{"id":174438,"date":"2007-09-13T15:52:12","date_gmt":"2007-09-13T15:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/http\/recordcollectormag.com\/articles\/ike-can-see-clearly-now"},"modified":"2020-05-21T10:25:34","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T10:25:34","slug":"ike-can-see-clearly-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/recordcollectormag.com\/articles\/ike-can-see-clearly-now","title":{"rendered":"Ike can see clearly now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Funny how things change. A little over a decade ago, Ike Turner was rock’n’roll’s terminal pariah. Damned by 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It?<\/em>, Hollywood’s take on his life with ex-wife Tina, he had become stigmatised as rock’s most notorious wife-beater. Railing against what he saw as the film’s fanciful way with the truth, he’d sunk as low as he could imagine. Years spent snorting coke had left him with a prison stretch, nostrils you could jam a pencil through and a reputation that seemed set to flush him down the rock crapper forever.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In attempting to tell his side of things, his confessional autobiography Takin’ Back My Name<\/em>, published in 1999, sold a mere fraction of the units that Tina’s own bestselling biography shifted in 1986. Turner decided the only way out was to go back to basics. Then came tentative comeback LP Here And Now<\/em>, reviving R&B stalwarts The Kings Of Rhythm, the soundtrack of Kill Bill<\/em> and Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n

In 2001, Scorsese had filmed Turner live in Chicago for a strand of his mammoth blues documentary, The Blues: Godfathers & Sons<\/em>, in which he reunited with childhood mentor Pinetop Perkins. Two years later, Scorcese captured Turner and early collaborator Sam Phillips on another section, The Blues: The Road To Memphis<\/em>. Next came a chance meeting with Damon Albarn, the fruit of which was a guest spot on Gorillaz’ new project, Demon Days<\/em>. Certainly, amidst the De La Souls and Shaun Ryders of Gorillaz’ live shows in 2005, Turner’s piano-pounding cameo on Every Planet We Reach Is Dead was the most unlikely. For the most part, he was well received.<\/p>\n

Both Albarn and Scorsese events put Turner firmly back on the musical map as an integral link between blues and rock’n’roll. Much like The Last Waltz<\/em> paid homage to The Band’s forebears, Demon Days<\/em> played up the significance of Turner’s trailblazing influence on the last five decades of music. He was arguably, after all, the inventor of rock’n’roll. Just listen to Rocket 88, cut at Sun Studios in March 1951 with his sax player Jackie Brenston.<\/p>\n

“When people talk about rock’n’roll,” said Little Richard, who lifted Rocket 88’s piano rhythm wholesale for Good Golly Miss Molly, “they talk about Chuck Berry, they talk about Little Richard, and they leave the main man out. Before all these people, Ike Turner was doing this thing. He was the innovator.”<\/p>\n

It’s ironic, but entirely fitting, that the latest step in Turner’s resurgence is a Grammy Award for new album Risin’ With The Blues<\/em>. Paying dues to key influences and peers, it’s a return to the raw boogie-woogie of his youth, slashed with blues licks and a voice that suggests he’s been through the grinder in more ways than one. For all his innovation, Turner’s second Grammy (his first was with Tina for 1971’s Proud Mary) sounds like a restatement of self, a return to guiding principles. Above all, like much in his life, it carries a tangible air of defiance. There are other projects already afoot, the most intriguing of which is an album with hip garageblues duo The Black Keys, produced by Danger Mouse. First reports, according to the Keys’ Patrick Carney, are that it sounds “pretty fucking fucked-up”.<\/p>\n

NOW IN HIS 75th year, Ike Turner still has presence. In dove-white shoes, slacks, silver pendant slung round a charcoal sweater, he looks trim and dapper, hunched over a cup of coffee in our Camden hotel. Interviewing him, I’m told beforehand, can be a risky business. Catch him in the wrong mood and he’s liable to cut out of there within minutes. As it turns out, Record Collector<\/em> finds him happy to talk and quick to laugh. Only when the questioning veers anywhere near the most famous of his 13 ex-wives do the defences go up. The body language changes immediately, retreating into his chair, arms folded. Ike is a complex man, acknowledging his failures with harsh self-criticism, but he’s rarely apologetic. It’s the same mood that permeates his autobiography.<\/p>\n

“I don’t think anybody should be apologetic about nuthin’” he confirms today. “If I sit here and start cussin’ at you and you just sit listenin’, then it’s your fault for sittin’ there listenin’. You could have walked out. So whatever happens in one’s life, don’t put the blame nowhere but on yourself.”<\/p>\n

Ike Turner was never meant for an ordinary life. Raised in the delta blues hotbed of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he grew up in an age when racism was endemic. As a three-year-old, he witnessed his Baptist minister father beaten senseless by a white hate mob in the family home. They left him outside, having kicked holes in his stomach. When the local white hospital refused to treat him, the health department came over and put up a tarpaulin tent in the backyard to shelter him. “When the wind was blowing a certain way,” wrote Ike in Takin’ Back My Name<\/em>, “you could smell the odour that came from the wounds in my daddy’s intestines.” His father stayed sick for two or three years and never recovered. He died out there.<\/p>\n

At six, Turner was sexually molested by a middle-aged woman neighbour named Boozie Owens. In his teens, he witnessed a neighbourhood siege in which a black man shot 26 white adversaries before being caught, sexually mutilated and murdered on a cotton-loading platform. Young Ike grew into a hard-nosed rebel. But it was music that fired him. As a six-year-old, he’d heard the sound of bluesmen Sonny Boy Williamson and Joe Willie ‘Pinetop’ Perkins rehearsing at a friend’s house.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t know I wanted to be a piano player until I looked through that window and saw Pinetop playin’,” he remembers. “Man, I thought ‘Jesus!’ Then I found out there was a piano church nearby. I went home and told my Mom. Mama was the kind that whatever I wanted she would give me, she’d never say no. But she’d make me earn it. So I’d have to go sell iron and bottles and wash dishes and everything to get the money. When I asked for the piano, she said ‘OK, you bring me good grades home from school and I’ll get you one’. And man, when I showed her my cards saying I was promoted to the next grade, that piano was sittin’ in the house. That was the beginning of my life.”<\/p>\n

As a teenager, Turner roadied for guitarist Robert Nighthawk before playing juke joints with Sonny Boy Williamson and Pinetop, from whom he learned boogie-woogie piano. He soon hustled his way onto local Clarksdale radio station WROX as a DJ. And whilst still in high school, he formed his own band. By the late ‘40s, Turner had assembled an aggressive R&B combo, The Kings Of Rhythm. Then fate intervened.<\/p>\n

“We were in Mississippi and I wasn’t even thinking about doing any recording. I didn’t know how to record or where to go. But we kept passing this black club every Saturday [The Harlem Inn in Chambers, Mississippi], where there’d be all these cars parked outside. So I’d say to the band, ‘Let’s go in there and see what’s happenin’.’ And BB King and his band were playing.” Turner knew King, six years his senior, from the local circuit. “I said to him ‘Hey man, let us play one song’. And we ended up playing everything on the jukebox. BB turned to me and said ‘Man, you guys need to be recordin’. I know this guy Sam Phillips in Memphis. I could call him and you guys could go over there.’ So we made an appointment for that Wednesday.”<\/p>\n

It was early March, 1951. What happened next is etched in folklore. On the 60-mile drive to Phillips’ Sun Studios building that week, Turner wrote what is now regarded as the first ever rock’n’roll song, Rocket 88. With The Kings Of Rhythm crammed into a Chrysler – Ike, sax player Jackie Brenston, guitarist Willie Kizart, tenor sax Raymond Hill, bassist Jessie Knight and drummer Willie Sims – they began the trip up Highway 61 in lashing rain, amps and equipment loaded into the trunk, a bass amp tied to the roof.<\/p>\n

“On the way up there, I hadn’t even thought about writing any new songs,” laughs Turner. “In those days, I was keen on bettin’. I would bet you a quarter I would see more Chevrolets than you would see Fords. And the Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was the new car then. So all of us started writing different parts of this song about the Rocket 88. When we got to Sam Phillips’ office, his assistant put all the parts in the right places, whilst it took me 10 or 15 minutes to do the music. A lot of it was boogie-woogie. We’d set the amplifier out to dry because it had got wet with the rain. And part of it had cracked. So when Sam heard the music, it sounded like a buzz. But we recorded it and Leonard Chess released it.<\/p>\n

“So then they sent it to this white guy in Memphis at Red Hot & Blue radio station, Dewey Phillips. All the white teenagers listened to his show. It was the hottest show in the South. And Sam, who was his buddy, told him not to announce the name on it. If anyone knew it was black, they might not go for it. Anyway, all the white kids were stormin’ the record shops for it.”<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t quite that simple. For the final recording, Phillips tried out Jackie Brenston as vocalist. To Ike’s chagrin, when Rocket 88 was released, it was credited not to The Kings Of Rhythm, but to Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats. The record topped the R&B charts in June 1951. “We were paid $20 apiece for making that,” recalls Turner. “Sam was smart. He thought it was best if we had one record out with Jackie’s name on it and one with me. So instead of being Ike Turner’s Kings Of Rhythm featuring Jackie Brenston, all the kids went to the record shop to buy Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston. But people know it’s me. The truth always bleeds through.<\/p>\n

“That record is why I’m in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. We’re writing a song right now along the lines of ‘Ike went to Memphis and played the boogie with soul, white stations didn’t play black music so they changed the name to rock’n’roll’! (laughs heartily<\/em>)”<\/p>\n

Whatever the fine print, Ike had made a crucial breakthrough. He became a session regular in Memphis, allied to a job as Southern talent scout for both Chess and the Bihari brothers, who ran the LA-based Modern\/ RPM label. It was on RPM that Turner pounded piano on BB King’s first hit, Three O’Clock Blues, whilst also backing up Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Little Walter and Willie Dixon. As a guitarist, he sat in with Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, including the latter’s cornerstone recording, Double Trouble. In fact, it was Ike who brought another hulking talent to Sam Phillips’ stable: Howlin’ Wolf. That’s Turner playing piano on How Many More Years and Crying At Daybreak, an early version of Smokestack Lightnin’. By all accounts though, the Turner-Wolf relationship was a fractious one.<\/p>\n

“The last time I saw Howlin’ Wolf,” he laughs, “I was swingin’ at him with a broom. Sonny Boy Williamson did some stuff like that too. We used to go play with him all night. We’d start at eight o’clock and play ‘til eight the next mornin’, with no intermissions. We went up to get paid and the guy said ‘There’s no pay. Sonny Boy drank it all up.’ The next night, the same thing happened. So I said to Sonny Boy, ‘Hey man, why you keep drinking up all the money?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Well, you ought to drink too’.”<\/p>\n

As a boogie-woogie specialist in West Memphis’ blacks-only clubs, Turner also got to know a local young white truck driver who’d sneak in and hide beside the piano to study his style. It was Elvis Presley.<\/p>\n

By the mid-50s though, Turner was back with The Kings Of Rhythm, relocating to East St Louis and tearing up the local R&B circuit. He released a handful of sides under various aliases like Lover Boy and Icky Renrut (the latter being Ike Turner backwards, sort of), but it was the shows themselves that gained renown. Hitting on a supercharged revue format at the Manhattan Club, the band used a revolving team of guest vocalists. The first girl singer he ever tried out was a 16-year-old from Tennessee by the name of Anna Mae Bullock. It was 1956. Suitably impressed, she became a mainstay of the revue and moved into Ike’s house. They married two years later, Ike re-christening her with her stage name of Tina.<\/p>\n

The big break came when singer Art Lassiter failed to show at the studio to record Ike’s A Fool In Love in 1959. The new Mrs Turner stepped in, laying down a raw, searing vocal that had the local DJs hopping. In August 1960, it made Number Two on the R&B chart. From that moment on, she became the centrepiece of the act. Shifting the show’s emphasis, it now became The Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Auditioning a host of girl back-up singers and dancers, the Ikettes were out front with Tina on stage. The act itself was meticulously conceived. A dazzling soul revue with skin-hugging outfits, wild moves, flash licks, stage effects and primitive strobe lighting, Ike planned everything to the last detail. As a spectacle, people likened it to James Brown and his Fabulous Flames.<\/p>\n

“I was moving so fast, man. People always asked what Ike Turner did in those shows. Well, all the stuff you saw everyone do on stage, it all came from me. Every word that Tina ever said, like ‘Whaddya say?’, all of her expressions. Those short mini-dresses they wore? That was my idea. That was the first time anyone ever wore a mini-dress.”<\/p>\n

With Tina and the Ikettes doing The Shag and highkicking The Pony like barely-tamed Amazons, they were prototypes for the go-go girls that were soon to wiggle in every hip music joint along Sunset Strip.<\/p>\n

But the road was relentless. The revue toured the chitlin’ clubs and showbiz lounges for 11 months a year. The downtime was spent in recording studios. Cutting sides for a whole bunch of labels – Sue, Kent, Tomato, Harmony, Liberty – the R&B hits stacked up: It’s Gonna Work Out Fine; Poor Fool; Tra La La La La. For the seven-piece band, Ike was a hard taskmaster and strict disciplinarian. It was his way or no way. Unsurprisingly, turnover was high. At one point, he took on a young guitar player called Jimi Hendrix. He didn’t last long. Turner sacked him for overuse of feedback.<\/p>\n

“Well, he was doin’ somethin’ I’d never heard before,” he laughs now. “I’d give him a guitar solo and he didn’t have balanced lines. When he switched from main guitar to fuzz, it was like [makes high-pitched feedback sound] and the solo was gone. So I told him about it three times. It was a case of three strikes and out. People say to me ‘You fired Jimi Hendrix. How stupid can you be?’ But I did it. I wasn’t thinking in terms of his potential. I was thinking in terms of what I needed at the time.”<\/p>\n

Another pre-fame upstart sought out Ike during the 60s. Janis Joplin wanted vocal coaching. “Janis would come up to the house at weekends. She’d come down from San Francisco with another girl who had a big beehive. We’d just jam in the house all weekend. We had a lot of fun.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, it was tough out on the road. With a white secretary, tensions often simmered when the revue worked through the Deep South.<\/p>\n

“In the South, there were no black hotels. We’d get to a town and we’d have to go pile up by the river levee where the buses were. We’d sleep on the bus. You’d go to the bus station to wash up and one side would be for whites, the other for blacks. It was hell in those days. I came across a lot of racism, but I wouldn’t put up with it.”<\/p>\n

Turner’s first white Ikette was a young thing who’d played the St Louis clubs with Albert King and Little Milton and been blown away by Ike’s showmanship on guitar. It was Bonnie Bramlett. On stage, the blonde teen rubbed Man-Tan over her skin to make her look halfway black. She soon came face-to-face with the uglier side of the business. “We were in Kentucky and these people were trying to run me off the street. I hadn’t thought about this kid (Bramlett) being white.” When the white kids tried to run their car off the road, howling abuse as they did so, Turner told driver Jimmy Thomas to pull over. Taking out his gun from the glove compartment, Ike jammed it up to the white kids’ car window and made it simple: haul ass or he’d blow their goddamn brains out. “They were cryin’, ‘Oh please, dear God, oh God, oh God’,” remembered Bramlett years later. “And then they were gone.” A heartbroken Bonnie, meanwhile, packed up straight away and headed home to St Louis.<\/p>\n

Such problems were rife, albeit in less dramatic circumstances. “We’d go to places like the Holiday Inn,” says Turner. “I didn’t know Sam Phillips owned part of these Holiday Inns. So when they first started integrating black and white hotels, you’ve come to a place like this [we’re in Camden’s Holiday Inn as we speak], with a big parking lot outside. My white secretary would go and sign us in, but when the guy would see all these blacks, he’s say ‘Hey, the room won’t be ready ‘til 12 o’clock’. So then I’d call Memphis and tell Sam, who’d then tell them to let us in. That was typical of the kind of racism we got.”<\/p>\n

But there were also problems from within. Ike was a serial philanderer, playing around with women without disguising it from Tina. As he bluntly put it years later: “I started going with every girl I saw with a little waist and a big ass. I wanted to try them all, man.” He claimed that his marriage was more like the relationship between brother and sister, rather than man and wife. “Having sex with her was almost a duty,” he recalled.<\/p>\n

He also had a quick temper. Amongst the allegations in her life story I, Tina<\/em> (co-written with Kurt Loder), his ex-wife says she was punched in her sleep, was burned with coffee, had her ribs broken and was beaten so badly her stage wigs wouldn’t fit. Ike did concede in Takin’ Back My Name<\/em> that “Sure, I slapped Tina… there have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.” Although he refuses to be drawn on that subject today, he does suddenly become more animated when I ask if he might still harbour regrets.<\/p>\n

“I’m not regretful of nuthin’,” he asserts. “I had a mother and I did no more to Tina than I would want someone to do to my mother. I don’t even talk about that subject anymore.”<\/p>\n

In 1966, impressed by Tina’s voice but wary of her husband’s reputation, producer Phil Spector felt his Wall Of Sound could earn them a much wider audience, and he made a deal with Ike. For letting him record Tina, Spector would give him equal credit and billing on the records, providing Ike didn’t have anything to do with making them. The Ike-less union’s most prominent release was the painstaking epic, River Deep Mountain High. Though it famously bombed in the States, the single was a colossal hit across the rest of the world, making Top Three in the UK.<\/p>\n

Witnessing the recording first hand in the studio was Mick Jagger. Soon, he was inviting Ike and Tina to support the Stones on their next UK tour. When Ike met the rest of the band, he discovered a mutual appreciation society in Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Richards was particularly taken with Turner’s guitar playing, whilst also fascinated with Ike’s grounding with heroes like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. When Ike made it to the UK in September ’66, he was struck by British guitarists’ devotion to the blues.<\/p>\n

“We went out on tour with The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones. I remember playing Manchester and the Stones didn’t show up. So they sent us back on the stage four or five times to cover for them not being there. All the girls had Mick Jagger’s picture, hugging it and crying. I hadn’t seen any black people over here at all, not even an African. But I was walking off stage when I suddenly heard this guitar cryin’. I said ‘Man, that’s a spook’. We called all black people spooks then. I turned around and it was Clapton, sitting down Indian style and playin’ guitar [Clapton had actually left The Yardbirds in March ’65. Ike may have mistaken Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page for him]. In America then, people were ashamed of the blues. But over here, the blues was a big deal. Even today, they know more about blues here than they do in America. I love it here.”<\/p>\n

The tour was a huge success (“worth seeing for the Ike & Tina Revue alone”, gushed Melody Maker<\/em>), compounded when the Revue again opened for the Stones in the US three years later. The Turners were soon at their commercial peak. They played The Ed Sullivan Show<\/em> and were guests of Johnny Carson. A roaring cover of Credence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary went Top Five on Billboard<\/em> in 1971.<\/p>\n

But there were darker forces at work too. Alongside their tempestuous marriage and Turner’s infidelity came a burgeoning drug problem. Cocaine had entered Ike’s life in the 60s, introduced by two famous names in the entertainment world (he has never disclosed exactly who) at the Hilton Hotel in Vegas. By the early 70s, it had become a full-on addiction. Finest Peruvian flake was his thing, imported inside wooden coat hangers. Turner would place huge bowls of the stuff in every hotel room the band stayed in, like a welcome mat for all-comers. He gave it away to anyone who fancied a toot, at a cost of over $50,000 every six weeks.<\/p>\n

On tour in Europe, he came up with ingenious ways of smuggling it around: inside flashlight batteries, speaker cones, wah-wah pedals, platform heels and the zipped shoulder pads of his stage suits. By 1974, he’d burned a hole right through his nose. So he started freebasing. Tina, meanwhile, was never interested in drugs. Allied to his hot temper and exacting working methods, the coke heightened the tension in their marriage. A year earlier, Nutbush City Limits – a great stomp of distorted guitar and roadhouse vocals – had given them their biggest UK hit since River Deep Mountain High. But things were coming to a head. Emboldened by Ken Russell’s casting of her as the Acid Queen in his new Tommy<\/em> movie, Tina was looking for a way out. After another bruising spat in a hotel room in Dallas, she finally walked out on the weekend of July 4 in 1976, armed, as legend now has it, with just a Mobil credit card and 36 cents. Ike still believes it was the coke that cost him their marriage.<\/p>\n

After Tina left, Ike “just went into a 15-year party”. While his studio burned down in 1982, Turner’s coke habit was consuming him. Constantly arrested and in and out of rehab, his luck finally ran out in July 1989, when he was sentenced to four years’ jail in San Luis Obispo. Having served just over two years, he was released in September 1991, by which time Ike & Tina had already been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York. Phil Spector accepted the award on their behalf. Prison, says Ike today, was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was finally able to kick the coke. It changed his life.<\/p>\n

Shortly after came the biopic of Tina’s book, What’s Love Got To Do With It?<\/em> Played by Laurence Fishburne, Ike was portrayed as a brutal, sadistic force of nature. In a disastrous deal with makers Walt Disney Pictures beforehand, Turner had mistakenly given them free licence to take liberties with his character if and when they wished. Though Tina was to later publicly state that the film had done Ike an injustice, his reputation amongst the wider public was now sealed.<\/p>\n

As he fought to redress the balance, if not exactly clear his name, redemption came in the form of the music itself. In 1993, US girl duo Salt-N-Pepa sampled Ike’s I’m Blue for their monster hit, Shoop. And to a new generation of gangster rappers, he became a potent symbol of black defiance. Snoop Dogg cited him as a key influence, as did Ice-T. Cowritten with English biographer Nigel Cawthorne, Takin’ Back My Name<\/em> set about Ike’s life story in candid, warts’n’all detail. The only way forward, it seemed, was to go back.<\/p>\n

After touring with Joe Louis Walker as pianist and guitar player, Turner reconnected with the boogiewoogie blues that had shaped him. He revived the Kings Of Rhythm for live dates. 2001’s Here & Now,<\/em> his first solo LP in nearly 30 years, signalled a shift in his worldview. “Sittin’ round worryin’ about your losses\/You’re gonna lose your cotton-pickin’ mind”, he moaned on You Can’t Winnum’ All. Little Milton Campbell, whom Ike had brought to Sam Phillips at Sun nearly half a century ago, played guitar. The album earned him a WC Handy Blues Award. Then Japanese rockabilly girl group The 5, 6, 7, 8s tore up I’m Blue for Tarantino’s Kill Bill<\/em> flick. In the wake of Scorsese’s epic blues project came the somewhat unexpected blessing of Damon Albarn and Gorillaz.<\/p>\n

“What happened was, I was in a big hurry in LA to go some place and Brian (Burton, aka Gorillaz producer Danger Mouse) said ‘Ike, please play just one line on the piano’. And I said no way, I had to go. He came back and said ‘Please man, just one line.’ So I went in there and did it.” Reprising his cameo for those live shows in blaring white suit and gold bling, Turner looked like a man having a ball, slapping the keys with his backside in between the boogie.<\/p>\n

As for The Black Keys, how’s that one shaping up? “We started doing some songs last year and we’re finishing off now,” says Ike. “They’re great to work with. I enjoy it. It’s a strange thing working with a new band at my age. Y’know, the other day I was talking to Snoop Dogg. We’re doing something with him and 50 Cent and a lot of these big rap groups. Snoop said to me ‘Man, I can see myself going out and doing something with the real Godfather of Rock’n’Roll.’”<\/p>\n

So what’s it like being Ike Turner in 2007? “A lot of new things have happened. You find out your brain is still six, but your body says ‘no way’ (laughs<\/em>). I got the Grammy this year, but next year I’m really going for it again with a new song called Shouldn’t We Try Love. It’s about working together instead of fighting wars. One verse goes ‘Calling out to all my sisters and brothers\/Regardless of race, creed or colour\/The problems of the world will never be solved\/ Until we put a little love in our hearts\/Working together we can make a change\/Working together we can have better things\/So let’s put our hate aside and let love be our guide.’ I’ll tell you one more verse: ‘Our kids died before they’re 18\/They never had a shot at their dream\/Fighting over land and oil we don’t own\/ This land and oil is gonna be here when we’re dead and gone\/If we come together we can make a change.’ I’m recording this right now. It’s gonna be in the vein of Oh Happy Day and We Are The World.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, for latecomers to Ike’s music, new LP Risin’ With The Blues<\/em> is as good a starting point as any. The guitar lines are by turns beautiful and nasty, broken up by the odd squeal of whammy bar that he’d first perfected in the pre-Hendrix days of 1962’s Prancin’. Lyrically, he’s still treating festering wounds. Eddie Boyd’s Five Long Years is refashioned into 18 Long Years as a mark of his time with Tina. Lighting the funk bomb under Hound Dog Taylor’s Gimme Back My Wig, he can’t resist a final dig at his ex: ‘You’re gonna die an old maid’. But it’s Jesus Loves Me that burns longest in the memory.<\/p>\n

“They made a movie out of me\/And all of that stuff ain’t true” he booms. It’s Ike answering to no-one but his maker. Does this song sum him up? “Yeah, because everyone thinks I’m a bad boy. I am a bad boy. I’ll always be a bad boy. But Jesus loves me anyway, because I’m still here.”<\/p>\n

NUTBUSH BOOGIE?<\/h3>\n

One of the more curious myths of
\nIke and Tina Turner’s career is the
\nsupposed involvement of Marc
\nBolan in the recording of signature
\nhit Nutbush City Limits. In a Radio
\n1 interview, Tina once said that the
\nBopping Elf did indeed play guitar
\non the tune, which made No 4 in
\nthe UK in 1973. Apparently, in
\nanother radio interview, Bolan
\nhimself also claimed to have written
\nand played guitar parts on Sexy Ida,
\nin addition to Nutbush City Limits.
\nSome have even speculated, largely
\nfrom the title alone it seems, that
\nIke & Tina’s Baby Get It On (Parts
\n1 & 2) was also down to Bolan.<\/p>\n

In truth, there’s very little to
\nsuggest Bolan had any firm
\ninvolvement in any of the
\nrecordings, though it was highly
\nlikely that he was in the studio at
\nthe time of recording Nutbush…
\nAnd though a big fan of Ike’s guitar
\nstyle, his reasons may have been
\nmore carnal than musical. As T.Rex
\nrose to superstardom in the early
\n70s, he confided to the NME that
\nhe was now in a position to finally
\nmeet Tina Turner. He’d had a crush
\non her for years. Here’s hoping Ike
\nnever found out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funny how things change. A little over a decade ago, Ike Turner was rock’n’roll’s terminal pariah. Damned by 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It?, Hollywood’s take on his life with ex-wife Tina, he had become stigmatised as rock’s most notorious wife-beater. Railing against what he saw as the film’s \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"issue":[9591],"class_list":["post-174438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","issue-september-2007"],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\nIke can see clearly now - Record Collector Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Funny how things change. 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