Tina Turner Page 5

  Ike loved to hang out in pool halls, even as a boy. He would go there with his friend Ernest. That’s where he first heard Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins play the boogie-woogie piano. It didn’t take much to convince Ike that playing some hot jazz music was sure a lot more fun than playing the classical piano pieces that he had been taught by his teacher. Recalls Ike, “Pinetop taught both me and Ernest to play” (14).

  Soon Ike joined his first band, The High Hatters. The star of the show was a trombone-playing dentist named Dr. E. G. Mason. They would play in bars, at juke joints, parties, and local dances. Around 1948, when The High Hatters split up, the musicians who were more professional and could actually read music formed their own group called The Dukes of Swing. The less sophisticated, but younger and more aggressive guys formed their own group, which they named The Kings of Rhythm.

  Ike recalls the long and extensive gigs they would land. “We played juke joints,” he says. “We’d start playing at 8 p.m. and wouldn’t get off till 8 A.M.—no intermission, no breaks. If you had to go to the restroom, well, that’s how I learned to play drums and guitar! When one had to go, someone had to take his place” (14).

  Ike had big dreams of stardom. Playing these nightspots, he would see all kinds of people come to hear the music. According to him, “I would see white guys pull up with their little white girls in their father’s car with the mink stole, and I’d say, ‘Oh boy, one of these days I’m going to be like that’ ” (5).

  One night, The Kings of Rhythm went into a blues club in Chambers, Mississippi, where the headliner was B. B. King. Six years older than Ike, King too was a local star, and he had quite a following due to the fact that he had records out. After King had played the set, the club invited Ike and The Kings of Rhythm to play a set of their music. When they were finished, B. B. King told Ike that he had a hot band and that he should start recording.

  It wasn’t long before they did just that. Ike went to Memphis and paid the founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips, to record his group. Three years later, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley also came to Phillips to record a song for his mother’s birthday—and so began one of the biggest success stories in all of music history. But that’s a whole different story.

  The song that Ike’s band recorded that day was “Rocket 88,” which Turner wrote with the man who was then singing with the group—a man named Jackie Brenston. Originally, Ike tried to do the lead vocal but had less than successful results.

  Sam Phillips recalls, “I listened to Ike sing in the studio, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I just didn’t hear him as a singer. The inflections weren’t there, the phrasing, none of it. But he was a whale of a damn musician—one of the best piano players that I had heard up to that time. So, he told me that Jackie could sing, and that’s when we cut ‘Rocket 88’ ” (4).

  Ike was later to complain, “Sam Phillips put Jackie Brenston’s name on there, but not mine, with the excuse that he was going to record me, and he didn’t want to put two records out with Ike Turner’s name on it” (15).

  When “Rocket 88” came out in 1951 on Chess Records by “Jackie Brenston & The Dixie Cats,” it became a No. 1 hit on the nation’s rhythm & blues music charts. In fact, it is often credited as being the first true rock & roll record.

  Trying to explain the sound of the song, in his own rough style, Ike says, “I didn’t go in there to try to cut nothin’ different. To me, ‘Rocket 88’ is rhythm & blues and boogie-woogie combined” (15).

  Jackie Brenston was convinced that he was now a big singing star, and he promptly quit The Kings of Rhythm. Through a chance meeting at a B. B. King recording session, Ike was introduced to a man named Joe Bahari, who was the owner of Modern/RPM Records. Soon Turner was working for Bahari, scouting out new blues talent for Bahari’s label to record.

  While all of this was going on, Ike continued to play with The Kings of Rhythm. Setting the blueprint for the act that was eventually known as “The Ike & Tina Turner Revue,” in 1952 Turner released a single called “My Heart Belongs to You” backed with “Looking for My Baby.” It was accredited to “Bonnie & Ike Turner” on vocals.

  The following year, four more tracks were recorded under the name of “Ike & Bonnie Turner.” The recordings went nowhere. It seemed that Ike was a great musician, but no one really liked his singing.

  Indeed, Ike’s singing voice, as heard on some of the later Ike & Tina albums, is not at all distinctive or pleasant to hear. It is flat, thin, and lacks any resonance. He wrote and played great music, but he could not sing.

  In 1953, the latest incarnation of the group featured a pianist named Bonnie Mae Wilson and a singer named Johnny O’Neal. In a pattern that he would later repeat, he married Bonnie, and they continued to play music together. Before long, Bonnie retired from the stage and worked in the business end of Ike’s budding musical operation. However, Ike’s marriage to Bonnie ended not long afterward.

  Over the next three years, Ike and his Kings of Rhythm were quite busy, appearing on dozens of singles for Sun, Modern, RPM, and Federal Records.

  By 1956, Ike had a singer named Billy Gayle in the band as its featured singer, and they recorded a hit for Federal Records called “I’m Tore Up.” Again, as soon as the record was a hit, Gayle also left the band. There seemed to be quite a pattern of events already set. Ike desperately longed to find a singer who would stay with him.

  The night that Anna Mae Bullock came to see Ike, she was transfixed by what she saw and heard on stage. Ike had a stage routine where he would invite pretty women in the audience to sing with the band. A microphone on a long cord was passed around, and—naturally—some women had great voices, while others couldn’t sing a note. Watching the show that night, Anna knew that she could out-sing all of the women she heard on the microphone, and she longed for the opportunity to demonstrate her vocal skill.

  Tina recalls, “I heard Ike Turner for the first time; I saw Ike Turner for the first time. And I really wanted to sing with him for a very long time, but I didn’t look the part” (16).

  Not only did Ike Turner have a reputation as a great musician and an accomplished talent scout, but he also had a track record for notorious violence and a short-fused temper. “He had a bad reputation. He was known as ‘pistol-whipping Ike Turner,’ ” says Tina (5).

  But she was undeterred. “I was a fan. Well, I became a fan after seeing his show, and great musicians—they really rocked the houses. It was incredible,” she proclaims (16).

  Watching these amateur would-be-singers having their sing-along moment of fame in the spotlight made Anna long for a chance to show Ike Turner what kind of singer she really was. “I wanted to get up there with those guys,” she vividly remembers. “They had people on their feet. That place was rocking! I needed to get up there with that energy” (5).

  Anna was an instant fan of Ike Turner & The Rhythm Kings, and she and Alline and their girlfriends would spend nearly every Saturday night club-hopping from Club D’Lisa to Club Manhattan. They went to so many shows that the two Bullock sisters became friendly with a couple of the members of the band. In fact, Alline eventually started dating the band’s drummer, Gene Armstrong.

  Then, one fateful night, Anna Mae Bullock got her chance at the microphone. According to her, “It was the story of Ike discovering a talent. I had wanted to get on-stage with him before—was just dying to get up there, because of the musical attraction, you know. But I was always this kind of very skinny girl, and I didn’t look the part, so I was never called. And then, finally, my sister was dating the drummer, and he was teasing her ‘cause he knew that she couldn’t sing. He gave her the microphone, and she passed it on to me, and I started to sing. . . . I did a song of B. B. King’s. And that was how Ike recognized me” (7).

  The song she sang was B. B.’s recent recording “You Know I Love You.” Ike Turner was completely blown away after he heard Anna’s voice. He was so startled that he stopped playing the organ, got off the stage, came o
ver to Anna, and picked her up in the air.

  As Tina recounts, “Everyone came running in to see who the girl was that was singing. Then Ike came down. He was real shy. He said, ‘I didn’t know you could really sing!’ ” (6). He then asked her what other songs she knew.

  Anna told him that she knew all of the songs by Willie John and several other songs currently being played on the radio. Ike took Anna up on the stage and had her sing song after song for him, and for the audience.

  “And I got onstage with Ike, and I was, of course, very excited. Very competent, because I’ve been a singer all my life,” recalls Tina (7).

  When Ike asked her to tell him her name, she told him, “Anna.” She was so young and skinny that he called her “Little Ann.” After the show, Ike told Anna all about his band and his problems with singers leaving him as soon as their records become hits. “My problem, Little Ann, is people always took my songs” he claimed. He was so impressed with Anna’s singing voice that he asked her to start singing semi-regularly with his band. She was elated. As she explains of her trajectory up onto the stage, “When I got there, Ike was shocked, and never let go” (5).

  On that particular night, why was it Anna that so eagerly took the microphone, and Alline gladly passed it up? Why didn’t Alline sing? As sisters, they surely must have had similar voices. According to Tina, she always had this fire inside of her, and Alline simply did not. “Some people have it naturally and don’t have to really work on it, but I did, and I’m happy I did. My sister and I were totally different. She was very slow and I was always very fast” (12). Anna’s own talent was something that was deep inside of her, and it was unique. “Then I started singing regularly on weekends. I was still in high school,” says Tina (7).

  However, it wasn’t as easy as all that. Anna naturally accepted his offer, but she knew that her mother would have a fit if she found out that her daughter was singing with the most notorious womanizer of a musician in East St. Louis. For a short while, Anna was able to keep it all a secret from her mother.

  Then, one afternoon, a big Cadillac pulled up in front of the house where Anna lived, and out stepped a woman named Annie Mae Wilson. She knocked on the door, and Zelma answered it. Annie asked where Anna was, because she was late for her rehearsal. Well, the cat was out of the bag now. When Anna Mae returned to the house from swimming with a friend, her mother confronted her about singing with Ike Turner’s band. She slapped her across the face with the back of her hand and asked if she had been singing at nightclubs. After all, she was only seventeen years old. Anna admitted that it was true.

  Her mother then told her that she thought Anna was going to become a nurse, not a nightclub singer—with Ike Turner no less. Anna told Zelma that she would much rather be a singer. Her mother’s reply to her was, “No more singing—don’t even ask” (1).

  For a while that edict stood as law. But before long, Ike Turner himself showed up at the house to talk to Zelma. It seemed that he was in a jam again and he really needed a singer for his band. Dressed up smartly in a sharp Ban-Lon shirt and gabardine pants, he had totally charmed Anna’s mother by the time he was finished. He promised that he would personally take care of Little Ann and make sure that nothing happened to her. With that, Zelma relented and Anna Mae started singing with The Kings of Rhythm on a regular basis.

  Without a doubt, Anna Mae Bullock had a wonderful and very different voice, even back then. According to her, “When I started to sing with Ike, I was basically patterning myself after most of the male singers that I was around, like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. When I started singing, there were more male singers than female. I think my voice is heavy because my mother’s voice is quite low, as is my sister’s. I think the raspiness in my voice is the natural sound. But the style really came from mimicking and copying my surroundings. Mine is not a pretty voice. Actually, it sounds ugly sometimes. I don’t like to sing ‘sing’ that much. The pretty way of singing is not my style. I don’t enjoy singing pretty songs. I like them rough, rocky, and rock & roll because it suits my type of voice” (10).

  For a while, Anna Mae felt that she was suddenly Cinderella. It was all too exhilarating to find herself suddenly in the spotlight. “I became like a star. I felt real special. Ike went out and bought me stage clothes—a fur, gloves up to here, costume jewelry and bareback pumps, the glittery ones; long earrings and fancy form-fitting dresses. And I was wearing a padded bra. I thought I was so sharp. And riding in this Cadillac Ike had then—a pink Fleetwood with the fish fins. I swear, I felt like I was rich! And it felt good” (6).

  Ike began to mold Anna into the kind of star he knew she could be. He paid for her to go to the dentist to fix her long-neglected teeth. He even bought her a gold tooth, which made her instantly feel like somebody special. “I was having a dental problem, and my mother didn’t have money at that point for dental work. He corrected all that. And then I was a little star around him. I was loyal to this man. He was good to me,” says Tina (5).

  She remembers, “There were three dresses, the gloves, the bare-back shoes and the stockings with the seam in the back. That was, you know, really grown-up clothes. And I was very excited, riding in a pink Cadillac. I’ve always been crazy about movie stars. I felt like I was Bette Davis or somebody. I had my chin up and all of that. But I outgrew that pretty quickly” (7).

  It seemed like a dream come true to be working for Ike and the band. “Ike had some kind of innate quality about him that you really loved him. And if he liked you, he would take the clothes from his back, so to speak. I was there because I wanted to be. Ike Turner was allowing me the chance to sing. I was a little country girl from Tennessee. This man had a big house in St. Louis, and he had a Cadillac, money, diamonds, shoes—all of the stuff that a different class of blacks would look up to” (5).

  And Ike was completely knocked out by Anna’s talent. “I could sing his songs the way he heard them in his head,” she claims (1). “I was a singer; Ike was not. I—I felt his pain, because he had—he wanted so badly to be a star, you know?” (12). However, she also got a good look at what his personal life was like.

  She knew, right up front, that Ike was every inch the womanizer his reputation had fostered. According to her, “Oh, God, I remember some nights when he would have maybe six girlfriends in the house, and he would stay up there and call his wife to come to the club that night—it was the only way they could save him” (6).

  Anna harbored no desires to have Ike Turner as her man. She was not interested in him in that way. After all, he was still legally married, was heavily involved with one woman, and had a string of girlfriends on the side. Anna didn’t want to get entangled in all of that. She was a singer, he was the bandleader, and they were great friends. He was able to confide in her like a buddy or a sister. She was happy to have their relationship remain this way.

  As she saw it, “Ike was very good to me when I first started my career. I was in high school and started to sing weekends with him, and we were close friends. We had a very fun life in some kind of way” (16).

  Often Ike would complain to Anna how he felt that everyone deserted him right before he was about to make it really big. Anna knew a lot about being deserted. She could totally empathize with him. “He was brokenhearted because every time he got a hit record on somebody, of course they got to be the star,” she recalls. “The man was very nice and very generous to me. Way before our relationship started, I promised him that I wouldn’t leave him” (8).

  In the 1960s she was to go on and record such Ike Turner compositions as “Tina’s Prayer” and “A Letter from Tina.” Her first year with Ike and The Kings of Rhythm could have been another such song, which could have been entitled “Tina’s Promise.” It was a promise she fully intended to keep—a vow of non-desertion. It was a vow that no one else in her young life had ever made to her. And it was promise that was to haunt her for years to come.

  But for now, Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, was a singing star.
And she was still in high school! Finally, for the first time in her life, she felt like she was somebody. She had a place to belong, people in her life who cared about her as a friend, and a job that she had only fantasized about one day having. Suddenly, her life had gone from horrible to wonderful. For the moment—at the age of seventeen—she was living “Little Ann’s Dream.”

  4

  SEXY ANN

  Anna Mae Bullock was not in love with Ike Turner at the beginning of their relationship. She loved him as a friend, and she loved singing on stage with his band, but it was never intended to be a love affair. The first year that she was the featured singer with The Kings of Rhythm, she felt for the first time in her life that her dreams and goals could actually come true. In her mind, Ike Turner was the man who had rescued her from a dismal and unhappy life. He was her friend, and she trusted him implicitly. Yet she knew full well the rumors about him. She saw with her own eyes how unfaithful he was to the women in his life with whom he was romantically linked. He didn’t have a love life so much as he had a harem of transfixed women.

  Anna didn’t care—after all, she wasn’t involved with him in that way. “I happen to have been a ‘friend’ of Ike Turner’s in those early days. I stepped in as a high-school girl just coming from Tennessee,” she recalls. (8)

  What she felt was gratitude. “Since he had been so good to me, I thought, ‘Well, I will—I will give that—that favor back.’ So that’s what all the singing was, in spite of the fact that he felt that it was—that a relationship was needed, actually, to keep me. But our friendship could have done it, actually” (12).