Tina Turner

"Y' know, every now and then I think you might like to hear something from us nice and easy. But there's just one thing. You see, we never ever do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough. So we're gonna take the beginning of this song and do it easy. Then we're gonna do the finish rough. This is the way we do 'Proud Mary.'"

When she wakes up in the morning, Tina Turner might stroll to the window of her villa in Villefranche and look out over the sparkling blue ocean that washes the Cote d'Azur in Southern France. She may be having a party this evening, entertaining guests in the backyard amphitheater. Perhaps she will surprise them by singing some opera.

Or maybe it will be just another day. A day listening to new songs for a new album. A day preparing for another portion of her farewell tour. Maybe she will add to her 60 million records already sold worldwide. Maybe she will fill another stadium like in 1988, where the 152,000-strong crowd in Rio de Janeiro set a world record.

Or maybe she will just have breakfast in bed. And think about how she got there.

The exact date of Tina Turner's arrival at the Haywood Memorial Hospital in Brownsville, Tennessee isn't important. Some say it was November 26, 1938; Tina says it's 1939. Who could argue? She looks a third her age and intends to keep it that way. Her legs - the best of 1997 according to Hanes - are insured for over $1 million. Her leonine tresses have been artificial since a bleaching procedure went wrong in 1960. These concerns are a lifetime away from Anna Mae Bullock - the girl from Nutbush, Tennessee. Her father was a farm supervisor, and Anna Mae's family could hold their heads up high in the church where she first sang. But her dreams of having a stage of her own came from a steady diet of movie magazines.

In 1948, though, Anna Mae's life seemed more like a Warner Brothers social drama. Her Cherokee Indian mother Zelma left for St. Louis. Her dad moved to Detroit in search of better work, leaving Anna Mae in the care of her grandparents. Tina remembered, "I had to go out in the world and become strong, to discover my mission in life." Before Anna Mae could assert her independence, though, her mother rescued her and took her to St. Louis.

Meanwhile, over in Memphis, Anna Mae's destiny was already taking shape, since her life would soon become intertwined with that of a man already cutting records there, one Ike Turner. In 1951, Turner was playing piano and coordinating the session for a song called "Rocket 88" in the yet-to-be-famous Sun Studios. Turner was a man with a chaotic mind, and he attempted to restrain its disorder with strict discipline. The struggle made for great records. Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88" is the first sign of that meticulous, raunchy racket that became rock 'n' roll.

The 20-year-old Turner was many things: DJ, session cat, talent scout, even the leader of his own band - the Kings of Rhythm. The Kings were booked in the St. Louis Club Manhattan for several gigs in 1956, and it sure was unlike any other place they ever played. There was the pretty waitress Aimee Bullock for starters; and then there was her cuter but pesky younger sister - who leapt on stage and took the mic from Ike on the band's first night.

Ike quickly hired the young Anna Mae Bullock and gave her the nickname "Little Ann." She became his muse, even if she was sleeping with the sax player Raymond Hill. Turner worked hard to set free his Little Ann from St. Louis so she could tour, telling Mrs. Bullock he would treat Little Ann as a little sister, while he wooing her on the side with gifts like a gold tooth. He had to. As Tina recalls, "I could sing his songs the way he heard them in his head."

Getting into Ike's head wasn't easy. He was an inarticulate man who spoke with his fists or his guitar's high end, dripping blues licks that awed a young Jimi Hendrix. And Ike was always in search of new idioms to express what he heard - whether it was R&B, funk or rock 'n' roll. Ike's eye was for opportunity. So when a session singer failed to turn up in 1960, Little Ann sang on her first record, "A Fool In Love."

"A Fool In Love" ultimately became a No. 2 R&B hit; Anna Mae became Tina Turner - named after the exotic jungle girls Ike followed in the comics - and the Kings of Rhythm became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Dressed in loincloths and shredded dresses, Tina acted the part. Roadhouses weren't church, but she understood that it was what both promised that counted. And as Mick Jagger recalled, Tina's sexual roar swore "to reap the whirlwind." Ike's tight show and Tina's wild abandon kept them on the road 270 nights a year, going from juke joints to the cabarets of Las Vegas - accepted either as true torchbearers of the hottest R&B or as crazy freaks from the South. The revue had five Top 10 R&B hits over the next two years, and attracted the notice of Phil Spector.

Spector heard the voice of America in Tina Turner. If he listened carefully enough, maybe he heard the violence between the Turners that only made it on stage when Tina played with a blackened eye or split lip. Spector vowed to harness it in his greatest work - a second national anthem of piano, horns and Tina's yearning bellow at the middle of it all: "River Deep, Mountain High."

The 1966 record was a failure in America, but it brought Ike and Tina to the ears of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. George Harrison called it, "One of the only Cinemascope-sized records ever." Jagger studied Tina like a book, and invited the Revue on tour to take notes, transforming the effete white blues boy into the sinewy N'Awlins stud on the hunt for brown sugar. The Turners gave the Stones' white audience the high energy rock they craved, and built on their fascination for the hurricane who fronted the band with the 1971 No. 4 hit "Proud Mary." By then, as Tina remembers, "that woman who went out on stage - she was somebody else. I was like a shadow."

Ike's dreams of grandeur were now a tempest of coke clouding his Inglewood, California, studio, where he tinkered at a record that might be a black Sgt. Pepper -- or maybe Their Satanic Majesties Request. Phone calls came at all hours of the night, bidding Tina to the studio to perform. Money came in from stints supporting Elvis, but Tina was too numbed by abuse to care. She tried to commit suicide in 1968.

The band was in the descendent, too prone to the foolishness that put a song like "Funkier Than A Mosquita's Tweeter" on the flipside of "Proud Mary." Ike in his megalomania even loaned Tina to Frank Zappa for his 1973 album Overnite Sensation for $25. The Revue disbanded in 1974, and left Ike and Tina lost. Tina sought strength in her Buddhist faith, and branched out into acting with the role of the Acid Queen in Ken Russell's 1975 film version of Tommy.

The end came in July 1976, when Ike offered Tina a piece of chocolate on their way to the Los Angeles Airport. Tina declined and Ike hit her. Tina, for the first time, hit back. The two scrapped on the plane to Dallas, in the car to the hotel, and when Ike finally collapsed on his bed in the Hilton, Tina left him. She had 36 cents in her bag and a Mobil credit card.

Tina spent the next two years running from Ike, hopping from couch to couch at friends' houses, cleaning homes to pay her bills. Ike sent their four children (two from his earlier marriage) to burden her, then sued her for $500,000 compensation for lost shows. Tina said, "You take everything I've made in the last sixteen years. I'll take my future."

The future arrived slowly. Tina appeared on Cher's variety show and Olivia Newton-John's 1979 Hollywood Nights special - sounding more like someone with a past than rock fantasy incarnate. In the eyes of Roger Davies, the 27-year-old assistant to Newton-John's manager, that past meant something. He agreed to manage her.

After showcase gigs at Manhattan's Ritz, which got the industry buzz going, Tina would no longer find herself rock music's best-kept secret, a favored collaborator of long-time fans like Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger but forgotten by the public. Electro-poppers Heaven 17 asked her to sing on covers of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" and Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" they had cut. The latter became a No. 26 hit in 1984 - Tina's biggest since "Proud Mary."

David Bowie introduced Capitol's A&R department to his "favorite female singer" backstage at the Ritz. They gave Tina $150,000 to record an album -- and two weeks to deliver it. Private Dancer benefited from the haste. As well as top-end songs by Bowie, Mark Knopfler, and the sublime No. 1, "What's Love to Do With It," the sparse instrumentation put her voice front and center.

Each song -- from the Beatles' "Help" to "I Might Have Been Queen" -- worked as a chapter in an autobiography. Tina later set down that life story, I, Tina, with writer Kurt Loder. At last her own woman, she was never so eloquent than when she was singing on Private Dancer of bruises, heartbreaks and the perils of "dancing for money."

The rest plays like a coda: an appearance in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and a hit with its theme song, "We Don't Need Another Hero"; "We Are the World" and an electrifying appearance with Mick Jagger at Live Aid; finding a new partner in German record exec Erwin Bach, 16 years her junior; the release of the acclaimed movie version of her life story, What's Love Got to Do With It?, with Angela Bassett; staying away from the 1991 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in case Ike turned up (he was in jail at the time); performing the Bond theme, "Goldeneye" written especially for her by Bono and the Edge; strutting from the lobby to the stage of the Beacon Theatre during Divas '99 to a thunderous standing ovation; singing at the Super Bowl half-time extravaganza in January; and maybe breakfast in bed.

Nothing is never ever nice and easy.