Down the Tina Turner Rabbit Hole
I’ve started something of a trend and could not be happier. In fact, it was a little bit my idea, except they were both already thinking about it. I just gave a wee nudge.
I started “On This Day in History, Shit Went Down” on April 18 of last year. I’m good friends with the women who run both SciBabe and Vagina Devil Magic, although I’ve known SciBabe a lot longer. We’ve been sharing each other’s work for many years now. The woman who runs VDM I noticed shared my “That’s a lot of words for ‘I can’t find the clitoris’” viral tweet in December 2019 and I messaged her page, and we’ve been sharing each other’s stuff ever since, and also have become friends.
Anyway, after my Patreon launched and proved successful (thank you!), I started talking to both of them about doing something similar. I spent an hour on the phone with SciBabe and messaged a lot with VDM. On January 1, SciBabe launched her “Moment of Science” daily column, which is awesome, and just in the last week VDM launched her “Brief Biographies of Badass Bitches”, which is also proving awesome. This isn’t to pat myself on the back (very much), because both have sent me so much traffic and new readers it’s more about just being a good friend, because we help each other with stuff. They’d have done the same for me, and I’m happy that this little theme of writing a unique daily column that plays to your strengths is catching on among my friends, and that people are enjoying it. We all needed a break from the doomscrolling.
Anyway, Tina Turner.
This morning VDM did a brief bio on Tina, and it was amazing. So of course, I shared it on my page because I love Tina.
I got my driver’s license the day after I turned 16, in June of 1984. I had to wait a day because I turned 16 on a fucking Sunday and that was the one day the Motor Vehicles Branch was closed. So, my mom drove me to the appointment first thing Monday morning, I passed, then I drove my mom to work, then I went to school.
I had a 1981 Honda Accord back when Honda Accords were pretty shitty. It didn’t have a tape deck but at least it had FM radio. In 1984 in Calgary there were only two good FM radio stations (as far as I was concerned) and NO good AM ones. They were CJAY 92, and KIK FM 107. CJAY still has the same moniker and still plays rock but kind of sucks now. 107 has gone through a few names but has always been rock. They’ve been a classic rock station for quite a while now and I still listen to them regularly, because I’m a fucking dinosaur.
The month before I got my driver’s license Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” album released. This was her big comeback at the age of 44 that made her a superstar, which you need to read about in the VDM story. I was 16 so forgive me for not knowing who she was before then. But having only two stations that I listened to, and that both stations had this new album on their rotation, I heard the songs from Private Dancer a lot. A LOT.
And every time I did, I cranked it up.
And I watched her videos too, and I saw the way she danced and owned both the stage and the camera and was like holy shit that is some woman, some performer. Alas, I never got to see her in concert.
The 80s gets a bad rap for things like clothes and music, but there was actually a lot of awesome stuff in that decade. My favorite song is “The Spirit of Radio” by Rush and it launched the decade at the beginning of 1980, so that’s cool.
But I want to tell you about the most 80s video I ever saw, and why it’s awesome. And also, the part about how I’ve been mishearing lyrics for 35 years. Back when TV music stations played actual music videos and focus on glorifying unplanned teen pregnancies, I would sometimes watch those videos. I remember this one video for a Tina Turner song that I thought was called “Candy Love.”
After sharing VDM’s bio of her I typed “tina turner candy love” into google and I found a song called “What You Get Is What You See”. Here is how google is brilliant. The words “candy love” don’t appear anywhere in the song. But obviously I hadn’t been the only person who misheard them, because that song was #1 on the search. The line I’d been mishearing is “I don’t want your kind of love.” The way she sings “kind of” kind of sounded like “candy.”
See what I did there?
Anyway, I found the song but not the video. Not the right video. What I found was the official video, but that wasn’t the one I remembered that I’d seen many times back in 1987. I searched and searched to no avail and finally it occurred to me to search a live performance.
It turned out that the video that stuck in my brain—the one with close to a dozen guitar players, many of them atop an angled structure reaching a peak over the stage, was actually Tina’s performance at Camden Palace (now called KOKO) in London.
Are you ready for this? This is the most awesome 80s kind of shit you have ever seen. Especially the guitar solo starting at 2:50. Except it’s not really a solo when it’s that many guitars in unison. Concerts like this are why I wish I had a time machine. Oh, to have dressed up like Don Johnson in Miami Vice and been there. Go watch it.