“Let’s Stay Together,” which followed the Heaven 17 collaboration, was produced by Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. It was a cover of an Al Green song from 1971 — another deliberate choice, another song from the Black American pop tradition, another demonstration that the voice could inhabit contemporary electronic production without losing the qualities that made it distinctive. The result reached number six in the UK and opened the door that John Carter at Capitol walked through.
The Capitol signing was not inevitable. Carter had to make an internal argument for it. The label had concerns about whether a forty-three-year-old Black woman from the R&B tradition was the right commercial investment for a pop label trying to compete in the post-MTV landscape. Carter’s counter-argument was the voice and the stage show and the “Let’s Stay Together” single as evidence that the repositioning was working.
He won the argument. She got the deal. The clock started on the two weeks they had to make an album.
## The Divorce Debts and the IRS: The Specific Weight of Freedom
One element of the divorce settlement that tends to get simplified in retrospective accounts is the debt that Tina Turner took on when she left. The settlement didn’t just allocate assets between the two parties — it also allocated liabilities, and the liabilities fell heavily on her side.
The missed concert date debts were the result of performances the Revue had been booked to deliver that Tina Turner, in the chaos of her departure in July 1976, did not show up to perform. Concert promoters who had sold tickets to Ike and Tina Turner shows and then didn’t get the show had valid claims, and those claims needed to be settled. By accepting responsibility for those debts, Tina Turner took on a financial obligation that was directly tied to the act of leaving — she was, in effect, paying for the decision to stop working for Ike Turner, financially, through the debt service on commitments she had made as part of his enterprise.