Tina Turner Read online

  Still a senior in high school, the man that Anna Mae Bullock was in love with at the time was one of the men she had met through Ike. He was Raymond Hill, whose mother had owned a nightclub when he was growing up. At that time, Raymond was playing in Ike’s band. Anna liked Raymond a lot. His skin was light, or “yellow,” as she was to later describe him. Raymond was kind of quiet, compared to the other more rowdy musicians in The Kings of Rhythm.

  Anna Mae’s high school classmates noted the change in her appearance and the way she carried herself. The shy little country girl they met when she first came to St. Louis had been replaced with a more self-confident young woman. In fact she had a new nickname—they called her “Sexy Ann.”

  The next thing she knew, further changes came—in a big way—when she discovered that she was pregnant with Raymond’s baby. Anna assumed that since she was carrying his child, she and Raymond would eventually be getting married. However, that was not going to happen as Anna had hoped that it would.

  Every night after the shows, the band and the girls they were hanging out with would go back to Ike’s house in East St. Louis. There would be all-night parties and all sorts of drinking and horsing around. Tina confesses that she was a bit naive back then, “I guess they were parties, and I guess the girls went to bed with the guys, but I didn’t really know” (6). Since she was part of the entourage, eventually Anna moved into the house as well. It made sense, since she had no way of getting back to her mother’s late at night after shows.

  One night, in the bathroom of one of the clubs that the band was performing at, Raymond and one of the other band members—Carlson Oliver—got involved in a wrestling match, and 260-pound Carlson fell on Raymond’s ankle. They heard it crack, and they both hoped that it was only a sprain. Raymond wrapped the ankle in a tight bandage and went on stage and performed that night. However, the ankle seemed to be going from bad to worse. Several days later, Raymond had to go the hospital, where doctors confirmed that it was indeed a break.

  That was the end of Raymond being in The Kings of Rhythm. He packed his bags and returned to Clarksville. That was also the end of Anna Mae Bullock seeing Raymond Hill, the man whose baby she was carrying.

  Meanwhile, Ike Turner’s current girlfriend was a woman by the name of Lorraine Taylor. Lorraine’s father was a local sausage manufacturer. However, while Ike was dating and living with Lorraine, he was also sleeping with several other women. Lorraine was known to become insanely jealous of any woman who got close to Ike in any way. At the time, Lorraine was carrying Ike’s baby.

  Anna Mae was no threat to Lorraine as long as Raymond Hill was still in the picture. However, when Raymond left for home, there was “Little Ann,” living right there under the same roof—in Turner’s spacious house.

  Now that Anna Mae was pregnant, Lorraine’s instinctive radar made her suspect that perhaps it was actually Ike’s child that Anna was carrying.

  Late one night, drunken and distraught, Lorraine burst into Anna’s room, brandishing Ike’s loaded .38 pistol and an iron poker from the stove. With the gun to Anna’s head, Lorraine demanded to know whether or not Anna was sleeping with “Sonny.” Horrified, and innocent of these charges, Anna swore there was nothing going on between she and Ike.

  Disgusted by Anna’s presence, and only half believing her, Lorraine conceded out loud that Anna was so insignificant to her that she wasn’t “worth the bullet” (4). Still distraught, Lorraine went into the bathroom and locked herself inside. Suddenly the sound of the gun being shot shattered the silence from within the bathroom. Frightened, Anna went screaming for help. Lorraine had aimed the gun for her own chest. She ended up firing the bullet through both of her lungs. An ambulance was called, and a seriously bleeding Lorraine was taken away in a stretcher. Fortunately, Lorraine survived her gunshot wound. However, this was only the beginning of trouble at the house of Ike Turner.

  After that event, Anna moved back in with her mother, Zelma. She was less than thrilled that her teenage daughter had returned home, pregnant and unwed. In the spring of 1958, Anna graduated from high school. On August 20 of that same year, she gave birth to her son, Raymond Craig.

  On October 3, Lorraine too gave birth. Her baby, a son, was christened Ike Turner Jr.

  At this point, Anna Mae Bullock was no longer just a “featured” singer who would sing three or four songs with The Kings of Rhythm; she was the lead singer of the whole group. Ike was paying her fifteen dollars a week to perform with the band. To make more cash, Anna worked during the days in the maternity ward of the local Barnes Hospital. This gave her enough money to afford to rent her own tiny apartment, which she and infant Craig moved into. It also gave her enough money to afford a babysitter for Craig.

  Although the apartment that she rented near the Hoderman Tracks was surrounded by whorehouses and rib shacks, Barnes Hospital was in a nice section of town. In fact, it was a Jewish hospital, and its clientele was very wealthy.

  Working at Barnes really opened up Anna’s eyes to a whole new world. She was amazed to see women who had come there to have their babies, who lounged in their beds in satin nightgowns with fur collars. One day Anna walked into the ladies room, where she saw one of the women looking at her image in the mirror and applying flawless makeup. According to her, the woman looked beautiful and she was very happy about the birth of her baby.

  Anna found the woman fascinating. As they chatted, she showed Anna what she was doing with her mascara and her eyebrow pencil, demonstrating the latest technique. That very weekend, Anna purchased her first Maybelline pencil and mascara.

  Although she was no longer fascinated with the idea of being a nurse, Anna did enjoy her job at Barnes. She liked washing and taking care of the babies. However, after a while, the grind of holding a day job and then working all night as a singer with Ike’s band started to wear on her.

  Ike had a habit of always arguing with his musicians. If a musician was late, or missed a note, Ike would fine him, eliminating money from his paycheck. He needed someone to keep track of who had what infractions subtracted from their pay. Since Tina was good with numbers, she began keeping track of Ike’s books for him.

  When Ike raised her salary to twenty-five dollars a week, she and her baby, Craig, moved out of the apartment near the Hoderman Tracks and back into Ike Turner’s house. Tina recalls that’s how her personal relationship with Ike slowly began.

  Once Lorraine came back to the house with her baby, whatever jealousy she felt toward Anna had subsided. Since the atmosphere at Ike’s house was just like a big house party, often Anna would fall asleep on Ike and Lorraine’s bed, while all three of them were in it.

  During this period of time, Ike was still going into the recording studio, trying to recapture the success that he had with “Rocket 88” years before. However, he never quite found the right formula. Often, he and The Kings of Rhythm would be accompanying other lead singers, including Jackie Brenston (“You Keep on Worrying Me”), Tommy Hodge (“I’m Gonna Forget about You”), and Betty Everett (“Tell Me Darling”). On one such record, a song credited to Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, featuring Ike and Carl and entitled “Box Top,” Anna provided background vocals. This was to go down in history as her first recording experience.

  On some occasions, Ike would take Anna out with him when he was checking out new singers or other bands at the local clubs. He would talk to her about all of the blues music that he liked. Anna learned all about Big Mama Thornton and Howlin’ Wolf. In this way, Anna began to feel like Ike was her musical mentor.

  Tina would later recall that she felt like her relationship with Ike was that of “brother and sister.” Ike was still in a relationship with Lorraine, and there was another girlfriend of his in town named Pat, with whom he also had another child. Sometime around 1959, Lorraine and Ike broke up, and Ike was without a main lady in his life. This was when his roving eye landed on Anna Mae. According to Tina, the first time that he attempted to touch her sexually was in his car, o
n their way back from a club date. She remembers how wrong it felt to allow him to have his hands on her, but Ike was her Svengali, her mentor, so she just let it progress from there.

  One night, one of the musicians in the band threatened to come to Anna’s bed and have sex with her. She had no interest in this, so she went to Ike’s bed, wanting to sleep there for protection. When she woke up in the morning, Ike started fooling around with her in a sexual way, and one thing led to another. Since she thought of Ike as her older brother, this really felt wrong and taboo, but she let it happen. And that was the beginning of her sexual relationship with Ike Turner.

  What was it about Ike Turner that made all of these women interested in him? He certainly was not the most handsome guy. And his reputation for violence sure should have repelled most women. Still, he seemed to have a harem of girlfriends having sex with him and having babies out of wedlock with him. It seemed like none of the women in East St. Louis in the 1950s owned a box of condoms.

  Did the secret to Ike’s attraction lie in his pants? According to Tina, “I really didn’t like Ike’s body. I don’t give a damn how big his ‘member’ was. I think that must have been attractive to a lot of white women. I swear, the first time I saw Ike’s body, I though he had the body of a horse. It hung without an erection, it hung with an erection. He really was blessed, I must say, in that area. . . . Was he a good lover? What can you do except go up and down, or sideways, or whatever it is that you do with sex?” (5). Well, Ike Turner was certainly up to something in bed that women couldn’t seem to get enough of—and now Anna was caught up in it as well.

  As their newly established sexual relationship progressed, Anna started to fall in love with Ike. As she did, Lorraine came back in the picture. The next thing she knew, both she and Lorraine were pregnant—by Ike. Depressed, confused, and “addicted” to her relationship with Ike, Anna moved out of his house on Virginia Place.

  Expecting her second child, Anna and baby Craig moved into a small house in St. Louis. She found a woman nearby to take care of her baby while she worked.

  In addition to all of the St. Louis and East St. Louis club dates that The Kings of Rhythm were playing, Ike and Anna and the band were also performing at several college dances and fraternity parties.

  Anna was torn about her relationship with Ike during this period—circa 1959. Could she ever be more than just one of his many women? And did she actually want her relationship with him to be anything more than that? She could always quit the band and go back to work for the hospital. She began to weigh out her options. And there was also the fact that she was now carrying his baby.

  She was stuck between a rock and a hard place. “The mistake was when in some kind of way it became personal and [it] wasn’t my doing. . . . Had it not become personal, we would have possibly still been together today,” she claimed in 1997 (16).

  The longer she sang with the band and spent time with Ike, the more deeply entrenched in his world she became. “He was giving me money for singing. He went out and bought me clothes. . . . Something was going on—maybe the feeling he could protect me. That’s the kind of girl I am. If I go to bed with you, then you’re my boyfriend. It wasn’t love in the beginning; it was someone else who I found to give love to,” she claims (5).

  And how could she ever hope to successfully leave him and strike out on her own? She knew nothing about the music business: “I didn’t know anything else—or anybody else. And I wanted to sing” (1).

  Was there something so seductive and addicting about being on stage and feeling like a star? Explains Tina, “In the beginning, yes, very exciting in the beginning because to sing on stage, actually, to—the feeling to get on stage and sing, which is I think what every [one wants to do]—well, a lot of people want to do—to have that feeling. And that’s what it was in the beginning—it was fantastic!” (16).

  According to Tina, the relationship she was having with Ike both cemented their association with each other and simultaneously doomed it from the start. “We were very close friends, and then what ruined it, actually, was when our relationship became a reality, so to speak,” she recalls (12).

  As 1959 was coming to an end, and the 1960s were about to dawn, “Little Ann” was pregnant and emotionally torn. However, she also felt like a star when she was onstage singing for a cheering crowd. Although she described her affair with Ike Turner as an “addiction,” the real drug wasn’t “love” for Turner, it was love of performing. It was in her blood now, and there was no turning back.

  5

  JUST A FOOL IN LOVE

  Ike Turner and The Kings of Rhythm, along with “Little Ann,” were busy touring around the St. Louis area. They were very popular—as a local bar band. However, this wasn’t exactly mainstream success by any means. What the group really needed was a gimmick to set it apart from other bands. They also needed that elusive and all-important commodity—a hit record.

  The record that started it all was a song called “A Fool in Love.” However, it was not written for “Little Ann,” it was written for a singer by the name of Art Lassiter. While Ike wrote the song, and while he rehearsed it with Lassiter, Anna was right there by his side. So by the time the recording date approached, she knew the song backward and forward.

  Ike recalls lending Lassiter eighty dollars to purchase new tires for his car. Ike then booked Technosonic Recording Studio to record “A Fool in Love,” with Art singing the lead vocal. The studio time began, and there was no Art Lassiter. Apparently, Art took the eighty dollars, got the tires, and drove in the opposite direction with his brand new free wheels.

  Meanwhile in the recording studio, there sat Ike, the band, and Anna. The studio time was booked and paid for, so they had to do something. Ike decided to record the song, putting Anna’s voice on one track and the band on the other track. That way when Lassiter showed up, Anna’s voice could be taken off, and he could record the song as originally planned.

  Art never showed up, and Ike started taking the finished recording around to see if he could get a label to release it. He played it for a local St. Louis radio station disk jockey, and the D.J. in turn sent copies of the song out to several record labels. He got a very positive response and ultimately landed Ike a “singles” deal with New York–based Sue Records.

  Paranoid that “Little Ann” was going to leave him, he decided that he would make up a new stage name that could be put on the record. Of receiving her new name, Tina said, “Black women were very heavy in those days, with big hips and things. And I was very small, so I was ‘Little Ann.’ When my career started, Ike thought we had to get a name with a sound for the stage. He had a thing for the women in movies who swing on the vines—the jungle queens” (2). Ike chose the name “Tina” for “Little Ann,” because it rhymed with SHEENA, Queen of the Jungle, one of his favorite fictional heroines. And, from that point forward, the former Anna Mae Bullock was always to be known as “Tina Turner.”

  In the summer of 1960, the song “A Fool in Love” by Ike & Tina Turner was released by Sue Records and began its climb up the record charts. It made it to No. 2 on the rhythm & blues chart and No. 27 on the pop chart in Billboard magazine in the United States.

  The sound of Tina’s distinctive “whoooooaaaaaoooo” yelp that kicked off “A Fool in Love,” is one of the most distinctive on-record debuts from any rhythm & blues or rock & roll performer before or after. Since the song was originally in a key more suited for a male voice, Tina’s leap into a gruff, masculine kind of delivery was to become her audible identity. Her voice is raspy and growling on this classic song, which became a star-making turn for both Ike and Tina.

  That was the end of Anna Mae Bullock’s singing career, and the beginning of Tina Turner’s. Since Tina was carrying Ike’s baby, and they now performed as “Ike & Tina Turner,” the public assumed that this was a husband-and-wife team. To simplify matters, from this point forward, they just pretended they were married. That was also the end of The Kings of Rhythm, as
they were now christened “The Ike & Tina Turner Revue.”

  As the song was starting to make noise on the radio and on the American music charts, Tina was suddenly sidelined with health problems. She had taken Craig to the doctor because he had a cold or some other sort of childhood ailment, but the doctor took one look at Tina and informed her that it wasn’t Craig who was sick—it was she. He told her that she was yellow with jaundice and had a severe fever. The doctor refused to let her leave the hospital. She was diagnosed with hepatitis, and she was very infectious. She ended up being hospitalized for six weeks, and the doctors still did not want her to leave their care.

  While all of this was going on, “A Fool in Love” was getting bigger and bigger, and the demand for performances by The Ike & Tina Turner Revue was mounting. Finally, tired of turning down gigs, Ike sent one of his buddies to bust Tina out of the hospital. The next day the group had a booking in Cincinnati, Ohio, on a bill with Jackie Wilson. This was the first show where they officially performed together as “Ike & Tina Turner.” No matter what Ike had to do, Tina was going to be there. He wasn’t about to miss this gig. He didn’t want to hear about her health problems.

  Tina rode to Cincinnati with Ike in his big pink Cadillac. The band rode in a station wagon. On the way to the gig, there was an accident, and the band rolled the station wagon on the road. No one was fatally injured, but they arrived a bit bumped and bruised.

  To disguise her pregnancy on stage, Tina wore a sack dress, which she covered with waves of chiffon to hide her stomach. It is kind of an amusing idea to think of unwed Tina performing “A Fool in Love,” while several months pregnant. Yet, without knowing it, that’s what Cincinnati got that night.