The World's Greatest Heartbreaker

"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 lo 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, president of Blue Thumb, knew Ike and Tina from their association with Warner Brothers' 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 and Tina, which was finally re-released 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 stars-Boccaccio '70 or something. And he shot them in front of that big teardrop. Then the gas company, had a big sign, and Hooper took them there and shot them in front of a big burner."

On stage, 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 had never been captured on records. She purrs like a kitten on record, but she's wild on stage. 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 whole 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 unbottoned, 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 ... 13 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 writers' 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 own 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 PM 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 100 chicks wrapped up together. And she's so straight, it's ridiculous.

"As for Ike ... Ike was not into dope at all until three, four 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 can 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 first deal-bought $3000 of cocaine from King Curtis, and he bought it and showed me, and I laughed and said, 'That's no 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."