[excerpt from Tina Turner's autobiography] ---------------
1974 ♫
Ann Cain: Ike needed somebody then, because the office was a mess -- there were hundreds of thousands of dollars in checks lying around.
I had set up Ike's business system originally, so I tried to untangle things.
The way he worked -- with no manager or anything -- he could make millions from one hit record. And he had access to lots more. He'd take bank loans just to establish credit -- start with a twenty-thousand-dollar loan, maybe, take the money and put it in his office safe for a month, then take it back. He kept doing this with bigger and bigger loans.
After a while, he could walk into Wells Fargo and get a million dollars easy. So he had all this money. But he made all these bad investments with it.
1961 ♫
In 1961, a new dance craze began sweeping the nation. Dance-floor fads were nothing unique, of course -- over the years there had been the lindy, the jitterbug, the bunny hop, the cha-cha. But the twist was different. Not because it was a black musical phenomenon that went on to make truckloads of money for watchful white entrepreneurs -- that was an old story in the music business.
The twist was unique in that it marked that curious cultural moment when teenage kicks -- a symbol of all things hip and happening and, above all, youthful -- became the obsession of the social mainstream. Essentially, it was the beginning of "The Sixties."
The twist soon spawned a plethora of free-form dances distinguished by an absence of any bodily contact between the dancers. First came the pony (Checker's "Pony Time" topped the pop charts in March 1961), then the fly, the slop, the Bristol stomp, the mashed potato, the hully gully.
The nation, now led by John F. Kennedy, the youngest president in its history, was going dance mad. And the original twist refused to fade. In New York mainstream celebrities of every stripe -- from Norman Mailer and Jackie Kennedy to, it was said, Greta Garbo -- began flocking to a tacky dance club on West Forty-fifth Street called the Peppermint Lounge, where Joey Dee and the Starliters pumped out nonstop twist music.
By January 1962, Chubby Checker's version of the twist was topping the pop charts once again, with "Peppermint Twist," by Joey Dee and the Starliters, lodged firmly in the number-two slot.
This dance mania provided the perfect context for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, which traded in spectacle as much as it did sounds. As each new twist-based dance appeared, Tina and the Ikettes, rehearsing endless hours backstage and after shows, would get it down and add it to their act.
...In the wake of a second big hit, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine," Ike -- a do-it-yourselfer from the outset, and still free of such costly business trappings as managers and producers -- was flush with cash. In 1962, he decided the time was ripe to move, at last, to California. The St. Louis scene had been good to him, but by now, with two Top 30 pop hits under his belt, he had outgrown it.
In L.A., Ike could hustle with the big boys.
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{I, Tina. written by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder. Copyright 1986, AVON Books.}
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