HBO’s Tina Turner documentary retells—and re-balances—the rock legend’s story
TV Reviews Tina Turner
For most of the first 15 years of Tina Turner’s career, her name was inextricably linked with Ike Turner, her musical partner and husband. Ike was the leader of the hard-working and internationally popular Ike & Tina Turner Revue, while Tina was the star attraction. When she went solo in 1976, the fans and the press kept peppering her with the same question: “Where’s Ike?”
The toll that question exacted is made clear in Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s comprehensive documentary Tina, both in the new interviews shot for the film and in the copious old film and video clips that Lindsay and Martin’s team have unearthed. In the late 1970s, the full story of why Tina left Ike—a story that involved years and years of physical and psychological abuse—had yet to be told. So whether she was a celebrity guest on a game show or she’d been booked to sing a little and chat a little with some amiable TV host, Turner kept getting asked about Ike. Did she ever miss those days in the Revue? Did she still talk with Ike? How was he doing?
Roughly the first half of Tina is about the highs and lows of Turner’s Revue years. Then the movie shifts to what happened after she got tired of pretending her breakup with Ike had been amicable. First, she sat down with a People magazine reporter, hoping that talking about her turbulent marriage would end all the questions. It didn’t. In 1984, Turner had the biggest hit album of her career with Private Dancer, and the press’ curiosity about Ike inevitably intensified. So she collaborated with Kurt Loder on an autobiography, 1986’s I, Tina, putting in so much information about the abuse that—she assumed—everyone would finally know all they wanted to know.
The book didn’t do the trick. If anything, it resonated with so many readers that it became a central part of pretty much every subsequent article about her life and music. The 1993 docudrama What’s Love Got To Do With It? didn’t banish the Ike talk either; the addition of visuals to her narrative just made it more powerful.
What makes Tina such a welcome addition to the Turner lore is that while Lindsay and Martin don’t ignore the violence in her life—because that would be disingenuous—they also don’t let it define her. The movie has two goals: to increase appreciation for one of the most powerful vocalists and most electrifying live performers of the 20th century, and to emphasize how unjust it is that so much of Turner’s story has been dominated by her abuser.
The first half of the documentary should be a revelation to anyone who only knows Tina Turner from her ’80s hits. Though they were a popular touring attraction and frequent guests on TV talk shows and variety shows, The Ike & Tina Turner Revue didn’t have the string of hit singles and classic albums that their rock and R&B peers did in the ’60s and ’70s. They poured a lot of their creative energy into their show, where they covered songs by Motown stars, Stax stars, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Sly & The Family Stone, Otis Redding and—perhaps most famously—Credence Clearwater Revival. The performances were masterfully paced, blending slow-burning ballads with high-energy rave-ups, with a lot of audience interaction. (For a good example of the Revue at its peak, listen to the album Live In Paris—Olympia 1971.)
Lindsay and Martin’s interview subjects—including Tina Turner herself, plus some other musicians and music journalists—talk about those early years, and what amounted to over a decade spent on the road, suffering unexpected and sometimes expensive commercial setbacks. The thrilling live footage in Tina reveals what what was really left behind from that era: a lot of memories of nights when the Revue brought the house down.
While all of this was going on, Turner was often miserable backstage and at home with her husband, who made most of the decisions about their career—and who tried to control her through petty insults and outright assault. The documentary covers these events too, previously detailed so well in I, Tina and What’s Love Got To Do With It?: the fight that finally pushed her too far; the legal battle to maintain the right to use the name “Tina Turner” as a solo artist; and the long time spent working off the debts she incurred by breaking all the existing Ike & Tina Turner Revue contracts.
Most of Tina’s second half delves into the comeback years in which, with the help of some songwriters, producers, and stylists who were were huge Tina Turner fans, she made herself over into an older-but-wiser pop diva, belting out arena-filling anthems and sinewy ballads. At last, the chart hits started piling up: “What’s Love Got To Do With It?,” “Better Be Good To Me,” “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” “Typical Male,” “The Best,” and so on. Yet even as she was selling out stadiums around the world, Turner kept getting asked about Ike.
Like a lot of rock-docs, Tina fades some in the stretch, after its star becomes a superstar. Everything leading up to the release of Private Dancer, I, Tina and What’s Love Got To Do With It? gets a lot of screentime, while nearly everything after is crammed into a final 20 minutes that’s essentially an extended round of applause. After a while, all that hype gets exhausting. That said, the hagiographic repetition at the end serves a purpose, if only because it shifts the overall weight of the story, giving more time to what Turner accomplished than to the man she overcame. In the long arc of Turner’s life and career, the Ike years were ultimately just a small fraction, made to seem bigger because of all the times she felt obliged to relive them. It’s understandable but also somewhat unfair that Ike has always cast such a long shadow. But as Tina Turner herself proves, it’s never too late to strut into the light.
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Maybe this doc manages that rebalance, but I haven’t read an article about Tina Turner that mentioned Ike so often in my life. That and the assertion that “the hagiographic repetition at the end serves a purpose, if only because it shifts the overall weight of the story, giving more time to what Turner accomplished than to the man she overcame.” immediately after saying that it was crammed into the last 20 minutes makes an unconvincing argument.
Not sure what software you’re using but the name Ike comes up 15 times in the body of the article (perhaps you forgot to not count the letters’ usage in the word ‘like’ or are counting the words in the article overflow at the bottom of the page?) and 4 of those times are in naming the band (which makes it unavoidable).
There’s also the fact that much of the time she’s referred to as “Turner,” “her” or “she.”
Yep. Bad premise on the part of OP. C-.
Maybe it was talking about Tina’s well-known interest in General Eisenhower.
I’m glad that Tina made big money with her solo career, but I honestly never cared for her solo material. It’s too “adult contemporary.” I still would have liked to see her in concert.
I remember when Ike died and everyone pestered her to say something and she finally put out a statement to the effect of “ I have nothing to say about that abusive piece of shit—happy now?” I still think she should have just said nothing, it was what he deserved.
OK – a must-see.When I was young my dad and I would see her on TV and dad would just flip out. I was just coming into music and discovering my own, shall we say, drives, and seeing her live (on TV) was indescribable. I don’t mean to be, you know, but her and the show and the music, it was just – a young man’s dream.Then later when I was playing in bands and understood who Ike Turner was and the legacy, etc. I thought: what a great partnership.AND THEN, I started to hear about how incredibly abusive he was to this fabulous woman and, what I thought of as his Meal Ticket, I was flabbergasted. How could someone who had this kind of talent be such a horrible human being. And how could someone who had this kind of talent (Tina) be so manipulated by this obviously sick and detestable cretin.AND THEN, when I started to understand psychology of relationships and men and women (a little bit anyway) I was also working in a record store when Private Dancer came out, and it was astonishing. I think Tina Turner’s second act is one of the greatest stories in show business, and life in general.
She left that dick far in his much deserved dust. AND NOW, I guess she’s an old man’s dream. Straight outta Nutbush.
Ike was undoubtedly an asshole, but he was also a musical genius. It was nice Tina made the big dollars after, but no way her solo career eclipses Ike’s accomplishments.
Yeah, Ike had a hand in creating rock and roll, R&B, and Funk. He was even the talent scout that brought Howlin’ Wolf to the Sun studio. Towards the end of his life, Turner played the Chicago Blues Fest and brought the heat. Guitar heroics. Stomping piano. At the end of his set, he was standing between two Tina Turners while playing unbelievable guitar solos with frantic whammy bar action. Asshole? yes. It’s a rare concert that makes my jaw drop like that, though.
He and Phil Specter are probably congratulating each other on their musical achievements in Hell.
Rock and Roll is the devil’s music. Ask any Jesus Freak
His whammy bar is the shit.
She doesn’t need to eclipse his accomplishments, though, to be regarded and loved in her own right. That’s the point. A discussion of Tina Turner doesn’t need a discussion of Ike Turner tacked onto it to be a good discussion.
Yeah, Tina should be thanking Ike Turner for beating the crap out of her (and no doubt other women throughout his life) physically and mentally in between achieving his standout musical accomplishments. How ungrateful of Tina Turner.
No, and that wasn’t the point I was thinking about. I meant it was nice she moved on and had her own career. —didn’t need himThis is one of those “can you separate the artist from the person” things. Usually I can, you can be a true genius and still be a horrible “person”. And it seems like if you are exceptional in one area or another you get a pass of some kind to be a jerk.
I always find it interesting when men tell me where they were, what they were doing or who they saw that gave them their first tingles! Sometimes they knew precisely what the tingles were but others just knew they liked it on a deeper, different level than they’d ever liked anything before. And they usually like some variation on that theme forevermore.Funny how that works cuz The Six Million Dollar Man, Leif Garrett and Michael Jackson lost their appeal fairly quickly never to return.
I have a really special relationship with Ike Turner as a guitar player. I knew he was a monster when I got into his music. I was primarily into his work before before Tina. The man was an R&B guitar monster. It was a different thing with the Tina review and he was still a badass, but man she was the star. When I first saw a Ike and Tina show on dvd. Man, she blew him away. Kurt Loder makes the point in the documentary that Ike Turner really had a limited range. He was great at what he did but he didn’t use a broad pallette. They were kind of a cover band. Aworld class cover band, but yeah, he was a killer band leader but essentially a side-man in a cover band.
Once upon a time, Tina covered Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed.” I can only think that Ike made her do it as a slap in her face. For those who don’t know the song, it’s about an abuse woman. I’d heard about this cover back in the 90’s and finally found it when Youtube came along.
She might be happy to know that, at my age (mid-forties), I know a lot more about her and her solo career than what she did with Ike (who’s pretty much just the villain in her biopic). Her energy on stage was legendary, and lasted for quite a while.
Of course the best portrayal of Ike Turner was by Tim Meadows, opposite Kevin Nealon on Weekend Update.