MusicObituaryIke Turner
Musician and ex-husband of Tina Turner who pioneered rock'n'rollThe transformation of his ex-wife Tina into a superstar inevitably overshadowed the career of Ike Turner, who has died aged 76.
In addition, the movie biography of Tina, What's Love Got To Do With It, permanently damaged his reputation with its depiction of him as a drug-crazed wifebeater. Even so, his own contribution to the history of soul and R&B was significant.
Turner was born Izear Turner in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi delta. Widely regarded as the "home of the blues" (and now the site of the Delta Blues Museum), Clarksdale worked its magic on him from a young age. At eight years old, he began dabbling as a DJ at the Clarksdale radio station WROX. Then he learned to play piano in the boogie-woogie style from local musician Pinetop Perkins, and soon found himself rubbing shoulders with famous local bluesmen, playing piano behind Sonny Boy Williamson when he was 11.
In 1951, Turner earned his first footnote in musical history when he masterminded the creation of Rocket 88, often cited as one of the very first rock'n'roll records. Although it was credited to Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, the band on the track was Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, where Elvis Presley would make his early hits, the song's raucous instrumental arrangement, capped with Brenston's debauched vocals, was evidence of Turner's instinctive grasp of the new musical medium.
He began to learn the guitar soon afterwards, and featured regularly on recording sessions at Sun throughout the early 1950s, backing such eminences of blues and R&B as Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy.
Turner possessed a powerful entrepreneurial streak, and doubled up as a talent scout for the Los Angeles-based Modern Records, bringing to the label Howlin' Wolf, Junior Parker and BB King, among others.
He moved his band to East St Louis in the mid-1950s and began to develop a revue-style show featuring several vocalists. One of these was the teenaged Anna Mae Bullock, who first met Turner in 1956. By 1958 they were married and in 1964 had a son, Ronald (Ike already had two sons from his first marriage to Lorraine Taylor). At Ike's urging, Anna renamed herself Tina and cut her first disc as lead vocalist in A Fool in Love, in 1960. Its chart success announced Tina's huge untapped potential, prompting Ike to rebuild his act around Tina and rename it the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.
They pumped out a string of R&B hits over the next few years, mostly written by Ike, including I Idolise You, Poor Fool and Tra La La La La, and built a reputation as a powerful live attraction on the so-called Chitlin' circuit of the eastern and southern US. However, Ike developed a cocaine habit, which exaggerated his already overbearing personality traits. In her autobiography I, Tina, his wife would later describe how he beat her regularly and burned her with cigarettes. Ike tried to suggest that her claims were exaggerated, and offered his own version in his 2001 autobiography Takin' Back My Name. He argued: "There have been times when I punched [Tina] to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her" - a distinction possibly too subtle for many readers.
Nonetheless, the partnership continued to be one of the hottest in showbusiness, albeit one based more on their tumultuous live performances than on chartbusting records. Though Ike created a top 20 hit by recording I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song) with their backing singers the Ikettes in 1962, hit singles featuring Tina would be thin on the ground for the next few years. However, the 1965 album Live! The Ike and Tina Turner Show, caught the revue at full blast in Texas.
In 1966 producer Phil Spector masterminded one of Tina's finest moments, the stupendous single River Deep, Mountain High, but to Ike's disgust Spector refused to allow him anywhere near the recording sessions. In September that year, Ike and Tina were invited to join a Rolling Stones tour in the UK, and in 1969 the Stones contacted them again to offer them the opening slot on their American tour. Ike noted the audience's enthusiasm for their pumped-up R&B, and cashed in by recording Turner-ised covers of rock songs including the Beatles' Come Together and, especially, Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary. The latter became Ike and Tina's first US top 10 hit and their first million-selling single.
In July 1976, Tina walked out of their band and their marriage. They were divorced two years later. Ike found it difficult to cope. He stopped touring in order to run his LA studio, Bolic, then went back on the road with a new band which had difficulty in recreating the glories of the Tina years.
In 1982 his studio burned down, and he lapsed into a dismal period of drug-related offences during which he was arrested 11 times. In 1990 he was jailed for four years in California for driving under the influence of cocaine, thus missing his and Tina's joint induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was released from prison that September into the custody of Twanna Melby, a daughter from one of his many unspecified relationships (Ike claimed to have been married as many as a dozen times, but was only verifiably wedded to two further wives. Ann Thomas and Jeanette Bazell). In an interview with Variety magazine, he pronounced that he had spent $11m on cocaine before kicking the habit in prison.
The What's Love Got To Do With It film in 1993 was badly timed for Ike, hampering his efforts to reassemble his life and career. He later claimed he had been coerced into selling his rights over how he was portrayed on screen for $45,000. "You have to have a villain and you have to have a hero, so I was the villain," he argued.
But he would not quit. He rebuilt his Kings of Rhythm band, and in 1999 published Takin' Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner, which included such sensational episodes as an account of being sexually molested by a woman during his pre-teen years, and watching his father being lynched. His album Here and Now was nominated for a Grammy in 2001 - the same year in which he was inducted into the St Louis Walk of Fame - and in 2007 Risin' with the Blues won Ike the Grammy for best traditional blues release.
In an unexpected reversal of fortune, Los Angeles police had to apologise to him in May 2007 after an expired drugs-related warrant still lurking on a police computer prompted his wrongful arrest.
He is survived by girlfriend Audrey Madison, and by three sons and two daughters.
ยท Izear Luster Turner, singer, born November 5 1931; died December 12 2007
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