In 2013, Tina Turner gave an interview about her early career. The journalist asked about the musicians who had influenced her most. Tina mentioned several names. Then she paused. She said there was one conversation she had never talked about publicly. A conversation that lasted 20 minutes in a backstage corridor in 1969 with Janis Joplin.

She said, “I asked her one question. And what she said back, I never forgot it. Not once in 40 years.” It was August 14th, 1969, the Atlantic City Pop Festival, two days of music at the Atlantic City Race Course in New Jersey, a festival that has been largely overshadowed in the cultural memory by Woodstock, which happened 5 days later on the other side of the state, but which was, by the accounts of everyone who was there, an extraordinary gathering in its own right.

75,000 people, a lineup that included Janis Joplin, Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and a dozen others who were in the process of becoming the sounds that would define the decade. Tina Turner was 29 years old. She was performing with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, the band she had been building alongside her husband for a decade, the vehicle through which her voice and her presence and her specific quality of performance had been reaching audiences across America and beyond.

By any external measure, she was one of the most powerful performers in American music in 1969. The revue was known. The shows were extraordinary. The voice was the voice, the one that would eventually be recognized as one of the great ones, though the full recognition was still years away, still on the other side of things that had not yet happened.

By any external measure, but external measures were not the whole story in 1969 for Tina Turner. The external measure was the performance. The external measure was the voice and the stage and the audience. The internal story was different. And the internal story was the one she was carrying into that backstage corridor in Atlantic City on the evening of August 14th, 1969.

She had watched Janis Joplin from the side of the stage. She had seen her perform before in the way that musicians see each other perform when they are moving through the same world at the same time, crossing paths at festivals and in dressing rooms and at the parties that accumulated around the music of that era.

But she had not seen her like this. Not from the side of the stage. Not with this specific quality of attention that comes from watching someone you have been wanting to understand and finally being close enough to see past the performance and into the thing underneath it. She watched Janis sing “Ball and Chain.

” She watched the way the song moved through Janis’s body before it moved through the air. She watched the specific quality of what Janis did with the stage, the way she occupied it, not as a performer occupying a designated space, but as a person who had decided that the stage was the truest version of the room and that everything happening on it was therefore the truest version of herself.

No management of distance. No protection. No layer between what she felt and what the audience received. Everything given completely without reservation, without the self-protective mechanisms that most performers develop because the alternative is too expensive. Tina watched this from the side of the stage and felt something she would not have been able to name precisely at the time, but that she would spend the next 44 years moving toward the right words for.

She felt recognized. Not personally. The recognition was not, “I see you, Tina Turner, specifically.” The recognition was, “I see what it costs. I see what it costs to be a woman on a stage who gives everything. I see the specific price of that particular decision. And I am making the same payment every night without acknowledging it, without anyone asking me about it, without anyone in the room knowing that what they are receiving as entertainment is costing me something that entertainment is not supposed to cost.”

>> [sighs] >> She watched Janis finish the set. She stood at the side of the stage for a moment after. Then she went backstage. The backstage area at the Atlantic City Race Course was not designed for the number of musicians who were using it that weekend. It was a series of corridors and makeshift dressing areas and rooms that had been repurposed for the festival and that would be repurposed back the following Monday.

Functional, unglamorous, the specific utilitarian architecture of a space that has been asked to be something it was not built to be. Tina was in one of the corridors when Janis came off stage. She was not there deliberately, or not entirely deliberately. She had been moving toward the area where the revue was preparing for their set, and Janis’s exit from the stage had brought them into the same corridor at the same moment.

Janis was still coming down from whatever the stage had taken out of her. She had the specific quality of someone who has just given everything and is in the process of reconstituting from whatever remains. Not depleted, exactly. Emptied in the specific way that comes after complete expenditure, the way a vessel feels after it has given out everything it contained and is waiting to be filled again.

She saw Tina. She said, “You watched from the side.” Tina said, “Yes.” Janis said, “What did you think?” Tina said, “I think you don’t keep anything.” Janis looked at her. She said, “No.” She said, “I never learned how.” She said it without complaint, without the performance of confession that the statement might have required in a different context with a different person, just as a fact, the same way she said most things that were true, directly, without requiring the listener to make her comfortable about the truth

she was stating. Tina said, “Can I ask you something?” Janis said, “Yes.” They moved to the side of the corridor to let a crew member pass. Tina said, “How do you do it?” Janis said, “Do what?” Tina said, “Give that much every night.” She said, “I watch you and I see what it costs and I know what it costs me and I don’t understand how you keep paying it.

” She said, “I don’t understand how you walk off stage and then walk back on the next night and give it again.” She said, “I don’t understand what you are paying it with.” Janis was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “What’s the alternative?” Tina said, “Management.” She said, “You give some. You hold some back. You protect yourself.

You manage the distance between what you feel and what you give to the room.” She said, “Most people manage the distance.” Janis said, “Yes.” She said, “I know.” She said, >> [gasps] >> “I tried.” She said, “It didn’t work.” She said, “When I manage the distance, I can hear it.” She said, “I can hear the space between what I’m giving and what I have and the space sounds wrong and I can’t unhear it.

” She said, “So I stopped managing.” She said, “I decided if I was going to be wrong anyway, and Port Arthur made sure I knew I was going to be wrong anyway, I might as well be completely wrong.” She said, “All the way.” She said, “Go all the way in and give everything and be completely wrong rather than be carefully, partially, manageably wrong.

” Tina looked at her. She said, “Does it help?” Janis said, “Does what help?” Tina said, “Being all the way in. Does it help with the other things? The things that are not the stage.” Janis understood what she was asking. She did not ask Tina to specify what the other things were. She understood from the quality of the question and from what she had seen of the world they were both moving through what the other things were.

 She said, “No.” She said, “It doesn’t help with the other things.” She said, “The other things are the other things.” She said, “The stage is the stage.” She said, “I used to think if I gave enough on the stage, it would fill the other things.” She paused. She said, “It doesn’t.” She said, “The stage is its own thing, complete.

And the other things are their own thing, separate. And giving everything on the stage does not fix anything that is happening off it.” She said, “I wish it did.” She said it quietly, without drama, without the performance of honesty that could have accompanied a statement like that from a woman in her situation in a backstage corridor being listened to by another woman in a different situation that was not entirely different.

Just quietly, as a true thing stated simply to someone who had asked a real question and deserved a real answer. Tina said, “Thank you.” Janis said, “For what?” Tina said, “For not pretending.” Janis said, >> [sighs] >> “I never learned how to do that, either.” And then a crew member appeared and told Janis there was someone who needed to speak to her and the 20 minutes ended the way 20 minutes always end, in the middle of something that had not quite finished and would not get the chance to. Tina watched her go.

She stood in the corridor for a moment after. Then she went to prepare for her set. She performed that night with the specific quality she always brought to a performance, the voice, the movement, the extraordinary stage presence that made everything else in the room rearrange itself around her. She gave what she always gave.

And she thought about what Janis had said. “The stage is its own thing, complete. And the other things are their own thing, separate. And giving everything on the stage does not fix anything that is happening off it.” She thought about it on the drive back to the hotel. She thought about it in the months that followed.

She thought about it in 1970 when Janis died and she understood that the woman who had said those words in a backstage corridor in Atlantic City was gone and that the 20 minutes were now permanently 20 minutes, unable to become 25, unable to become a friendship, unable to become the ongoing conversation that the 20 minutes had felt like the beginning of.

She thought about it in the years that followed as her own situation developed and changed in ways that would eventually produce the life she was able to build on the other side of the things that were not the stage. She thought about it in 1984 when What’s Love Got to Do With It reached number one and she stood on stages she had not imagined in 1969 and gave everything to audiences that were larger than anything that August night in Atlantic City.

She thought about it and she kept it. For 44 years, she kept the 20 minutes in the backstage corridor as something that belonged to her and to Janis and to the specific truth that had been spoken there and that she had not been ready to share with the world until the world had given her enough distance from the things that were not the stage to be able to say it clearly.

In 2013, a journalist asked the right question at the right moment. Tina said, “There was one conversation.” She said, “20 minutes, backstage, Atlantic City, 1969.” She said, “I asked her how she kept paying the cost.” She said, “She told me the stage is its own thing, complete. And the other things are their own thing, separate.

” She said, “She told me giving everything on stage does not fix anything happening off it.” She said, “She told me she wished it did.” The journalist asked, “What did that mean to you?” Tina was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “It meant I had been waiting for the stage to fix the other things.” She said, “And I stopped waiting when she told me it wouldn’t.

” She said, “That is what she gave me in 20 minutes in a backstage corridor.” She said, “She stopped me She said, “And when I stopped waiting for it, I could start building something else.” She said, “That’s what I never forgot, not once in 44 years.” Janis Joplin died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. She had been in the same corridor as Tina Turner for 20 minutes 14 months earlier.

 She had said, “The stage is its own thing, complete.” She had said, “Giving everything on the stage does not fix anything happening off it.” She had said, “I wish it did.” She had said it quietly as a true thing to someone who asked a real question. And then a crew member had appeared and the 20 minutes had ended. And Tina Turner had carried those 20 minutes for 44 years through everything that happened, through all of it.

 And when she finally set them down in an interview in 2013, 44 years later, she said, “I asked her one question and what she said back I never forgot, not once in 40 years. She was right. Janis Joplin was usually right about the things that cost something to say. The stage is its own thing and the other things are their own thing. And somewhere between those two truths is the life you have to build from whatever is available.

” Tina Turner built one, a remarkable one, in part because a woman in a backstage corridor in Atlantic City in August of 1969 stopped her waiting for something that was not coming and told her the truth instead, quietly, without drama, the way she always told the truth, all the way in, nothing held back, not even in a corridor, not even for 20 minutes, not even when the truth was, “I wish it helped.

It doesn’t. But I give it anyway, every night, all the way, because the alternative is the space between what you’re giving and what you have. And that space sounds wrong and she could never unhear it.”