The Cougar and the Horse

What's Love Got to Do With It - Tina Turner (mp3)
River Deep, Mountain High - Tina Turner (mp3)

Tina Turner used to scare the shit out of me.

Tina was my universe’s First Cougar*, the woman who stood there looking all older and shoving all that intense sexual experience in your face and daring you to not be impressed with her.

In 1984 I was 12. Ike started beating Tina before I was even an itch in my daddy’s pants, and she’d dumped him before I hit Kindergarten, so I knew nothing about her previous musical existence. When she released “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and walked down those city streets with enough teased hair to snare birds and small twin-engine airplanes, I knew nothing of her past. That video was my introduction to Tina. And she scared me.

Whereas older guys saw Tina struttin’ around The Big Apple as her way of reclaiming territory, of repossessing her rightful throne as the Queen of Rock, I just saw this scary big-haired black woman to whom I damn well better say “yes ma’am” when replying to her.

Most people focus on Tina’s legs -- because they are a damn fine pair of legs, especially at a time when most women were covering theirs up with leg warmers and spandex. But I never could see her legs for her hair, teased up and blonde and electrified.

To this day I can’t see what made “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” or its video popular. Nothing in the lyrics was terribly memorable. And the instrumentation, even by ‘80s standards, is hardly worth raising an eyebrow. It’s just this one long stretch of mellow rock that only once or twice gives you a chance to even appreciate her voice. And seriously, the video is pretty awful.

This won’t get me backstage passes with Tina, but I didn’t find her the least bit attractive. To be fair, the guys from The Fixx or Men At Work were nothing to look at either, but I don’t recall members of the opposite sex drooling all over them. Tina’s video did. Everywhere she walked, men worshipped her, and I simply didn’t get it.

This is the woman who sang “Proud Mary”? This is the woman who sang “River Deep, Mountain High”?? Hell, Tina and Bryan Adams covered the same general subject matter with their 1985 song “It’s Only Love,” a much more infectious song.

In hindsight, and with the benefit of a broader musical education, I get it. That song was her return, and it almost didn't matter what song she returned with, because everyone in music was cheering for her.

Fortunately, if I was initially turned off of Tina because of crap, she won me over with crap as well. Her role in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome as Aunty Entity was just perfectly awesome. That's the kind of character that fit my idea of her: vicious and nasty on the inside, but able to cover it with some smiles and sensuality, a kind of new age Cruella De Vil. The movie dragged on too long in parts, but her scenes, and the scenes in the Thunderdome, were awesome. And she almost looked good in that metallic dress with the low cleavage.

But nothing about Tina, and I mean nothing, could have rendered me as aghast as 1989 video for “Simply the Best.” The song, I like. But the video almost kills it. If Tina is indeed the Queen of Rock, then this video is her homage to Catherine the Great. It’s her visual love song to a horse.




I still can’t figure out exactly what the director is trying to do. Are the horse and Tina kindred spirits? Is he saying the horse’s legs are as sexy as hers? Is it an homage to Seabiscuit? Enquiring minds need to know!!

* -- With the possible exception of Rue McClanahan’s character Rose from “The Golden Girls.”

The Tawny Breast

Postcards from Paradise - Flesh for Lulu (mp3)

It was not my intention to write about anything awkward or sexual for a while, but Whitesnake has a new album out.

No, seriously. Yeah, that Whitesnake. They really have a new album.

David Coverdale, the flaxen-haired lead singer who was already approaching AARP age when “Here I Go Again” became the earworm of choice in 1987, has somehow found three musicians to travel through small casinos and venues to keep the dream of rock immortality on an iron lung just a little bit longer. When his dream isn't on the iron lung, it appears Mr. Coverdale himself is.

Today the part of David Coverdale will be played by Katey Segal in lots of agey makeup!

Or... Whitesnake, featuring lead singer Angela Lansbury!

Here’s the link to the video. I couldn’t in good conscience embed it here, because it’s just not very good. Further, looking at Coverdale in motion rather than in a single still capture just makes me very, very, very sad. And a little bit nauseated.

Coverdale emerged into popular consciousness with Deep Purple, but he was a replacement in that band. Whitesnake was his baby from the get-go.

Like most musical acts in the ‘80s to elevate themselves into platinum stardom, Whitesnake would never have hit the radar without a seriously memorable video. It’s unlikely that anyone filming the video could have predicted the influence of an attractive unknown redhead dancing on the hoods of a few Jaguars. Sure, the song was catchy enough on its own, but something about that woman, and that dancing, and those cars, that combined for an incredibly popular video.

My friend Scott and I were in on a little secret. We knew why the video was so damned popular. We were two of the teenagers who watched the request show on MTV each night to see it. We both recorded it on tape. Several times. Even if we hadn’t been naturally inclined to like the song, we fell in love with it because of what it stood for in its essence: a beautiful, perfect, inadvertently-exposed breast.

Wanna know where I fell on the social ladder? Wanna know how awkward and clueless I was around women? Here’s all you need to know: Scott and I could tell you every last detail about that video. You could blindfold us, and we could still have paused the VCR on the exact moment when Tawny’s breast pops onto the windshield of that Jag. Camera slides in front of band. Coverdale humps the mic as it hangs upside down. Tawny glides belly down the front of the black Jag, and STOP! Boob Time!

(If you must witness this rare moment for yourself, a moment that in the world of Skins is almost yawningly laughable, feel free to go directly to 2:19.)



Younger readers will need to appreciate a crucial difference in teenage life circa 1987. Boobs were precious and rare. Each boob sighting was a gift from the boob gods. It was easier in 1987 for a dorky boy to sight a bald eagle than to see the bare breast of an attractive woman. There was no Internet, no land of unlimited and free porn, no such thing as Google image searches where even an innocent entry can result in a few dozen unwanted nipples.

Boobs back in 1987 were confined to convenience store magazine racks -- most of which remained behind the counter with that grouchy-looking fat lady smoking a KOOL. I was fortunate enough to have located my father’s three Playboys a year or so prior, so I’d had the immeasurable pleasure of getting intimately acquainted with Vanna White’s upper torso. Our coveted swimsuit magazines and the Victoria’s Secret catalogues we snatched from our mothers’ wastebaskets were considered high-test. The occasional sheer nightie or wet bikini, items that permitted a glance beyond mere fabric, became memorized or dog-eared pages. They were the teen testosterone equivalent of highlighted Bible verses. I was perfectly capable of recreating, in my mind’s eye, every last (sometimes, admittedly, airbrushed) detail of a model’s curves.

In certain things, knowledge and information can indeed be counterproductive. I mourn for the current teenage boy who has seen more sexual positions enacted in digital film by the time he’s 16 than my grandfather could have possibly dreamt up. My grandfather surely mourned for me, being exposed to an assault of model-perfect naked breasts and thong-backed bikinis, thus building up an unfair expectation of what an awesome and miraculous spectacle any nude female should be. It's almost impossible for anyone of my generation -- and definitely so for anyone younger than 30 -- to imagine a time when the only way to see a naked woman was to actually have a naked woman physically present in front of your very eyes.

This is the crap that goes through my head when I see the withered and frightening visage of David Coverdale circa 2011.

Tawny Kitaen was at the peak of her attractiveness in 1987. A life of sleeping with overaged rock stars would gradually deteriorate her appearance in ways that mere age cannot.

This video was the pinnacle of their relationship, the band, her looks, his talent. Yet David Coverdale will get no Crazy Heart movie made about his life. No comeback awaits him. He will merely continue to slip into the sad and too-long denouement of an existence that was, for a couple of years here and there, the stuff of envy.

And Tawny... I guess I owe her either a heartfelt thank-you or a sincere apology. Probably both.