I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, with Ike Turner
For just a minute, let’s hold at bay the boys’ club surrounding her: the Maysles brothers’ footage of the casually cavorting Rolling Stones man-children backstage, leering and watching the spectacle on a monitor; the menacing spectre of Ike in the shadows, making his presence felt with a quease-inducing call-and-response. Pay attention to that voice – floating out into the atmosphere and, though surely under duress, still a thing of astonishing, visceral gravity. This is a record of agony that deserves to be recognised as Tina Turner’s wrought testimonial to the world, her excruciating meditation on intimate subjugation and the will to be free.
Whole Lotta Love
So many of those early-career tracks – from her work with Ike to her emergence as the Who’s Acid Queen in Tommy, and beyond – were face-off extravaganzas, showdowns with patriarchy either in the home or in the rock’n’roll arena. Turner kicks down the door of Led Zeppelin’s anthemic ode to the phallus and rearranges the playing field, transforming Plant and Page’s masculinist romp into a slinky bedroom power dance. “I’m gonna send you, yeah, back for some schoolin‘ … ,” she sings. This is our woman’s terrain, an electrified, sexual tête-à-tête.
