Tina Turner: Thunder And Lightning

A ferocious thunderstorm swept over Great Woods last Friday night just as Tina Turner took the stage. There was lightning, and there was noise, and in Turner's overpowering music there was all of the joy and assertion and downright female might that she has stood for during almost 40 years. It was a night of soul music, the real thing. And marvelous to see, because whereas all of her contemporaries have left the scene, the 58-year-old Turner has lost little.

Turner sang the 31-year-old "River Deep, Mountain High" to the accompaniment of a video of her singing it way back when, and her live performance was so exact it traced the old video exactly. She sang lusty stompers like "Better Be Good to Me," "Whatever You Want," and "Missing You." She sang the torrid slow tunes "Private Dancer," "Wildest Dreams," and "We Don't Need Another Hero." She danced alongside three svelte young back-up singers (we can't call them "Ikettes," but that's what they were). And if she felt exhausted, she sure didn't show it.

Because of Turner's connection with the Rolling Stones and David Bowie and the buzzsaw guitar blasts that accompany her vocals in so much of her repertoire, she is said to sing rock, and on stage that's how she described her show. But Turner was raised a country-church child, and her music is righteous. The tuneful noise was massive, and there were material light shows and tangible sound effects galore. Yet that fierce soprano shriek leaping from Turner's throat was all joy and spirit, the real gospel-derived thing. It's a musical vision formulated almost half a century ago, completely different from the flirtatious subtleties of present-day pop. At Great Woods it triumphed: small knots of fans danced, then whole aisles, then the entire crowd.

She delivered a set of 20 songs, which didn't shy away from covers -- Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," John Waite's "Missing You," and the definitive "Proud Mary" among them. She dominated them all. As with James Brown, whose music has always been about doing the James Brown, her most effective songs were about doing the Tina Tuner; they were self-portraits, demonstrations of who she is and will always struggle to be. Which meant, unexpectedly, that be-strong songs like "Better Be Good to Me," "Missing You," the plaintive "Private Dancer," and, above all, the definitive "Proud Mary" made more of an impact than the quizzical "What's Love Got To Do with It," her biggest US hit.

Twenty songs danced to death would exhaust just about anyone; and though Turner's voice never quavered, the up-close video of her projected on the stage screen had a ghostly look. There was tiredness in her eyes and a sallowness in her cheeks that neither the too-thick lipstick nor the spangled minidress could cover up. The music, too, needs its dressy, Europop orchestration and movie-ish special effects to say the same message for which Ike Turner's bare rhythm band and a single microphone once sufficed. Her strength at Great Woods could be said to be something of an illusion. But if the surface of Turner has sprung some leaks, the spirit inside her goes on and on.

-- Michael Freedberg