Forget the fright wig and fishnet stockings. Tina Turner is one of us.

“When Private Dancer hit #1, I was at Tower Records signing autographs,” says Tina, whose new Break Every Rule is likely to repeat the quadruple-platinum success of 1984’s Private Dancer. “I wasn’t hidden away in some hotel, I was right there with the people. I think that’s why the fans have stuck with me over the years. I’m not above them. I’m real, I’m approachable. They don’t feel uncomfortable coming up and talking.”

Except, that is, when it comes to the subject of her Buddhist chanting.

.“People stammer a bit when they bring it up,” she admits. “And I don’t blame them. When you’re first exposed to it, it seems so odd, all those people kneeling and chanting strange words. Pardon the expression, but it sounds like crap.”

Tina thought the same thing when she first encountered Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism early in 1974. But in those days, life was so rotten that anything seemed worth a try. Marriage to Ike Turner had become a horrific cycle of beatings, rape and infidelities. That Ike and Tina’s string of hits—“River Deep, Mountain High,” “Proud Mary,” “A Fool In Love,” “Nutbush City Limits”— had come to an end only added to Ike’s blind rage.

A secretary of Ike’s told her about the Buddhist sect that views that chanting of the Japanese phrase “nam-myo-horenge-kyo” as fundamental to tapping into the powers of the universe.

Interested, but skeptical, Tina decided to test chanting’s effectiveness. Because of allergies, she was dependent on a particular brand of makeup that had suddenly become hard to find. Several times a day, Tina concentrated her chanting on the makeup. Sure enough, a friend soon called with the news that Bloomingdale’s was now carrying Tina’s brand.

“And it was on sale! Now I know that sounds silly, but I knew it was the chant—that it was helping me rearrange my place in the universe,” she, says. “Makeup—I know, a small thing. But it was a start.”

Ike didn’t like this new force in his wife’s world and tried to forbid it. But Tina pressed on, often sneaking off to chant at the same time Ike was sneaking off to his mistresses.

The more she chanted, the more she began to realize the futility of staying with Ike. “Finally I realized that the only way I was going to help this family was by helping myself first,” she says. “I had to get out.” She walked out in 1976 with only a Mobil credit card and 36 cents—“a dime, a quarter and penny, that’s it!”—to her name.

Slowly at first, Tina began building a career of her own, chanting all the while. She spent almost seven years literally scraping by with Las Vegas shows and guest spots on TV variety shows. Except in England, at least, there wasn’t much interest in Tina Turner.

The road back to fame began in late 1983, when Tina recorded a revelatory cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” In England, where she had never fallen out of favor, the record was an almost instant smash. Astoundingly though, Capitol Records, her Stateside label, passed on releasing it in this country. One executive described the record as “a lot of wailing.”

The record wouldn’t be stopped. Sales of import copies took off to the point where “Let’s Stay Together” began to make a dent in the American charts. Realizing it was losing money to Tina’s British label, Capitol rushed a domestic version to stores and became suddenly eager to cut an entire album.

Between gigs of a previously booked European tour, Tina and her manager, Roger Davies, began frantically looking for songs. From songwriter Terry Britten they got a taped demo of a song called “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”

After one listen, she dismissed the song. Davies played it again, but Tina wouldn’t budge. “It’s wimpy,” she said. “Not my kind of song.”

“I knew it was a hit record, but I didn’t think it was my kind of song,” she says now. “After all the years of having Ike feeding me songs that I didn’t like, I was very intent on choosing what I thought fit me. And I just didn’t think that song was what I was looking for. At that point in time, I had in mind songs like ‘Honky Tonk Woman,’ ‘Hot Legs,’ ‘Hollywood Nights.’ And here was a completely different style.”

Especially in its demo version, “What’s Love Got To Do With It” was an ultra-slick pop number, far different than anything Tina had ever done. But manager Davies, along with Britten, pressured Tina and eventually prevailed.

/ “But now it was up to me to make it into my song. So I started thinking about /what attitude I should take in presenting it,” she says.

“And I realized this was the attitude a lot of people were taking: ‘Fellas, us girls don’t have to be in love anymore. What’s love got to do with it? Just go with it.’ And I said great, that’s a great performance attitude, that’s the way to make it mine.”

With the new album, there weren’t those kinds of problems. The same writers from Private Dancer—including Britten, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, and Rupert Hine—were reassembled, this time contributing songs especially written for Tina. Stars like David Bowie, Steve Winwood and Bryan Adams all offered their help. There was no maddening rush to get the record into the racks, and Tina had become accustomed to the new style she had forged on Private Dancer.

“That’s why I was so secure about the new album,” she says. “We had plenty of time, we knew what we wanted. As soon as the Private Dancer album became a hit, the writers began thinking about new material. So there just wasn’t anything to fret over.

“To me, the real questions should have been with Private Dancer. People could have said ‘Ike didn’t produce it and she went over there across the water to make the record with all those strangers, what are we getting?’ But no one worried about any of that, people accepted the album immediately. So they shouldn’t worry now: It’s the same thing, the same team. You knew it would be good.”

Even Tina, though, wasn’t ready for the songs that were presented to her. “I gotta tell ya, those guys knew me. They’d seen my public life and whatnot, but the songs they came up with were almost like I had been there writing with them,” she says.

‘‘Those lines weren’t just about things I had done, they were about my innermost feelings. I absolutely couldn’t believe it. It was almost spiritual the way they were inside my head.”

There was also enough time for a little horseplay, some of which even made it onto the album. At the end of ‘‘Overnight Sensation,” for example, Tina can be heard laughing as the song fades out.

‘‘Mark Knopfler and I where having so much fun in the studio,” she says. ‘‘He likes to imitate people and so do I, so we’d be doing all these imitations at each other through the glass.

‘‘Well, as we were recording, I was doing Prince Charles—because we’d both just done the Prince’s Trust concert—and he just broke up and then I did too. But I didn’t have any idea he was getting it all on tape. I thought we were through.”

Knopfler, though, left the giggles in. ‘‘I like it,” Tina says. ‘‘It’s nice to have a human in there. It makes the album sound lighter and happier.”

Continued success, though, has only strengthened her faith.

‘‘Chanting is merely a way of focusing upon that spark, the God that’s in all of us. You’ve just gotta find it,” Tina says ‘‘By you saying those words, you are taking charge of your own affairs. You can be influenced by listening, like when you go to church, of course, but it’s nothing compared to when you do it yourself. That’s what the practice offers, and that’s why I’ve grown strong from it.

“Sound and rhythm are very important in our lives and that’s what our practice is based on, sound and rhythm. The sound you put out there connects with that mystical law. We all know there is some sort of higher power, that’s why we have all these different religions. The question, though, is how to connect with it.”

But as strong as she feels, Tina says she has farther to travel. If her years with Ike and her solo career represent the first and second phases of her adult life, Tina says she is now preparing for the third chapter.

“Singing and dancing aren’t the only things I was put here to do,” she says. “For now, my career is still in bloom and I’m still learning. But there will come a time when I’m ready to teach the things I’ve learned. That’s when you’ll see me really ripen.” a