It was time for another cover. This time, we decided to include an actual article.
The piece speaks for itself. But, when it was included in a 1977 anthology, Reporting: The Rolling Stone Style, editor Paul Scanlon provided some context:
Music writers are often criticized for taking the easy route: being spoon-fed press releases; succumbing to contrived interviews with a press agent or manager hovering nearby, recording idiotic quotes with groupie-like awe. Ben Fong-Torres not only avoids these pitfalls, he also brings hard-nosed reportorial skill to his work ...At first Ben envisioned this story as a "loving portrait of a group that knocked me out at a tiny club in North Beach in 1966." As Ben explored, the picture became considerably sharper and more distressing. Diligent research and tough questioning made this story successful. So successful that for a long time afterward we were still feeling violent reverberations from the Turner camp.
I'll tell about those reverberations-not all of them violent-at story's end.
WALK INTO WHAT, FROM THE OUTSIDE, looks to be another well-paid, well-kept home in suburban Inglewood, California, and you're hit: a huge, imperial oil painting of Ike and Tina Turner, dressed as if for a simple, private wedding, circa 1960, modest pompadour and formal mink. A thriller? The killer, honey... Also in the foyer, under the portrait, a small white bust of John F. Kennedy. Next to him, the Bible, opened to Isaiah 42-A New Song to the Lord. The smell is eucalyptus leaves and wet rocks; the sound is water, bubbling in one of several fish tanks and, over in the family room, splashing. programmed, is a waterfall.
Two trim young housekeepers stir around the kitchen; dinner is cooking at 4 P.M. Ike is asleep upstairs, and Tina is out, a son at football practice. But you cannot just plop down somewhere, adjust yourself, and be comfortable. Next to the waterfall there's a red velvet sofa, designed around a coffee table in the shape of a bass guitar. Or, in the blue room, the couch, whose back turns into an arm that turns into a tentacle. Above that, on the ceiling, is a large mirror in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle piece, and against one wall is a Zenith color TV, encased in an imitation ivory, whale-shaped cabinet.
(Tina, later, will say: "Ike did the house. It was Ike's idea to have the TV in the whale shape. I thought, 'Oh wow!' I felt it was gonna look like the typical entertainer's house, with the stuff not looking professional. But everything turned out great. I'm very proud of it.")
It is very personal, but there are all these mail order touches. The neo-wood vertical frame with four bubbles to hold color pictures of the Turners' four sons. The JFK bust. On the wall, over a mantel, a large metallic Zodiac sunburst, with no clock in the middle. Also, a Zodiac ashtray atop the guitar-shaped table. (Ike showed his refurnishing job off to Bob Krasnow of Blue Thumb Records one day last year, and Krasnow remarked: "You mean you actually can spend $70,000 at Woolworth's?")
Atop a white upright piano complete with gooseneck mike, the gold record-not `A Fool in Love," or "It's Gonna Work Out Fine," or "I Idolize You," but, rather, "Come Together," the single on Liberty, their seventh or eighth label in ten years. And next to that, some trophies-a couple that the kids have earned, and a couple that Tina has earned. TO THE SWEETEST WIFE AND MOTHER, TINA TURNER. LOVE'S YEA. IKE TURNER AND FOUR SONS. Another, larger one, Olympiad, with a small gold-plated angel holding a torch above her, hara-kiri: TINA TURNER. THE WORLD'S GREATEST HEARTBREAKER 1966. LOVE IKE TURNER.
Tina's not back-half an hour late-and now I'm down to the sunlit bookshelf in the corner. A neat junior edition of encyclopedias. A couple of novels-Crichton's Andromeda Strain; Cheever's Bullet Park. But the main line appears to be how-to's, from Kahlil Gibran and astrology to a series of sharkskin suit-pocket hardbounds: How to Make a Killing in Real Estate, How to Legally Avoid Paying Taxes, and How to Scheme Your Way to Fortune. Atop the pile, a one-volume senior encyclopedia: The Sex Book.
SOMEONE ONCE CALLED TINA "The female Mick Jagger." In fact, to be more accurate, one should call Mick "The male Tina Turner." After all, in 19 60, Ike & Tina and the first of God knows how many Ikettes began doing their revue, and, as she tells it, "Ike used to move onstage. He was bow-legged and bow-hipped and when he moved from side to side, he had an effect he used to do with the guitar, and I used to do that, 'cause I idolized him so. Before I fell in love with him I'd loved him. We were very close friends. I thought there was nobody like Ike, so I wanted to be like Ike. I wore tight dresses and high heels, and I still moved, and that's where the side-step came from."
Philip Agee, who was 17 when he first saw them in 1960 in St. Louis, became such a fan that he has put out a book on them-for a seminar course in printing at Yale. Tina Pie is a collection of the colorations of Ike and Tina's romance and career, tawny browns and flashy reds and moanful yellows and hurtful blues. Silkscreening the act through the dark years and into the fast ones, with even remembrances from Tina's mother, or various of Phil Agee's friends and fellow worshippers:
"Tina came out and up on the stage. Nobody screamed or fainted. We were just real glad to see her. She always wore sparkling dresses and very high-heeled shoes with no backs and holes in the toes. Sometimes she was pregnant, singing with her stomach stuck out, stomping her high-heeled shoes with stiff legs. They would sing special songs when you asked them. Everybody liked A Fool in Love.' `Staggerlee' was my favorite. When Ike started slow, `When the night was clear and the moon was yellow, and the leaves came tumbling down...' By the time `ba-da, ba-da, ba-doo' ended, everybody was out on the floor. During their breaks the jukebox played again. Tina disappeared and the men sat at card tables near the stage drinking with their blonde girlfriends. When the men started playing again, Tina appeared for the second show. By 11:00 it was over. Pat's dad picked us up and drove me home. We went every Tuesday while they were in St. Louis.
"Tina Turner's part Cherokee and so's my Mom, so so am I."
KATHY KLEIN
BY 19 6 6, THERE WAS MORE PRACTICED FLASH. You learn what works. The Ikettes came storming out of the wings in a train formation, in mini-skirted sequins, haughty foxes thrusting their butts at you and then waving you off with a toss of their long whippy hair. Tina came out, eyes flashing until she became a fire on the stage. And across Broadway, there's your Motown act, the Marvelettes in their matching long evening gowns or the Tops in pink velvet, doing soul-hula, singing through choreographed smiles. Tina spits sex out to you. And Mick Jagger.
Before that breakthrough tour with the Rolling Stones in 1969, Ike & Tina had worked with them in England in 1966. "Mick was a friend of Phil Spector," says Tina. `And the time we cut `River Deep, Mountain High,' Mick was around. [This is at Gold Star, Phil's favorite studio in Los Angeles.] I remembered him but I never talked to him. He's not the type to make you feel you could just come up and talk to him. Mick, I guess, thought the record was great, and he caught our act a couple of times. Mick wasn't dancing at the time ...he always said he liked to see girls dance. So he was excited about our show, and he thought it'd be different for the people in England.
"I remember I wasn't mingling too much-Ike and I were having problems at the time, and we stayed mad at each other-but I'd always see Mick in the wings. I thought, `Wow, he must really be a fan.' I'd come out and watch him occasionally; they'd play music, and Mick'd beat the tambourine. He wasn't dancing. And to and behold, when he came to America, he was doing everything! So then I knew what he was doing in the wings. He learned a lot of steps and I tried to teach him like the Popcorn and other steps we were doing, but he can't do `em like that. He has to do it his way."
"River Deep, Mountain High." To hear that song for the first time, in 1967, in the first year of acid-rock and Memphis soul, to hear that wall falling toward you, with Tina teasing it along, was to understand all the power of rock and roll. It had been released in England in 1966 and made Number Two. In America, nothing. "It was just like my farewell," Phil Spector says. "I was just sayin' goodbye, and I just wanted to go crazy for a few minutes-four minutes on wax."
Bob Krasnow, presid
ent of Blue Thumb, knew Ike & Tina from their association with Warner Bros.' R&B label, Loma, in 1964. He was an A&R man there. "Spector had just lost the Righteous Brothers," he recalls, "and at the same time, Ike was unhappy," having switched to Kent Records.
"Spector's attorney Joey Cooper called and said Phil wanted to produce Tina-and that he was willing to pay $20,000 in front to do it! So Mike Maitland [then president at Warners] gave them their release, and they signed with Philles.
"Watching Phil work was one of my greatest experiences," says Krasnow. It was indeed a special occasion. Only "River Deep" was cut at Gold Star; the other three Spector productions were at United. (There was only one Philles LP ever made with Ike & Tina, which was finally rereleased last year by A&M.) And Ike didn't attend.
"Dennis Hopper did the cover on that LP. He was broke on his ass in Hollywood and trying photography. He said he'd like to do the cover. He took us to this sign company, where there was this 70-foot-high sign for a movie, with one of those sex starsBoccaccio '70 or something. And he shot them in front of that big teardrop. Then the gas company had a big sign, and Hopper took them there and shot them in front of a big burner."
Onstage, there may be reason to compare Tina Turner to Mick Jagger; Tina, in fact, is more aggressive, more animalistic. But it is, indeed, a stage:
"I don't sound pretty, or good. I sound, arreghh! Naggy. I can sound pretty, but nobody likes it. Like I read some article in the paper that Tina Turner has never been captured on records. She purrs like a kitten on record, but she's wild onstage. And they don't like a record like `Working Together.' I love that record. I love that River Deep Mountain High album, but nobody likes me like that. They want me sounding all raspy, so...I have to do what Ike says.
"My whole thing," she once said, "is the fact that I am to Ike-I'm going to use the term 'doll'-that you sort of mold...In other words, he put me through a lot of changes. My thing is Ike's ideas. I'll come up with a few of them, but I'm not half as creative as Ike."
THE WORLD'S GREATEST HEARTBREAKER drives up in her Mercedes sedan and strides in, all fresh and breezy in a red knit hotpants outfit, third button unbuttoned, supple legs still very trim at age 32 charging onto 33. ("Everyone thinks I'm in my forties, but I was only around 20 when I started. Born November 26, 1939," she says, very certain.)
Tina's hair is in ponytails, tied in brown ribbons; she is wearing brown nail polish and red ballet-type slippers. Here in the living room of her $100,000 house she is trying to paint a portrait of the offstage, in-home Tina Turner. There are four bedrooms, she says, four baths, and, let's see now.. .thirteen telephones. Additional phone cables are employed in the closed-circuit TV system, a system like the one in Ike's studios less than a mile away. There, Ike can sit in his office and push-button his way around the various studios, the room, the entrances, the hallways. Just recently, he was laughing about the time he punched up the camera scanning the bedroom in the private apartment he keeps there, and what did he and the people around him (Tina was at home) see but some heavy fucking going on, one of his musicians and a groupie. And everyone's lapping it up, and finally, when the sideman is caressing one of his nightstand's firm-nippled breasts, Ike's bodyguard springs out of the office, and the next you see him, he is piling into the bed, over most of that same station...
But later. Tina Turner is trying to paint a picture here. "I just got rid of the housekeeper. I get housekeepers and they sort of do just things like vacuuming and dusting, and nothing else is done-like the mirrors-and I'm a perfectionist, and that would never be. People think I'm probably one of those that lounge around, but I'm always on my knees-I do my floors 'cause no one can please me. When I was in the eighth grade I started working for a lady in Tennessee keeping her house; she more or less taught me what I know about housework."
Tina also tries to do most of the cooking, even if she usually does report to the studios around 4 P.M. to do vocals. She also likes to do gardening. "Every now and then I get out and turn the dirt.. .but now I've started writing, and Ike, every time I turn around, he says, `Write me this song.' So I went out and bought some plants and when I was in the hospital I got a lot of plants that I really love, and I sort of take care of them like babies."
"Ike is a very hard worker," a friend is saying. "He's such a driver. Last winter Tina was sick with bronchial pneumonia, 104 temperature, in the hospital with her body icepacked to bring the temperature down. And Ike was visiting, and he was going, `You get out and SING, or you get out of the house!"'
Tina doesn't discuss such things, even if her talk is often punctuated by references to Ike as the manager, the brains, the last word; despite his back-to-the-audience stance on stage. But in Tina Pie, Phil Agee's book, there's a piece of conversation backstage between Tina and one of Phil's friends:
Pete: I thought maybe you wouldn't be here tonight.
Tina: No, I never miss a performance. The doctor came to the hotel today, brought a vaporizer and that helped it a lot. I haven't coughed anything up today-so I was kind of worrying if it was okay. I always go on. Whatever's bothering me-I don't care how bad it is-I drop it when I go on stage. I hadn't coughed up anything today. You know that kind of hypnosis-I don't know what it's called-where you induce yourself into a trance?
(Tina's friend): Self-hypnosis.
Tina: Yeah, that's it. I hypnotize myself, and I forget the cold and stuff.
"DOPE?"
Bob Krasnow repeats the question, only in a softer voice. "Let me close the door a minute." (A few weeks before, I asked an ex-Ikette about Ike Turner and sex. "Sex? Oh, my god, that's another volume," she'd said. "I'll have to get a cigarette on that one!")
Krasnow: "Tina is so anti-dope I can't tell you. She's the greatest woman I've ever known, outside of my wife. She has more love inside her body than one hundred chicks wrapped up together. And she's so straight, it's ridiculous."
`As for Ike...Ike was not into dope at all until three years ago. One night in Vegas we were sitting around and got started talking about coke. He didn't care about it, and I said-and Ike, you know, is like 40 or so-and I said, `One thing that's great about coke is you can stay hard-you fuck for years behind that stuff.' That's the first time Ike did coke."
Krasnow can't help but continue. "That night he made his deal-bought $3,000 of cocaine from King Curtis, and he bought it and showed me, and I laughed and said, `That's not coke; that's fucking Drano!' Since then, he's learned." What-to lighten up on drugs? "No-to tell what good coke is and what bad coke is."
Krasnow worked with James Brown at King for years before he joined Warners and signed Ike & Tina to Loma. His evaluation: "Ike is ten times a bigger character than James Brown. And they're both fucking animals. How can I put this? Say, whatever you can do...they can do ten times as much. And Ike-he's always putting you to the test.
"What I like best about Ike is also what I hate: He's always on top of you."
"I find him one of the most fascinating people I've met," says Jeff Trager, who did promotion work at Blue Thumb. "If he knows you he can be real warm, and do whatever he can for you. There's just no limit to Ike Turner. He'd carry around $25,000 in cash in a cigar box-with a gun. He'd drive around town, man, sometimes to Watts, sometimes Laurel Canyon, in his new Rolls Royce to pick up coke. And he is real sinister-looking."
"Krasnow and Ike are both crazy," says Trager. "Ike would storm into the office with a troop of people, six-foot chicks, a bag of cocaine. Really, really crazy. He always came in. He loved Blue Thumb, and he was always saying he'd come back. Krasnow says he couldn't afford him now."
Krasnow produced both their Blue Thumb albums and brought "I've Been Loving You Too Long" to Turner. "He hated Otis Redding," Krasnow says. "He just didn't think Otis had it." The Ike & Tina version sold some half million copies. Blue Thumb was also a good showcase of Ike Turner's fluidity as a blues guitarist, and of the flexibility of the Ike & Tina sound-from "Dust My Broom" and "I Am a Motherless Child" to the stark raving "Bold Soul Sist
er." Ike Turner, who places "River Deep" up next to "Good Vibrations" as his two favorite records, says the Spector production didn't get airplay because the soul stations said "too pop" and the white stations said "too R&B."
Ike & Tina had a showcase at Blue Thumb, but no cross-market success. "Bold Soul Sister" went to number one at KGFJ, the black station in L.A., but, Jeff Trager remembers, the program director at KRLA refused to play it. "No matter what. I asked him, `What if it went to Number One?' and he said, `I don't care; I'll never play it."'
What finally carried Ike and Tina through was the 1969 Rolling Stones tour, where the revue broke out with "Come Together," in its own raw style, Tina snakesnapping across the stage, punching out the John Lennon lyric. Raves everywhere, and the mass magazines were stung to attention. Playboy and Look ended up using the same phrase to characterize Tina's entrance: "like a lioness in heat." Vogue did a photo spread. And Ike & Tina got booked into Vegas and both Fillmores. Liberty Records began talking big money, so big even Krasnow encouraged Turner to go to them as an artist. "We didn't have a contract, anyway," says Krasnow. "It was just on a piecemeal basis." That's when Ike shed his $100,000 home and began building his lavish studios.
Tina is sitting in the "game room" of the studios. The move to interpreting white rock and roll, she says, was quite natural.
"We went to a record shop in Seattle, Washington, and someone was buying `Come Together,' and I said, 'Oh, Ike, I gotta do it onstage, I love that record.' That's the thing I think of-the stage-because it's action, you know. And `Honky Tonk Woman,' that's me. And then people came to us and said, `You gotta record that song, it's so great.' And we said, `What's so great about it; we're doing it just like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones,' and they said `No, you have your own thing about it.' So when we cut the album, we were lacking a few tunes, so we said, `Well, let's just put in a few things that we're doing on stage.' And that's how `Proud Mary' came about. I had loved it when it first came out. We auditioned a girl and she had sung `Proud Mary.' This is like eight months later, and Ike said, `You know, I forgot all about that tune.' And I said `Let's do it, but let's change it.' So in the car Ike plays the guitar, we just sort of jam. And we just sort of broke into the black version of it. It was never planned to say, `Well, let's go to the record shop, and I'd like to record this tune by Aretha Franklin'... it's just that we get it for stage, because we give the people a little bit of us and a little of what they hear on the radio every day.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 9