She, Tina

Bob Dylan once gave a warning to John Fogerty that succinctly describes Tina Turner's awesome talent.  Fogerty had been wary of performing Creedence Clearwater Revival songs in concert when he resumed his solo career in the 1980s for reasons too random and complicated to explain, but Dylan convinced him he had to step up to the plate and claim his old songs.  If he didn't, Dylan told him, people would "remember 'Proud Mary' as Tina Turner's song." 

That was Tina Turner in a nutshell (or a Nutbush).  Turner, who died this past Wednesday at 83, could take any song and make it her own, and if it was a cover of a song originally recorded by its composer, the composer had to be prepared to defend it.  Her covers of "Proud Mary" and the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Woman" with her then-husband Ike threatened to eclipse the originals, and a generation of Americans who discovered her in the eighties with her Private Dancer LP probably know her cover of David Bowie's "1984" (released on Private Dancer in 1984) better than Bowie's original.  "The Best" (not, as many people believe, titled "Simply the Best"), released in 1989, is Turner's signature song, but how many people are aware that Bonnie Tyler - no slouch herself when it comes to interpreting a song - had released her own version of the Mike Chapman-Holly Knight composition a year earlier?  

Professional songwriters who don't perform the songs they write could always count on Tina Turner to record definitive versions of their songs, and she could also take the slightest song and give it more meaning.  For every solidly written song she was given, like "Better Be Good To Me," she was handed a lightweight tune like "What's Love Got To Do With It," but she didn't just make "What's Love Got To Do With It" her own song,  she gave it more depth and more meaning.  She could also rescue a well-known bad song.  "State of Shock," the 1984 song that Michael Jackson and his brothers did with Mick Jagger, is a piece of junk, a piece of crap that makes the case that the eighties were, by and large, a horrible decade for popular music.  At Live Aid, Mick Jagger and Tina Turner performed "State of Shock" together and it sounded fantastic. Tina could redeem anything with her amazing talent. 

Songwriters were happy to give her their songs.  When Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler, a voice of sanity in the musically insane decade that was the 1980s, wrote "Private Dancer" and knew instinctively that it was not a Dire Straits song and ought to be given to a woman to sing, he probably never even considered giving it to any woman other than Tina Turner.

I saw Tina Turner twice in concert - at the aforementioned Live Aid concert in 1985 (yes, I was at Live Aid, but it's nothing to brag about, as Woodstock it wasn't, no matter what Joan Baez said)  and again at the Meadowlands in New Jersey later that year.  Both of Turner's performances were amazing, and she commanded the stage both times - even at Live Aid, where her entire performance was duetting with Jagger.  It's why she, not Janis Joplin, is called the Queen of Rock and Roll, and it's a damn shame that no classic-rock radio playlist seems to want to acknowledge that.  RIP. 😢