalties of another $100,000. She truly needed some career advice. Most of her debts to the promoters of the aborted 1976 Ike & Tina tour had been repaid at this point.

  Tina played Roger some songs that she had recently recorded. She wanted his opinion on the material. Roger was not very impressed by what he heard, and he told her that he didn’t think these songs were what radio was interested in at the moment. Instead of being incensed by his comments, she was impressed with the fact that he wasn’t some “yes” man. Tina liked the way he communicated his thoughts. He was direct but tactful.

  Kramer was enthusiastic about signing Tina as a client, but Roger wasn’t convinced yet. He wanted to see what she could do on stage first. Tina was about to start a two-week engagement at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and she suggested that they come up and see her there. Lee Kramer and Roger Davies finally made it up to San Francisco on the last night of her engagement.

  Davies especially loved what he saw that night. Although the Fairmont Hotel was a pretty staid and stiff setting to see an act like Tina’s, he was knocked out by the energy she expelled on stage. He was so impressed that they stayed for the next show as well. They were thrilled to find that she was even better during the second show. They decided to sign her immediately.

  Roger and Tina both agreed that she should aim for more of a rock & roll type of show. However, he was to find that directing her out of the cabaret circuit was not as easy as they anticipated. Davies decided to study her act some more and see what needed changing first. For the time being, she played a lot of dates in Canada, unable to get the kind of bookings they wanted for her in the United States. Recalls Davies, “There was a terrible stigma attached to her because she walked out on the tour and because everybody still thought she was with Ike” (2). Roger didn’t want too many drastic changes in her act . . . only change the band, fire the dancers, find new material to sing, and ditch the clothes.

  Tina was willing to take his advice. According to her, “I kinda sensed that I would eventually be successful and decided not to give up until it happened” (11).

  In late 1979, an interesting proposal for Tina’s services came to Kramer and Davies’ office. It was an offer to tour and perform for five weeks in South Africa. It would make her $150,000. However, Davies was unable to go with her, as he was accompanying Olivia Newton-John to London for the British debut of the film Xanadu.

  If Tina accepted the African tour, she would be accompanied by a young management trainee, Chip Lightman. She had no idea who he was, but the money was too enticing. She also took along her son Ronnie, who was presently playing the bass in her band. The tour included dates in Johannesburg, Durban, and Capetown. Although this was a controversial period in South Africa because of segregation, Tina noted that the audiences seemed mainly racially mixed.

  She returned to the United States, then she and the entourage left on their next tour in Australia and Southeast Asia. This time around, Roger was with her. After a show in Manila, he told her that she had to fire everyone immediately. She needed to be more rock & roll, and the Bob Mackie costumes had to go. She also let Rhonda Gramm go. Ms. Turner recalls, “Roger had me get rid of everybody” (2).

  In 1980, Tina debuted her new band at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. From there she headed to Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and three sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. Then it was off to the Middle East: Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. She recalls, “We more or less survived off of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, even Teheran—places like that” (2). She had gigs all over the world, but the bookings she was offered in the United States were not the types that either she or Roger wanted. The problem was how to reintroduce her to American audiences.

  Then a possible management problem arose. Olivia Newton-John had severed her relationship with Lee Kramer, and she wanted Roger Davies to quit Kramer’s management firm and take her on as a client. He agreed. Now Tina had to make a decision—remain with Kramer, or stick with Davies. She chose Davies. Now Roger Davies had two entirely dissimilar clients: Olivia Newton-John and Tina Turner.
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  In this era, the American music scene was in an odd space. Disco devoured the whole music business from 1977 to 1979. Then, suddenly, in 1980 and 1981 New Wave rock was the rage, and everyone from Carly Simon to Linda Ronstadt was going punk. Then the bottom dropped out of that, and the music business went into a huge sales slump. Everyone seemed to be looking for the next big thing. The big thing that was right around the corner was MTV, which was in the planning stages at this point.

  Tina still wasn’t in the right position to get the kind of record deal that she needed. She cut several demos, including The Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time,” Murray Head’s “Say It Ain’t So,” and a song by Australian group The Sherbs called “Crazy in the Night.” However, none of these songs seemed to spell “hit.”

  In Greenwich Village, New York City, a man named Jerry Brandt owned a rock club on East 11th Street called The Ritz. Located between Third and Fourth Avenues, the club had originally been a dance hall that had been long abandoned. It had a large, flat dance floor and a big stage where the dance bands would perform. With nice high ceilings, the upstairs had a wrap-around balcony wide enough for tables and chairs on it. In its new incarnation as a rock club, it worked perfectly. It was a hip and happening place during this era, featuring established acts, along with many new wave and punk acts.

  After months and months of playing places like Yugoslavia and Abu Dhabi, Roger Davies felt that Tina was ready for the big time, and being seen in New York City was crucial. The Ritz seemed like the perfect venue to showcase her return to the mainstream. After all, ten years had passed since Tina had last played Manhattan.

  Davies phoned Brandt, and the club owner loved the idea of having Tina Turner perform at The Ritz in the summer of 1981. Roger announced up front that he didn’t care if they paid anything for this gig—the important thing was for Tina to be seen by the right people.

  Enthusiastic, Brandt took out full-page ads in The Village Voice, and there was a buzz all over town that Tina Turner was back. Invitations also went out to several celebrities and press members. A varied list of stars showed up for this first Ritz engagement, including Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Diana Ross, Mary Tyler Moore, and Robert DeNiro. Tina felt like she was holding court. She ended up playing three nights of packed houses, and she got great reviews. Tina was back and The Ritz had her!

  This first Ritz engagement was such a smash that Brandt booked Tina for a return run at the club in October of 1981. That second visit to The Ritz proved equally successful. Among the stars who came that time included Rod Stewart—who brought along record producer Richard Perry.

  Rod was very excited to see Tina back in full form, looking and sounding great. It just so happened that Stewart was going to be the musical guest on the TV show Saturday Night Live that very Saturday night. He invited Tina to be his special guest on the show, turning his hit “Hot Legs” into a duet. She jumped at the opportunity. It turned into a high-profile return to network television for her.

  One of the songs that Tina was performing in her act at the time was her torchy rock version of The Beatles’ hit “Help!” When she got back to Los Angeles, she went into a recording studio with Richard Perry and made her first attempts at turning it into a hot hit record. But somehow, that particular track wasn’t coming out as excitingly as she was doing it on stage, so it was scrapped.

  In the fall of 1981, The Rolling Stones were on tour, and Roger Davies and Tina went to see the group perform at the L.A. Forum. When they got backstage to visit the boys after the show, Keith Richards asked Turner why she wasn’t on tour with them. She simply told them that they had never asked her. Well that was quickly remedied. The Rolling Stones were booked for three dates in November at Brendan Byrne Arena in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. They asked her to open for them for the engagement. She instantly accepted. Furthermore, Mick Jagger invited Tina to duet with the band during the concert on the song “Honky Tonk Woman.”

  That night in New Jersey Tina hit the stage in a sexy pair of black leather pants and leopard print boots. She recalls that playing on the same stage as The Stones proved to be a huge bonding experience between her and the hot new touring band she was now working with. For all of them, this was truly the big time!

  Not to be outdone by The Stones, Rod Stewart again came to Tina’s aid, this time with an invitation of his own. On December 18, 1981, he was performing at The Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, in a concert set to be broadcast via satellite around the world. He invited Tina Turner and Kim Carnes to be his guest stars on the telecast that night on the song “Stay with Me.” When the concert was released as an album the following year as Rod Stewart Absolutely Live, the Stewart, Carnes, and Turner trio version of “Stay with Me” is the grand finale on the disk.

  Playing in front of a stadium audience with The Stones and Rod Stewart really opened her eyes up to a whole new realm of concert possibilities. She could feel her dreams expanding and focusing. Tina claimed, “I wanted to be like The Rolling Stones and all the guys out there that were packing the stadiums” (12).

  Her road back to mainstream recording happened one piece at a time. She had offers to do one or two cuts on a couple of albums featuring varied artists and a couple of one-shot singles. The first one came in 1982 when she ended up with two tracks on the Warner Brothers soundtrack album for a Daryl Hannah and Peter Gallagher film called Summer Lovers. One of the songs was her freshly recorded “Crazy in the Night” and the other one was called “Johnny and Mary,” which Richard Perry produced for her. On that soundtrack album she was in very good company, as it also included new music by Elton John, Nona Hendryx, Heaven 17, Chicago, and Depeche Mode.

  Recalling his frustration over trying to find Tina a label contract, Davies says, “It wasn’t easy to get a record deal. A lot of people still thought she was with Ike” (11).

  In 1982 Tina received another offer to record. There was a production team in England who called themselves B.E.F. (British Electric Foundation). The team was actually just a duo of producers—Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh—both members of the group Heaven 17, who had also had a cut on the Summer Lovers album. There were no “musicians” per se in this “group,” it was just the two men and their synthesizers. They wanted to record an album comprised of their own tributes to some of their favorite rock stars and wanted to use singers who weren’t heard from much anymore. Among the British singers they had lined up for their album were Sandie Shaw and Gary Glitter. They wanted to record a version of The Temptations’ hit from 1970, “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today),” and Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Gonna Come” with Tina as the singer. Why not? And so, Roger and Tina flew to London.

  Martyn Ware recalls, “The first time Tina and I met in the studio, her first words were ‘Where’s the band?’ I was surrounded by what was the latest recording equipment and synthesizers, engrossed in creation of the whole rhythm section without the aid of any musicians—which at that time was a very revolutionary technique. I believe that Tina’s openness to ideas is what has enabled her to become popular with a new audience. Tina was charm and professionalism personified, as she has been in all of our following recordings together” (21).

  When the B.E.F. album Music of Quality & Distinction, Volume 1 was released in April 1982, “Ball of Confusion” made the album, but “Change Is Gonna Come” did not. It went on to be came a big hit in England—which was the only country in which it was marketed. (“Change Is Gonna Come” can be found on the 1994 Tina boxed compilation, The Collected Recordings, Sixties to Nineties.)

  To coincide with the B.E.F. album release, Roger booked Tina at the Hammersmith Odeon theater again in London to mark her comeback in progress. At the time, he was actively seeking a solo recording contract for her.

  When United Artists and Liberty Records were rolled into Capitol/EMI Records in America, Tina Turner had been one of the acts that was dropped from the label. When Roger approached the executives
at Capitol, they were unenthused about signing her again for the American market. However, intrigued by the noise that the Music of Quality & Distinction, Volume 1 was making in the United Kingdom, their international division was interested in her for the British market. What started brewing was a possible deal for the international audience. With that, Tina went into the studio with one of Capitol’s house producers, John Carter, to record a couple of songs to test the waters within the company. The songs that Tina cut during those sessions included The Animals’ “When I Was Young” and The Motels’ “Total Control.” Still, the actual deal remained unsigned—because she hadn’t had a major hit since “Proud Mary” in the early 1970s, Capitol wasn’t sure if they wanted her or not.

  Meanwhile, in December 1982, Tina was booked for another return to The Ritz in New York City. Roger Davies was startled when he received a phone call from the Capitol/EMI Records office in New York, wanting to add sixty-three people’s names to the guest list for the show that very night. What had happened was that EMI was getting ready to release a big David Bowie album, Let’s Dance, and there was a huge listening party for it. When David announced to all of the Capitol/EMI executives he was with that he was going to see his all-time favorite female singer that very night, the company heads asked who that was. Replied Bowie, “Tina Turner.”