The artist that taught Mick Jagger how to be a frontman: “A female Little Richard”
Any great rock band usually needs to have some frontman out front delivering the goods to the audience. Unless there’s someone like Pink Floyd who relies on their light show to get the job done, it’s worth it to have someone willing to give more than 110% of their energy whenever the music kicks in during a gig. And despite being one of the few frontmen who refused to slow down over the years, Mick Jagger felt that nothing compared to watching what Tina Turner did onstage.
Then again, Turner was a bit of a rare breed when the genre started. Despite being one of the single greatest performers of any generation, she seemed to come out at a time when female rock singers weren’t accepted that much in the mainstream. It was still mostly about people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and any female tended to go the way of girl groups rather than going for the throat.
Turner was never just going to sit still whenever she was playing. If the crowd wasn’t getting into it, she could grab them by the lapels and demand that they pay attention to wherever they were doing, whether that was when she was crooning on ‘River Deep Mountain High’ or turning CCR’s ‘Proud Mary’ into one of the most energetic rock songs ever made.
By the time Turner started, though, it didn’t really matter what Jagger was doing. He could certainly hold his own as a performer, but looking at how he strutted across the stage, it wasn’t anything that Turner didn’t do a thousand times better before, which became all the more evident when they teamed up together.
Looking back, Turner remembered Jagger consistently turning up backstage so he could learn some stage moves off of her, recalling in My Love Story, “When I finally saw Mick Jagger for the first time, he was standing in the wings. Later, he showed up at the dressing room and said, ‘I like how you girls dance’. He was a little bit awkward back then. We pulled him into our group and taught him to do The Pony. To this day, Mick likes to say, ‘My mother taught me how to dance’, but I know better.”
Especially when looking at how Jagger strutted across the stage, it was like night and day after he met Turner. The first known footage of Stones shows saw Jagger looking like a stiff plank of wood in front of the stage, but as soon as he had his conversion, he seemed to take every step to make sure no one could take their eyes off him for a minute.
Even Jagger had to admit that no other female artist did it better than Turner, telling Rolling Stone, “I was influenced by her. A lot of women performers are static– or certainly were in the 1960s. They did their best, but they weren’t like Tina. She was like a female version of Little Richard and would respond to the audience.”
So, if you really break down the history of what a frontman should be, it really took one of the greatest frontwomen in rock and roll to teach everyone how to truly entertain an audience. Because if Jagger hadn’t copped a few moves from her, we probably wouldn’t have seen the likes of David Lee Roth later.
