Album: Tommy
Year: 1975
. . .
Of course, outside of maybe seeing her on the Sonny & Cher or maybe a stray TV performance of “Proud Mary,” my first real exposure to Tina Turner was in Ken Russell’s film of Tommy, which I only saw because 12-year-old Jim wanted to see Elton John. It was a scene when Tommy’s mother, played by Ann-Margaret and stepfather, played by Oliver Reed decided that maybe psychedelics would be a good way to de-deaf, de-dumb and de-blind Tommy. As people did. So they took him to The Acid Queen, as played by Turner.
The resulting scene is over nine minutes of Turner dancing around like a maniac singing “Acid Queen” while abusing Tommy and eventually sticking him in a metal contraption that had dozens of needles shooting acid into his body, sending him on a lights swirling camera spinning skeleton snakes psychedelic freak-out, which did not seem like fun. Drugs are scary!!
Of course, on Tommy The Movie The Soundtrack, “The Acid Queen” is cut down to a much more manageable 3:48, mostly by cutting out the instrumental section which scored the psychedelic freak-out, which makes sense, though in the longer version, it’s fun to hear what guests like guitar slinger Ronnie Woods, the eternally great pianist Nicky Hopkins and future Who drummer Kenney Jones add to John Entwistle’s rumbling ever-changing basslines and Pete Townshend’s flaming power chords, which rumble under a pretty funky opening verse.
If your child ain’t all he should be now
This girl will put him right
I’ll show him what he could be now
Just give me one night
And indeed, during what they did leave in from the instrumental freak-out, you can very clearly hear trademark licks from Hopkins, Townshend and Entwistle, — you hear Ronnie Wood more clearly during the verses — but that’s not the point of this version of the song. The point is Tina Turner, who sings the ever-living fuck out of it, having so much fun every single time she announces herself.
I’m the Gypsy, the Acid Queen
Pay me before I start
I’m the Gypsy and I’m guaranteed
To mend his aching heart
During each of of those choruses, she kills it — the irony in Townshend’s wry lyric “pay me before I start” steamrollered by the pure “fuck you, pay me” of her demand . . . here’s all my money scary lady — but in the second chorus, when guarantees to “tear your soul apart,” you’re pretty sure that she can rip out your soul and show it to you before you die using just her voice, and later on in the song, which she chuckles to herself in the last verse, she pretty much does it. Adios, soul, we had a good run for awhile.
If your child, heh, ain’t all he should be now
This girl will put him right
I’ll show him what he could be now
Just give me one more night
And when you A/B Tina’s vocal to the rather tenuous vocal Townshend put up on the original Tommy album, there’s absolutely no comparison: his acid queen seems almost apologetic for what she’s doing, whereas Tina is absolutely reveling at her chance to fuck your world up, closing with an absolutely demonic laugh that would have chased me out of the theatre had I’d already seen the Elton John performance of “Pinball Wizard” that was the reason I saw Tommy in the first place.
It was clear that Tina relished this opportunity: her next album was called Acid Queen, and featured a pretty decent remake of it, and you should check out the live video from 2009 where she interpolates it with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
“The Acid Queen”
“The Acid Queen” sequence from Tommy The Movie
“The Acid Queen” Live in the Netherlands, 2009
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