Tina Turner: Sole Survivor

Tina herself, however, remained uncomplaining. A total pro, she knew the drill and accepted it. Taking the stage, she noted the usual ocean of half-capsized banqueteers bobbling before her in ambiguous anticipation. What would this crowd be expecting? How much might it remember? "Proud Mary"? "Nutbush City Limits"? Maybe even "River Deep — Mountain High"? Surely, these people wouldn't recall "A Fool in Love," the first record by Tina and her former husband, Ike Turner, an epochal R&B hit in this same month of August exactly twenty-four years ago. Perhaps they'd remember hearing about the glitterized solo show she'd taken to Vegas and Tahoe a few years back — the one with the boy-and-girl dancers and the big-deal disco interlude. In which case, maybe they were prepared to embrace the inevitable: for what else can one normally expect in the ballrooms of American commerce but the last pathetic flickerings of faded and irretrievable fame?

Imagine, then, the instant of lip-flibbering surprise when Tina's band — which is a real rock & roll band, not some has been backup crew — whipped out the wild, synth-riddled riff to "Let's Pretend We're Married," a song by Prince, and Tina shimmied out onstage in tight black-leather pants and a punk bouffant so bushed out you almost expected to see breadfruit come tumbling down in mounds around her stomping, stilettoheeled feet. Kick-stepping up to the microphone at center stage, she snapped the sucker off its stand, and with a smile on her face the size of a sweet new moon and a voice that could fuse polyester at fifty paces, she began to sing. To soar, actually. The effect was electrifying — this was no Vegas act. "What you've heard about me is true," Tina chanted. "I change the rules to do what I wanna do." She didn't write the words — she rarely has — but, as always, she made them her own.

And from that moment on, the whole potentially hohum gig took an entirely different tack. Because Tina in transit across a stage knows only one velocity — flat-out — and as she kicked, shimmied and soared through most of her album and into a withering rendition of ZZ Top's neoboogie hit "Legs," the burger folk first rose to their feet, then up onto their tables, and finally into the very air, leaping and hooting and flapping their napkins overhead as this fabulous woman with the wraparound legs and the flatware-rattling voice proceeded to grind out an exhilarating hour-plus of artfully adult, but undiluted, rock & roll.

And Ottawa was it: the light at the end of the comeback tunnel. Tina Turner had outlasted her past. Now she could look strictly to the future: Her next single, "Better Be Good to Me," would be released as soon as her current hit, the reggae-spiked "What's Love Got to Do with It," could be pried out of the top spot on the U.S. singles chart, and several other tracks off the LP seemed likely candidates to follow. Six sold-out shows in Los Angeles were coming up, and after that she was off to Australia to confer with director George Miller, who's been waiting for two years to feature her in the third of his celebrated Mad Max movies (she'll play a kinkily costumed creature called Entity and may do a tune over the titles). Then it would be back to New York in September for the MTV Music Video Awards and the release of her pal David Bowie's new album — on which she harmonizes a haunting reggae track called "Tonight" — and then ... well, who knows? If all of this could happen to a woman who didn't even have a U.S. record deal a year ago — who in fact not all that many years ago was feeling so slapped down by life that she almost bought out of it with a bottle of sleeping pills — well, then maybe there is a universal harmony. Whatever that buzz is, it's Tina Turner's theme song.