A Big Wheel Turns Again

“Here and Now” is one of the year’s most striking albums, a tour de force that offers the raw command of the great R&B; and blues records that helped shape the early boundaries of rock ‘n’ roll half a century ago.

So why do I feel defensive recommending the album?

It’s by Ike Turner.

Whoa!

Most of the women I know, including my wife and grown daughter, recoil at the name. Many men also view Turner as a social leper of sorts.

They can’t forgive him for the beatings reported by ex-wife Tina Turner in her 1986 autobiography, “I, Tina,” and the related 1993 film, “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”

Is that fair?

Should those events, some of which Ike Turner denies, disqualify this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member from a place on the contemporary pop scene?

It’s been 25 years since Tina left Ike, who was zonked out of his head on cocaine for much of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was only after an 18-month prison term for cocaine charges in the early ‘90s that he broke the addiction and began putting his life back together.

Turner spent most of the last decade trying to rebuild his confidence as a musician--and waiting for a record executive willing to overlook his tarnished image.

He found that benefactor in Robert Johnson, who owns Bottled MaJic Music, a Connecticut-based company that runs three boutique roots-music labels.

“I believe Ike is one of the pantheon figures of the modern popular music era and I wanted to meet him to see if he was still vital,” says Johnson, a former speech writer for U.S. Sens. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and William Proxmire (D-Wis.).

“When I went to see him at his house in San Marcos, I was worried that he’d be a bitter, beaten man, but I found this warm, magnetic personality. You could feel that he was ready to get back to creating again. He had all this pent-up energy, like a coiled spring. But we were both fully aware that he faced a tremendous obstacle in terms of the image he has in the aftermath of the movie.”

San Marcos, north of San Diego near Carlsbad, is so sleepy and nondescript a town that it would be perfect for anyone in the federal Witness Protection Program. It’s easy to picture Turner hiding away and nursing his wounds in his modest, four-bedroom house.

But he’s surprisingly upbeat as he stands in a photo-filled den amid the recording equipment he used to make the new album. Rather than try to disappear in anonymity, he has customized plates on his Mercedes: IKE REVU (for the old Ike & Tina Turner Revue). He’s living in San Marcos not to hide out, but because he likes the weather and the peace and quiet of the area.

“My life is better today than it has ever been,” boasts an energized Turner, 69. “There was a time when I didn’t do anything except sit in the studio and do cocaine and party. I had cocaine in big bowls. People would come in and scoop it up. It was a 15-year party. I know now that it was all a waste.

“I used to pray to God to just give me three days without the stuff so I could stop, but I would always come up with some excuse to continue. Jail was a blessing in disguise because it finally enabled me to stop and get my life back on track. Now, I’m movin’ again.”

The great misconception in the Ike & Tina story is that Ike rode into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Tina’s coattails.

The truth is that if the two had never met, he would have stood an infinitely greater chance of being inducted than she would have, because their act was largely his creation. That’s not to downplay Tina’s immense talent, but simply to underscore Ike’s legacy.

His induction in 1991 wasn’t just warranted--it was overdue, as Robert Palmer, the late blues historian, pointed out in a 1993 essay in The Times. Turner was a first-level talent scout, record producer, pianist, guitarist, songwriter and rock auteur whose legacy began long before the high-energy Ike & Tina Revue.

The photos in Turner’s den form a gallery of the many musicians and record producers who worked with him. There’s a photo of Ike and Pinetop Perkins, the barrelhouse pianist who taught Ike his aggressive style. There’s another of Ike with Sam Phillips, owner of the studio where Turner recorded “Rocket 88,” the 1951 single that some historians claim was the first true rock ‘n’ roll hit. And, somewhat surprisingly, there are lots of pictures of Ike and Tina.

“She was part of my life. No matter what happened, we were a team,” he says softly.

Izear Luster Turner Jr. was born on Nov. 5, 1931, in Clarksdale, Miss., the same Delta town that was home to such blues giants as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. And Ike’s early years certainly prepared him to sing the blues.

He was 5 when he watched, horrified, as some white men dragged his father from the family house, and beat and kicked him so badly that he was left with a hole in his stomach. He eventually died of the injuries. The dispute, Ike says, had something to do with a woman. At 6, he claims, he was sexually molested by an older woman. He also had a rebellious streak and developed quite a reputation as a fighter.

His passion was music, and his mother, a seamstress, bought him a piano when he was 7. He played it endlessly and formed the Kings of Rhythm band during high school. He patterned his sound after Louis Jordan and Amos Milburn, whose rollicking music was characterized by an upbeat, entertaining sound. Ike wanted to see the crowd move when he played.

Ike and his band so impressed a young B.B. King one night when they shared the stage that the guitarist introduced Ike to Phillips, who was recording blues artists in Memphis and then leasing the records to major labels in Los Angeles and Chicago.

Three years before Phillips released Elvis Presley’s first single, Phillips took Ike’s band into the studio and cut “Rocket 88,” a novelty that Turner and his band wrote while driving to Memphis for the session. Turner was so shy that he had another band member, saxophonist Jackie Brenston, handle the vocal.

Phillips took the upbeat boogie-woogie number to Dewey Phillips, the Memphis disc jockey with a nightly show who would be the first to play Elvis’ debut single.

“Dewey never played black music until ‘Rocket 88,’ but Sam talked him into it and the white kids loved it,” Turner says. “That’s where Sam got the idea about making a million bucks if he could find a white kid who could sing this black music. You can ask Sam, he’ll tell you.”

Phillips leased the song to Chess Records, where it became the No. 1 R&B; single in the country for five weeks in spring 1951. Turner only earned about $20 for the session, and the record didn’t even carry his name. Phillips credited it to Brenston because he was the singer.

Turner spent the next few years working for several labels in a variety of roles, including talent scout, musician and producer. Among the artists he was associated with were such future hall of famers as King, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Ace and Junior Parker.

He moved in the mid-’50s to the St. Louis area. There he met and married Annie Mae Bullock, who as Tina Turner would become the hardest-working woman in show business, a female equivalent to James Brown.

Clad in dresses as skimpy as the law allowed, Tina shook her hips with intoxicating force to some of the most irresistibly sexy beats this side of Prince.

Tina was the star of the act, but Ike was the guiding force. They had a series of pop and R&B; hits, including “A Fool in Love,” “Nutbush City Limits” and a version of John Fogerty’s “Proud Mary.” But the revue’s greatest effect was live. Many felt it upstaged the mighty Jagger and Richards on the 1969 tour with the Rolling Stones.

But the seeds of destruction were already planted in the pair’s relationship. Ike, who has been married a staggering 13 times, was a notorious womanizer, often carrying on in full view of Tina. It was physical abuse, however, that apparently caused her to leave him in 1976.

While she eventually prospered on her own, Ike floundered, lost in a haze of drugs. He was in a San Luis Obispo prison dorm the night he and Tina were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One of Ike’s daughters, Tawanna, accepted the award for him.

By the time the movie “What’s Love Got to Do With It” was released, Ike was through with drugs but still plagued by self-doubt. He was a spectacular pianist and an inventive guitarist, but he had never been the lead singer because of his shyness.

As he sat in the house in San Marcos at the time, he talked about finding a new singer and putting together a new revue, but nothing came of it. The movie seemed to have sapped him of his confidence.

“I’ve been through hell since that damn movie came out,” he says, showing a flash of anger as he sits in his den. “I can’t go around and tell everybody, ‘Hey, man, that’s not me in the movie.’ They see the bad, they don’t see the good. They don’t read Vanity Fair, where Tina said she hated the movie because they took things out of context. They just see where this guy punches the woman.

“Tina was a good thing for women’s lib because she’s someone who came from an abusive relationship and she went to success. But they made me into something I’m not.”

While Turner is out of the room, I ask his current girlfriend if she recognizes the man portrayed in the film. Audrey Madison, a singer who gives her age only as “thirtysomething,” says no. Asked what she’d do if he ever hit her, she replies, “I’d say bye-bye.”

James Clayton Jr., an attorney who is one of Turner’s closest friends, lives in nearby Leucadia and stops by often to see Ike.

“If I thought the media was right in portraying this man as evil, I would never come over here,” he says when asked about the controversy surrounding Turner. “I’m not going to mention names, but there are some artists out there who have done really bad things to people and they aren’t stigmatized the way Ike is. I’m not saying it’s racism, but people have to look in their own hearts and figure out why they are prejudging this beautiful person today.”

The testimonial embarrasses Turner, and he switches on his electric keyboard and plays some notes to drown out his friend’s words.

Asked if he thinks the continuing stigma will make it hard for his album to get a fair hearing, however, Turner snaps to attention. He walks across the room to pick up some sheets of paper that list more than 200 radio stations around the country that are playing “Here and Now.” It’s proof, he suggests, that he can win in the court of public opinion.

But the stations are mostly low-rated outlets, not enough to push the album onto the national airplay or sales charts.

After a month in the stores, “Here and Now” has sold just 3,500 copies.

Turner has scored with critics, however, and he logs on to his Web site and calls up some of the favorable quotes. He plays a tape of his recent appearance on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” where the audience cheers his performance of “Gave You What You Wanted,” one of the standout tracks on the album.

“I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress,” he says. “It’s like I’m getting another chance, and I’m going to show people what I have to offer.”

His goal, he says, is to bring his type of black music to the airwaves.

“There’s not enough sides to black music today,” he says. “Among the whites, you have country music, rock, pop, bluegrass, but hip-hop and rap is about all there is for blacks. There’s no more Jackie Wilson, no more Sam Cooke, no more Ray Charles on the radio. I’ve got nothing against rap, except for some of the [misogynistic] language is pretty extreme.”

I mention that many of his detractors would be surprised to hear him standing up for women, but he doesn’t see the irony in it.

At the end of the interview, Turner hands me a copy of his book, “Takin’ Back My Name.” It was published in 1999 in England and contains a foreword by Little Richard that lauds Turner as the real innovator behind R&B; and rock ‘n’ roll.

But it’s his story, his answer to Tina’s book and movie, that he wants to share. “This may help you understand,” he says.

I don’t know what Ike was like in the drug days, but he seems very much in control now. You can see the energy and charm that made label owner Johnson want to work with him. Before leaving, I congratulate Turner again on his album and wish him luck on his fall tour, which is expected to cover 40 cities.

So it’s startling later when I read Ike’s book and find page after page detailing the womanizing that must have been humiliating to Tina. And there’s a bigger surprise: the admissions that he sometimes hit Tina.

“Sure, I’ve slapped Tina,” he writes with co-author Nigel Cawthorne. “We had fights and there have been times when I punched her without thinking. But I never beat her. Man, my mother was a woman. I loved my mother. I did no more to Tina than I would mind somebody doing to my mother in the same circumstances.”

Ike sees some dividing line between his actions and those in the film, but it’s a distinction likely to be lost on others.

I call Johnson a few days later to ask about the book, and he sighs. “My impression is the pinnacle scene in the movie is the rape in the sound booth, and that’s something that Ike swears never happened,” Johnson says. “I think that’s one of the places Ike feels the movie crossed the line.”

Wherever that line was drawn, Johnson thinks Ike is a different person today.

“I saw something I liked in Ike when I first met him, and I’ve seen him blossom even more in recent months,” Johnson added. “You can look in his eyes when he’s on stage and see just how much the audience response touches him.

“The day he and Pinetop Perkins played at the Chicago Blues Festival [in June] people just went bananas. When Ike left the stage they were chanting, ‘We like Ike. We like Ike.’ That was something he wondered if he’d ever hear again.”