The World's Greatest Heartbreaker

ys, "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 and 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-that 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 and 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 Yorkbased 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 and Tina toured with the Stones, and the next time Ike talked with Liberty, Liberty was talking about $150,000 a year guarantee, for 2 albums a year. Ike signed in January, 1970.

"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, 1971. 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 and Tina's final home. Ike Turner must produce those two albums a year, and UA has no choice but to promote its ass off.

* * *

Ike's head is on one woman's lap; his kneesocked 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 him-shows 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 AM, 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."

"Three, four years ago, they were playing a club," Trager recalls, "and Rhonda had a cigar box at the door. And one dollar would go into the box, one dollar to the club. At Basin Street West he got cash all the time."

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."