Tina Turner – Tina Turns The Country On!/Acid Queen/Rough/Love ExplosionTina Turner

Like Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West before her, and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter after her, Tina Turner’s 1974 foray into country, Tina Turns The Country On! [8/10], is a refreshing illustration of the breadth of her talents. Already successful with her then-husband in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Tina’s solo career began not with the rock-infused R&B that made them famous, but country crossover instead. On its 50th anniversary, the album is ripe for reconsideration, thanks to a reissue with a brand new half-speed master vinyl and first ever CD release. In addition, her next three solo albums – 1975’s Acid Queen [7/10], 1978’s Rough [6/10] and 1979’s Love Explosion [5/10] — are also being reissued on vinyl and CD, all for the first time in 20 years.

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Tina Turner wrote some of her own songs, including the effervescent tribute to her hometown, “Nutbush City Limits”, but it’s her electrifying reimaginings of songs in the classic rock canon that solidified her status as the queen of rock’n’roll. On her solo debut, she draws her attention to country and folk instead, a decision likely shaped by her childhood in West Tennessee. Tina Turns The Country On! exclusively features covers, with the exception of “Bayou Song”, a Southern rock banger written specifically for her to sing on this album. All swagger and slow burn, it’s clear that Tina could have dominated an entire album of such originals. Elsewhere, her fiery grit and uniquely sexy rasp elevates what might otherwise be fairly standard takes on the best-known versions of these songs.

The songwriters range from Kris Kristofferson to Hank Snow and Dolly Parton, but it’s her takes on two Bob Dylan tunes that are the album’s standouts, the raw power of her voice a natural pairing with the gentleness of Dylan’s folk. She invigorates “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” with a sweet sensuality, but “He Belongs To Me” is even more expressive, and indicative of her future as a symbol for empowerment. Her tumultuous relationship with the abusive Ike Turner is well documented, and she wouldn’t leave him for another two years at the time of recording. But when she sings, “He’s got everything he needs, he’s an artist and he don’t look back” with such strength, it’s like she’s foretelling her own future, flipping the gendered pronoun on its head with her refusal to give up the Turner name, a legal battle she won even if she lost almost everything else in their divorce.

Broadly speaking, this quartet of albums is a revealing bridge between the R&B hits of the Turner Revue and Tina’s immensely successful solo career that began to take off in the ’80s. 1975’s Acid Queen is the best-remembered album among the four, inspired by her role as the trippy Acid Queen in Ken Russell‘s Tommy. Her performance as an LSD-dealing prostitute is at once irresistible and terrifying, her commanding presence perfect for Pete Townshend’s operatic, psychedelic visions. The album’s strongest moments are in her fearsome classic rock interpretations, including a magnetic take on The Who’s “I Can See For Miles” and a truly transformative version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, the original’s ultra-masculine eroticism transmuted into Tina’s own red-hot sensuality, a sonic strut of self-assured sultriness.

Ike was still in her life during Acid Queen, so 1978’s Rough marks her first proper solo album without him. Opening track “Fruits Of The Night” was co-written by Giorgio Moroder‘s longtime collaborator Pete Bellotte and sets the album’s adventurous if not always successful tone. Spikes of synth-pop and even jazz fusion are scattered among disco, blues and rock, exalted by the punch of her trademark soulfully steamy delivery. The following year’s Love Explosion delves further into disco, an admirable effort from Tina to explore the genre, but perhaps not the best use of her talents. Taken together, these two feel more like experiments, Tina figuring out her footing as a newly independent artist. The album did not chart and cost Turner her contract with United Artists, but it would only be a few more years before the release of Private Dancer, the album that propelled her career into the stratosphere. While her spirit lives on in her remarkable legacy, these four albums deserve to be hauled out of obscurity, especially Tina Turns The Country On!, and rediscovered by a new generation: they’re milestones in her journey towards independence and eventual immortalisation as a rock’n’roll icon.