The World's Greatest Heartbreaker

Krasnow worked with James Brown at King for years before he joined Warners and signed Ike and 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 Rocye to pick up coke. And he is real sinister-looking."

"In Las Vegas," says Krasnow, "I brought some friends into the dressing room, and Ike pulled out this big .45-just putting them on. Another time he came into the front room at Blue Thumb and threw $70,000 on the floor, in cash, and dared anyone to touch it. Just to blow everybody's mind."

"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 and 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 and Tina sound-from "Dust My Broom" and "I Am a Motherless Child" to the stark raving "Bold Soul Sister." 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."

"See, what's wrong with America," he told Pete Senoff, "is that rather than accept something for its value...America mixes race in it. Like, you can take Tina and cut a pop record on her - like 'River Deep, Mountain High.' You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina...But I can play you stuff like Dinah Washington on Tina. I can play you jazz on Tina. I can play you pop on Tina. I can play you gutbucket R&B on Tina like we have on our Blue Thumb record ... really blues. I can play you that stuff, then I could play you the Motown stuff."

Ike and 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 light, white 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.'" Whether too R&B or what, the program director at KFRC, the Bill Drake station in San Francisco, wouldn't play "I've Been Loving You Too Long," which Krasnow, its producer, called a "pop record." KFRC had to be forced-by its sales-to put the song on the playlist.

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 snake-snapping 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 and Tina got booked into Vegas and both Fillmores. Liberty Records began talking big money, so big that even Krasnow encouraged Turner to go to them as an exclusive artist. "We didn't have a contract, anyway," says Krasnow. "It was just on a piecemeal basis." That's when Ike refurnished 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 on stage, 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 bit of what they hear on the radio every day.

"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."

Tina gave a slightly-shall we say-different account to Changes magazine:

Tina: I guess 'way before the Stones asked us to tour with them, Ike started to get into the hard rock thing, dragging me out of bed to listen to this or that, and at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Ike: She didn't like rock.

Tina: Finally, he said 'You going to have to sing it, so you may as well like it.' So I started to listen to rock.

* * *

"They are really making it now," says Krasnow. "Really. Everytime 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 him on the Andy Williams Love show. We had dinner afterwards, 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 $1000 a night when you can get $20,000 now?' I mean, he was just touring himself out." Ike himself 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 and 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 now apparent is that in Africa or in Hollywood, in bowling alleys or in the Casino Lounge of the Hotel International, the Ike and 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 Inspiration," 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 pre-greased ... 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 on stage. How could I stand on stage, 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 ol' 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 is giving me 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, can you guess, 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 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.'"