"My mother-her radio was usually blues, B.B. King and all. But rock and roll was more me, and when that sort of music came on, I never could sit down. I've always wanted to move."
"They are really making it now," says Krasnow. "Really. Every time he plays a place-like last week, Carnegie Hall-it's sold out a week before. And everybody's raving about the show." But there was a time...
"I got pissed at him 'cause we worked our asses off to get on the Andy Williams Love show. We had dinner after, and I said, `This is it! You've made it, man!' He was back playing the bowling alley the next night. I kept saying, `Why play for $1,000 a night when you can get $20,000 now?' I mean, he was just touring himself out." Ike him self says, "It doesn't matter to me; we've got a living to make." Recently, he has relaxed the road pace, from six nights a week all year to two or three nights a week.
Ike & Tina are now regularly on TV-on variety shows, talk shows, and specials; they were in Milos Forman's Taking Off and Gimme Shelter, and they helped celebrate Independence Day this year in Ghana, Soul to Soul. And what is apparent is that in Africa or in Hollywood, in bowling alleys or in the Casino Lounge of the Hotel International, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, with the Ikettes and the Kings of Rhythm (nine pieces plus Ike) is pretty much the same show:
The band member doing the introductions and shameless album plugs; the Kings warming up with a couple of Motown-type power tunes, followed by the Ikettes singing "Piece of My Heart" or "Sweet Inspirations," then Tina running on, churning through "Shake Your Tail Feather," then saying a hearty hello and promising "soul music with the grease." Tina's recitations and spoken paeans-and Ike's wise-ass, not-quite-inaudible cracks, are all pregreased...Mama don't cook no dinner tonight, 'cause Daddy's comin' home with the crabs... When Tina sings, "I been lovin' you... too long...and I can't stop now," bossman Ike invariably croons, "'cause you ain't ready to die.... "
The Otis Redding song is the show-stopper. Back in `67, Tina was simply breathing heavily over the instrumental passage; by `69, she was touching the tip of the microphone with both sets of fingers oh, so gently. Now, of course, it's a programmed gross-out, with Ike slurping and slushing and Tina rigid over the mike doing an unimpressive impression of an orgasm while Ike slams the song to a close, saying, "Well, I got mine, I hope you got yours." In 1969 it was a solid salute to sex as a base for communication. Now, the subtleties gone, it's just another request number to keep the crowd happy.
"We cut the song," says Tina, "and Ike kept playing the tune over and over and I had to ad lib, so I just did that-just what comes into your head. So we started doing it onstage. How could I stand onstage, I felt, and say `Oh baby, oh baby, uhh'-I'm just going to stand there, like an actress reading the script without any emotion? So I had to act.
"What I did on the Rolling Stones tour was only what had matured from the beginning. I don't think it can go any further, because it's, as they say in New York, it's getting pornographic. I agree, because like now Ike has changed words, which makes it obvious what that meant when we first started doing it. I was thinking it meant sensually but not sexually. Sometimes he shocks me, but I have to be cool. Sometimes I want to go, `Ike, please.' I start caressing the mike and he goes, `Wait 'til I get you home,' and I feel like going, 'Oh, I wish you wouldn't say that.' Everything else I feel like I can put up with, but not that. But like, I can't question Ike because everything that Ike has ever gotten me to do that I didn't like, was successful.
"I think in the early sixties it would have really been out of bounds-like, I probably would have been thrown off the stage. But today, it's what's happening. That's why I can get by with it."
From Tina Pie, this strange crossfire:
"...It could be nice but it would probably turn out awful-especially with that dirty of Ike hounding me. I sat through the first half of the second show with him and he kept telling me he want to give me a fit and just 'cause he had Tina didn't mean he couldn't want me, too. He's got the greatest skin going but that's about it."
MELINDA, New York City
"Melinda Who?"
IKE TURNER, New York City
TINA I S GIVING M E A TOUR of Ike's new main studios-the master control room with the $90,000 board featuring the IBM mix-memorizer (a computer card gives an electronic readout on the mix at whichever point the tape is stopped), a second studio marked STUDIO A (Ike Turner's is STUDIO AA), a writers' room, business offices for his various managers and aides, a playroom furnished with a pool table, Ike's own office, and, inevitably, Ike's private apartment suite. Again, it is disgusting, flowers chasing each other up the wall, a cinerama mural of a couple in an embrace next to the breakfast table and refrigerator. Again, sofas, of Ike's own design, with hard-on arms. White early American drapings and chairs, and a draped, canopied bed so garish that Tina turns to Ike and says, "Can I tell `em what we call this room? We call it `the Whorehouse."'
There's a double-door air closet at the entrance to Ike's private quarters, where he spends so many nights, "because of all the work to be done." This is the Trap. You bust into Bolic Sound, and all the doors are automatically locked, leading you down the hall, into the stairwell in front of the apartment. The only way to open the door there is by dialing a secret telephone number. And the only word that can get to you will come from above you. Ike's got a TV camera there, too.
Ike Turner has moved around from label to label for ten years. Ike & Tina began with `A Fool in Love," which Ike cut with Tina when the original singer for his composition didn't show up at a date. That record hit in 1960 and was on a Midwest R&B label, Sue. It was followed by "It's Gonna Work Out Fine," but the head of Sue delayed its release so long-he sent the master back three times, said Ike-that he split in 1964, going to Warner Bros.' fledgling R&B label, Loma, for a pair of live LPs recorded in Ft. Worth and Dallas by "Bumps" Blackwell, now manager of Little Richard. 1963 to 1966 was a dark period for the Revue; they made what they could on the road, and they had no hit records-and Loma records were hard to find.
Ike then took his act to Kent, a label he'd worked for in earlier days when he traveled the South scouting and recording, on a cheap Ampex tape recorder, bluesmen like B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf. This time around, he managed a hit for the Ikettes, "Peaches and Cream." But, he said, "They tried to steal the Ikettes. They sneaked around and tried to buy the girls from under me." Then it was Spector, won over by Ike & Tina's work as a substitute act in the rock and roll film, T'N'T Show. But after "River Deep" bombed, said Ike, he "got discouraged and went down in Mexico making movies." Phil recommended Bob Crewe as a producer, a single didn't hit, and they moved to an Atlantic subsidiary, Pompeii Records. "We were lost among all of Atlantic's own R&B stuff," Ike said, and that's when he ran into Krasnow. With no contract ever signed with Blue Thumb, Ike actually made a deal with United Artists/Liberty in mid-1969, before the Stones tour, through their New York-based R&B label, Minit.
"Spector gave Ike an absolute guarantee of hits forever," says Bud Dain, then general manager at Liberty. What Minit promised was a $50,000 a year guarantee "plus certain clauses-a trade ad on every release, sensitive timing of releases...but Minit was a mistake. They defaulted on the contract, and Ike was free to break the contract."
Then Ike & Tina toured with the Stones, and the next time Ike talked with Liberty, Liberty was talking about $150,000 a year guarantee, for two albums a year. Ike signed in January, 19 70.
"The first LP was Come Together, in May," said Dain. "Now Ike wanted to build his own studios. The option came up again in January, 19 71. The album sold well, but we couldn't exercise the option unless he'd sold 300,000. And he only had one album out that year. But he needed $150,000, and Al Bennett [President at Liberty] believed in him. We gave him the money." With the second advance, Ike's studios were well underway, and he got another hit record, the single on "Proud Mary."
"Then he came in-he needed another $150,000. He got that in June. So there's a total of $450,000 in advances." And that's why United Artists may
yet be Ike & Tina's final home. Ike Turner must produce those two albums a year, and UA has no choice but to promote its ass off.
I K E'S HEAD i s o N ONE WOMAN'S LA P ; his knee-socked feet on another's. His thin frame is blanketed by a trench coat, a sleeping bridge across the sofa in the dressing room. Tina has her back to them. She's working her hair into shape for the second show this Friday night, and Ike's getting the only rest he's gotten all day. And after the second show, he'll jump off the revolving stage of the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, then back to the nearby San Francisco Airport to return to his studios to cut instrumental tracks the rest of the night and into the day, then back up to San Francisco and to the Circle Star mid-Saturday evening.
In the hallway, after the second show Friday, he stops long enough to give you a solid shoulder grab-a football coach's kind of friendly gesture-and a warm hello. He turns to the zoftig lady photographer nearby, glancing right through her tangle of cameras and giving her the onceover. He asks if maybe she wouldn't fly down with him. "What? You got a boyfriend?"
"This is the critical point of our career; I can't lighten up now," he says, and is off to the airport. At 2:30 in the morning, Tina-who doesn't return to L.A. with himshows up at a banquet room in her hotel for a photo session. The photographer's assistant asks, "What's your advice for people getting into the business?" Tina, at 3 A.M., is serious: "Have some kind of business knowledge."
In the dressing room between shows, she had said, "I'm glad I got Ike, 'cause I would've quit years ago. I probably would've worked for promoters and not get paid. Our policy is to have our money before we go on stage. Even if it's for the President."
Just before the Stones tour, Ike and Tina were booked for the Ed Sullivan Show, in September, 1969. `And he got his money in front," says Jeff Trager. Most promoters say 50 percent deposit, the rest after the show. "So Sullivan comes up to Ike before the show, and Ike hasn't got his guitar with him, and it's showtime. Sullivan asks where his guitar is, and Ike tells Ed he needs `the key to the guitar,' the key being the money." Sullivan paid.
"You have to protect yourself," Tina is saying to the two women on the sofa with Ike. Road manager Rhonda Graham, a stern, curt white woman, is seated nearby, in front of a rack full of Tina's costumes and shoes. "In the early sixties we went through that...if you don't know these people, some of them just take the gate and leave."
But if you are black and in the music business, you get burned until you either quit or learn. Turner learned, through all the different labels and beginning in the late forties. In junior high, he says, he'd decided to devote himself to "giving people music sounds that they could really dig...and pat their feet to. I'm not a very good speaker, so I try to express myself when I play."
Turner told Pete Senoff: "I started professionally when I was 11. The first group I played with was Robert Nighthawk, then Sonny Boy Williams. This was like back in 1948-1949. I went to Memphis in about 1952. That's where I met junior Parker, Willy Nix, Howlin' Wolf. I was just playing with different groups all around... playing piano. From Junior Parker, I left Memphis and went to Mississippi, where I met the people from Kent and Modern Record Company. That's when I started scouting for talent for them. That's when I started recording B.B. King, Roscoe Gordon, Johnny Ace, Howlin' Wolf. We were just going through the South and giving people there $ 5 to $10 or a fifth of whiskey while we recorded over a piano in their living room.
"I wrote thirty-two hits for that firm, but I didn't know what a songwriter's royalties were. I didn't know nothing, man. They were sending me $150 a week, which was enough to keep me very happy in Mississippi, but not enough for me to get away to find out what was really going on."
Right after high school, Ike had formed the first Kings of Rhythm: their first job was in Lulu, Mississippi, and each King got 18 cents for the night's work. One time, they went to Memphis and recorded "Rocket 88" at B.B. King's label. It was a local hit. "But some dude at the record company beat me," Ike said, "and I only got $40 for writing, producing, and recording it. And the lead singer took the band from me and went on his own." Ike went back to Memphis, gigging around. After the record company job, he went back to his hometown, Clarksdale, reformed the Kings of Rhythm, and ended up in St. Louis. From 1954 to 1957 he played all around the city.
One night, 17-year-old Annie Mae Bullock went to see Ike's show. She had moved to St. Louis two years before to join her sister. "She'd been telling me about Ike Turner, who was like a legend in St. Louis-you know, his picture and name spread about the newspapers. I went to this club to see what it was all about. I remember Ike was on top of the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis and the band was walking, and everybody was moving. Well, I've always sung and one night I asked Ike if I could sing and he said OK, but he never called me."
Annie Mae went out again, another night in 19 5 7, to the Club Manhattan. On a B.B. King tune, with Ike on organ, the drummer went to the audience and set the mike in front of her sister-"teasing, I guess. She said `No,' so I grabbed the mike and started singing. Ike looked up all surprised, like, `Oh wow, she can really sing."' She became a regular, singing on weekends, until she cut 'A Fool in Love" in 1960, and the demo became a hit. By that time, they'd been married-"in 1958," says Tina, "one of those house things, little preacher things, sort of quiet, saying, 'OK, let's do it."'-and Ike changed Annie Mae's name to Tina.
TINA WAS BORN IN BROWNSVILLE, TENNESSEE, and grew up in Knoxville. The way she stretches her limbs on stage, she looks tall, and her high cheekbones give her a proud Indian appearance. But she's only 5'4", and as for Indian blood: "It's in the family, but I don't know where or from what tribe. My grandmother really looked like an Indian, though. She was maybe one-fourth Cherokee."
Tina never studied music. Of course, she learned some from church-in Knoxville, she went to Baptist church and sang in the choir and, in high school, she sang some opera. But mostly she remembers a baby-sitter taking her to "sanctified church, a religion, they call it holiness-it's where they play tambourines and dance, but not just dancing-dancing like godly to the fast music, sort of like today. I remembered the excitement of the music; it inspired you to dance."
"Before Ike," says Tina, gingerly feeling the cuff of her hot pants, "I didn't-I never owned a record player. I listened to songs on the radio, but I never knew the artists went out and performed. I never connected the two. It's like you're dumb, you don't know how they make movies. I never knew ...I just thought I'd be singing in a church the rest of my life and marry."
The dumb kid travels the world and meets royalty. And her innate sensibility shows through. In Ghana: "I went to see where they kept the slaves before they brought them to America-and it was very interesting and touching. They kept the women on one side in a room this big [about 20 by 30 feet]. The only light was three holes at the top, and only the sea light came in. A lot of them got diseases from the dampness of the sea; it formed a sort of crust on the wall. They had to live in all that filth; there was no bathrooms, no nothing. Like just women over here and men over there-the men in a much larger room-and they'd open the door so they could 'multiply,' as they called it-in all that filth. It was really something to see where you came from-where it all began.
Tina never did much reading, she says. "Every now and then I read. Like for instance I took time to read what I wanted to about astrology, and I took time to read up on the health food thing." Tina is trying to move away from meat, and her kids "are doing vitamin pills, wheat germs, and sunflower seed flour. But I like a good steak now and then....
"I read the Jacqueline Kennedy, the Ethel Kennedy book. From the very beginning I never paid any attention to the political end of America. So then when President Kennedy became president, I became interested, because for some reason I liked him. Every time they said the President's going to speak, I watched. Something about that family-they're real people. I don't know what it is-lively, life-like."
Ike and Tina played Hyannisport once, and got an invitation from Ethel to vis
it the Kennedy estate.
"You could feel there was a real family. Like my family, it's too late now... I'd like to have been able to teach them things before they reached the age of 13 where.. .you know how kids question things, why say it this way or...that's what they do, automatically know that this is the right way and why, not just because I say it is.... But you start from the root. Because my oldest son, he's really prejudiced, and I don't know why, because we've always mixed, being entertainers. And Greg's got this thing, Ahh, wow, mother, she's white...' None of the other kids are like that, but he's really....,,
Ike is playing his new sides in his office, and everybody's moving, just so, head nodding, lower lip out a little, legs maybe churning a bit, and this photographer is sit ting there, tapping both feet lightly on the floor, and Ike strikes an accusatory pose: "See? See? You white people-you have to move from inside! Man, white people put black people off beat clapping so long...."
"I knew there had to be a time for us," says Tina. "I'd go and catch shows that people said were great that did nothing for me. And I felt our show was much better. And I knew we had to get some records out, but I didn't feel that it was going to be the records. I felt it was going to be a timing. I didn't know that the timing would be a change in the world, but I thought it would be a certain time, like maybe the seventies. But all of a sudden, remember when they used to call longhairs beatniks? OK. Now they call them hippies. The hippies came, and more of them came and more and more. They took over San Francisco, they took over the highways, they just took over. That was the beginning of the change.
Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll Page 10