Rock queen and shy grandmother

Press, 27 June 1987, Page 23

Rock queen and shy grandmother

/, Tina. By Tina Turner, with Kurt Loder. Viking, 1986. 256 pp. Illustrations. $3O.

(Reviewed by

Hans Petrovic)

My first vivid memory of Tina Turner is of her raunchy rendering of “I’ve Been Living Too Long” in the Rolling Stones film, “Gimme Shelter,” in 1970. The things she did to that microphone would be considered obscene even today. Besides that, her knock-out legs and frantic way of, “shakin’ her ass,” are part of an image that it would be difficult ever to erase.

In her autobiography, “I, Tina,” however, she goes to great pains to make a i big distinction between her boisterous stage image and the shy off-stage grandmother who is now a devout Buddhist, and whose hard fight for independence has made her a hero for many women round the world. She was born Anna Mae Bullock, daughter of a sharecropper, in 1939, in Nut Bush, Tennessee, only 72km from Memphis, which was to be come the Southern centre for the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, i

With some American Indian blood on both sides of her family, it could be estimated ‘ that she is about threeeighths Indian herself — thus accounting for her high cheekbones and angled eyes. The fact that she had reddish hair during her early years was never: fully accounted for; but with the fright wigs, she wears now, it certainly does not inatter. Hers is the usual story of poverty in

the South: the family was well fed, but various domestic disruptions caused Tina and her sister, Alline, to be moved round the countryside, from home to Home.

Details of her young life in the country and her school years are told wtth unconscious humour, an honest innocence that stays true throughout the book. Speaking of her first highschool boyfriend, Harry Taylor, she tells us: “Harry was the beginning of my Scorpio phase, which lasted the

whole first half of my life. Scorpio guys, as I later came to learn, are a pain in the ass.” Following this pattern, the biggest influence on her life was to be Ike Turner, whose band, the Rhythm Kings, she joined at the age of 16. Within a short period her first name was changed to Tina (to rhyme with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle), and the band became known as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. - Ike was a talented musician whose early work influenced Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix, but he was also a mean man. Much of this book is devoted to the indignities Tina suffered under Ike’s insecure ego and violent temper, making intriguing but discomforting reading. It was only after 16 years of living hell with Ike that Tina finally managed to summon up enough courage to walk out on him. After several years of obscurity, at the age of 37, she began again at the bottom of the show-business ladder.

These years of struggle culminated in the release of her best-selling album, “Private Dancer,” in 1983. She swept the Grammy Awards, starred in “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” and in 1985, triumphantly toured 19 countries, firmly establishing herself as the Queen of Rock. . All this is told by Kurt Loder, with lengthy first-person reminiscences by Tina, and many of the people who helped and hindered her way, including Ike himself.