Janis Joplin Predicted Tina Turner’s Success in 1969 — Tina Lived to 83 and Proved Her Right
In March 1971, two songs were on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time. Me and Bobby McGee by Janis Joplin and Proud Mary by Ike and Tina Turner. Janis Joplin had been dead for 5 months. Proud Mary was at number four. Janis had been telling anyone who would listen since 1969 that Tina Turner was the best thing in music.
She had said it on Dick Cavett show to an audience of millions. She had jumped on Tina’s stage at Madison Square Garden. She had spent the last week of her life sitting in a small club watching Tina Turner perform every night. 3 months after she died, the world agreed with her. She never got to say, “I told you so.” This is that story. To understand what Janis Joplin saw in Tina Turner in 1969, you have to understand what Tina Turner was not yet.
Anna Mae Bullock had been performing with Ike Turner since she was 16 years old. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was one of the most powerful live acts in America. They had been building for years. Hits on the R&B charts, tours, the Chitlin’ Circuit, the specific reputation of a band you had to see live to understand. In 1969, they were the opening act on the Rolling Stones American tour.
They were playing to the biggest rock audiences in the country. And almost nobody outside of that circuit knew Tina Turner’s name. Janis Joplin knew. She had been watching Ike and Tina perform for years. She had seen what Tina did on a stage, the complete physical and vocal commitment, the total mastery of space and audience, the specific combination of power and precision that Janis had said she was still working toward in her own singing.
She had seen it in Tina Turner before anyone else was looking. And on July 18th, 1969, on the most watched late-night interview show in America, she said so. Dick Cavett asked who she went to see for a good concert. “Tina Turner,” Janis said. “Fantastic singer, fantastic dancer, fantastic show.” Cavett had no idea who she was talking about.
Janis kept going anyway. Here is what Janis Joplin did not know in 1969. She did not know what Tina Turner was carrying off stage. In 1968, the year before Janis started publicly championing Tina, Tina Turner had attempted suicide. The specific weight of the years with Ike had reached a point she could not sustain.
She survived. She came back. She performed. She started playing Proud Mary on the Stones tour, and the audiences responded the way audiences always responded to Tina Turner doing something at full power, with the recognition that something extraordinary was happening in front of them. She was performing through everything, the way she always had, the way great performers who carry great wounds always do.
Not in spite of the wound, but through it. The wound becoming the fuel for the thing that cannot be imitated because it cannot be performed. It can only be lived. Janis Joplin understood this. Not about Ike. She didn’t know about Ike, but she understood the performing through the wound. She had been doing it since Port Arthur.
Two women, two different wounds, the same stage, the same full-power presence that told the audience, “I am here. I have survived, and I am going to give you everything I have.” That is what Janis was seeing when she watched Tina. That is why she couldn’t stay in the wings. November 27th, 1969. Madison Square Garden, Thanksgiving Day.
The Rolling Stones were headlining. Ike and Tina were one of the opening acts. Janis Joplin was watching from the wings, the place where musicians watch other musicians when they want to see properly. Land of 1,000 dances started. Tina moved. The crowd moved. The music built. Janis Joplin jumped on stage.
Nobody had planned it. Nobody asked her. She simply could not stay on the other side of the curtain. For a few minutes at Madison Square Garden, the day after Tina Turner’s 30th birthday, they sang together. Two women at microphones, unplanned, unrehearsed, real. Tina’s expression when Janis appeared, pure, delighted shock dissolving into recognition.
The face of one great singer welcoming another. The photograph of that moment has been circulating for more than 50 years. Neither of them knew, standing on that stage, what the photograph would carry with it. The Cosmic Blues Band ended in December 1969. Janis went to Brazil. She came back. She formed the Full Tilt Boogie Band.
She got clean for 6 months. Pearl was almost finished. And in September and October of 1970, Ike and Tina Turner were playing a week-long residency at the Hungry I in San Francisco. Janis Joplin came every night. She sat in the audience. No entourage. No Southern Comfort raised toward the stage.
No performance version of herself. Just a woman in the audience watching Tina Turner sing Proud Mary, which by now was a central part of the set. The song that audiences had started to respond to differently. The song that everyone who heard it understood was something beyond what had come before. They talked between shows about music, about performing, about what it cost and what it gave back.
Tina said later, “Janis came and spent the last week with me before she passed. She was a real fan.” The last week, October 4th, 1970, room 105, Landmark Motor Hotel, Los Angeles. Janis Joplin was gone. 3 months later, January 1971, “Proud Mary” was released as a single on Liberty Records.
It went to number four on the Billboard Hot 100. It sold more than a million copies. It won Tina Turner her first Grammy Award, Best R&B Vocal Performance by a group, 1972. The song became one of the most recognizable recordings in American music history. The specific opening, “We never do nothing nice and easy, but we finish nice and rough,” became one of the most quoted lines in rock and roll.
In March 1971, “Proud Mary” by Ike and Tina Turner was on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time as “Me and Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin, which was at number one posthumously in the first week of March. Both songs on the chart, Tina alive, Janis gone. Janis had said in 1969, “You need to know this name.
” The world learned the name in 1971, 3 months too late for the woman who had been saying it. Here is what happened after. “Proud Mary” planted the seeds, as one music writer put it, of Tina Turner’s liberation as both an artist and a woman. In 1976, Tina left Ike Turner. She left with nothing, 36 cents and a Mobile gas card.
She started over. She worked her way back through small venues and cabaret circuits and the long road that serious artists walk when they choose integrity over security. In 1984, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Tina Turner at 44 years old, one of the best-selling singles in history, a Grammy for record of the year, the beginning of one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of popular music.
She performed until 2009. She released music until 2021. She died on May 24th, 2023. She was 83 years old. For 52 years after Janis Joplin died, Tina Turner kept rolling. The woman Janis had said was the best thing in music in 1969, the woman she had watched every night for a week in the last days of her life, became one of the most successful recording artists in history.
Janis never got to see it. She never got to say, “I told you so.” But she saw it first. That matters. Seeing something first before the world catches up, before the recognition arrives, that is its own kind of gift. You don’t get the credit. You don’t get the I told you so, but you get the knowledge.
The specific satisfaction of knowing what something is before it becomes what it is. Janis Joplin sat in a small club in San Francisco in the last week of her life and watched Tina Turner sing Proud Mary every night. She knew. Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever recognized something or someone before the world did? And what did you do with that recognition? Janis Joplin recognized Tina Turner in 1969 and told 20 million people on national television.
She jumped on her stage at Madison Square Garden. She sat in her audience for the last week of her life. She never got to watch Proud Mary go to number four. She never got to watch Tina leave Ike and stand on her own and become one of the most powerful performers in the world. She never got to be in the room when it happened.
But she was in the room before it happened. She was watching before anyone else was watching. The last thing she ever saw performed, the last concert she ever attended was Tina Turner singing Proud Mary in a small club in San Francisco. Three months later the song went to number four. She knew. She always knew. Subscribe.
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