Ike Turner Looking for Other Peaks to Reach

“I want my career. Just give me my career, and you can have everything else . . . the drugs, the women. . . . “

Ike Turner, the other half of the celebrated Ike & Tina Turner pop saga, was speaking by phone earlier this week from the Schick Shadel Hospital in Santa Barbara, where he said he was undergoing treatment for the cocaine addiction that has plagued him since 1970.

“I have a lot in me to give, and I’m going to give it,” the 56-year-old musician said confidently. “I’m not bragging, but I have a lot of talent. I have more talent than you can dream of.”

Turner, whose early rock and R & B accomplishments have been largely overshadowed by his ex-wife Tina’s spectacular success in the ‘80s, has reasons to be optimistic. Although the guitarist and band leader’s drug misadventures have become so widely chronicled that he’s the butt of a joke in “Clean and Sober,” a new Michael Keaton film set in a detox center, there is now an ambitious and highly orchestrated effort under way to revive Turner’s career.

Among the projects planned: a new record album, an autobiographical book (tentative title “I, Ike: The Flipside,” a play on his wife’s hit book, “I, Tina”) and a companion TV movie.

The road back, Turner says, began last summer when the musician stepped into the offices of Starforce Entertainment in Beverly Hills, carrying master tapes of some of his old recordings, including “Proud Mary.”

Turner was just hoping to get some money for the tapes, but the company’s partners--veteran television writer and producer Stanley B. Herman and former Kama Sutra Records executive Hy Mizrahi--saw an opportunity.

Recalled Herman: “I said, ‘Hy, Tina’s getting so much publicity. I think what we ought to do is talk some sense into Ike and resurrect his career.’ ”

A deal was struck that included Starforce buying future recordings and the book and movie rights to Turner’s life story. (Tina’s book is currently being turned into a TV movie by Disney, which has paid Ike a fee for the use of his likeness.)

Why would Herman and Mizrahi take a chance on someone who had fallen so far--someone who is now appealing a sentence of one year in jail and three years probation in connection with a March 18 cocaine possession conviction?

“Even though Ike was a rogue, he’s still a music man,” said Herman, claiming that Turner’s new material and his singing are on a par with his strongest work. “It’s unbelievable. There’s more soul in his voice now. He’s singing from the heart.”

On the matter of Turner’s reliability, Bunny Johnson, a singer who is the musician’s business manager, said in a separate interview: “I was talking to him last night and he said the craving (for cocaine) is gone. Right now, he’s trying to secure himself with his music. He’s a very hurt man, and it’s surprising how sensitive he is.”

“I’ve never told anyone this before,” Turner said in the telephone interview. “One time I put a Magnum in the roof of my mouth and snapped it, but God was with me ‘cause it didn’t shoot. The pin put a notch on the bullet, but it didn’t shoot. It must not have been my time.”

That incident, Turner said, was in 1982--as Tina was starting her comeback in England. But though thankful for his second chance, Turner, speaking from the substance abuse clinic, seemed anything but repentant

Throughout the conversation he tended to blame others--or the world at large--for his troubles, including drug arrests in 1985 and 1986. His troubled reputation, he maintained, is the result of the media blowing things out of proportion.

But his greatest peeve, and his strongest motivating factor at this time, is Tina. “I love Tina,” he said. “I will always love her, but I don’t like her at all. The Tina that’s there today, I don’t know her.”

A spokesman for Tina Turner said she was unavailable to comment.

It was Turner’s band, the Kings of Rhythm, that in 1951 recorded “Rocket 88”--considered by many to be the first true rock ‘n’ roll record. Turner also served as a talent scout for Memphis’ legendary Sun Records in the early ‘50s and later made some highly admired records on his own.

But his most dramatic career rise began in the late ‘50s after he discovered a young singer named Anna Mae Bullock, whom he married and rechristened Tina Turner. The steamy Ike and Tina Turner Revue became one of the most popular and influential R & B acts throughout the ‘60s and well into the ‘70s. But the partnership fell apart, and the couple were divorced in 1978.

Tina’s career made a dramatic comeback in the ‘80s, and the colorful singer, in interviews and her 1986 autobiography, painted a picture of Ike as an abusive, unfaithful tyrant of a husband and producer.

Ike feels that her portrait of their life together was unfair.

He’s even written a song, he said, in response to her Grammy-award winning hit “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” Turner says he will never release his musical response because he doesn’t want anybody to think he would “capitalize off of her.”

But Turner, who entered the Schick program two weeks ago and completed the residency portion Monday, did quote a particularly pointed verse from the song:

You say you didn’t know what love had to do with it

Why when you had it, you didn’t want to quit it?

Now you want to do me like the farmer do the potato

Want to plant me now and come back and dig me later.

In the interview, he added: “If I wanted to put her down I could, but that’s not my shtick. My music will speak for itself.”

Turner, who will return to the Schick center twice this month for follow-up treatment, acknowledges that the roots and causes of his downfall are now academic, and that only he can be responsible for getting back on the right track.

“All I can do is give my all and keep bumping into doors until someone accepts me and lets me in,” he said. “If they don’t, I may have to leave the U.S. and go to Germany, but I’m going to try it here.

“I’m sitting here right now, scared to get out of the hospital ‘cause I don’t know what lays before me. I’ve got to start from zero.”