they wanted the blues and we'd give it to them

The book I, Tina is arranged in a way where you have different people "talking."  You're reading it on the page, but you can almost "hear" them, the story-telling is so evocative.  

It will say, starting an indented paragraph, Tina: - the print is bigger than the rest of the text, and it's bold.  And after her name, it will be her telling you something.

When it's Ike telling it, you see a paragraph, indented, starting with Ike: ... etc.  In my opinion, it's very effective.

        And there are places where there are words to read, but no name is put in front of that section, then you know it's the background narrator - rock journalist Kurt Loder, who produced the book with Tina, in 1986.

Here are some excerpts from the book, starting with Harry Taylor, Tina's high school boyfriend.

        Harry Taylor:  I had to keep that thing going between Alline and John, because if he didn't go along, I couldn't get there.  I lived in Brownsville, and Anna Mae lived on this farm out around Nut Bush, down a gravel road, with no telephone.  John had a 1937 Plymouth - it was in great shape - and so after school we would get in his car and drive out to see them, following their school bus home.

        ...Sometimes Anna Mae's Uncle Gill would go out to some all-night joint out there, and Ann and I would stay at the house and sit on the porch and swing.  Or we'd just sit in the living room, you know.  Nothing like what happens today, I guess.

        Tina:  ...Well, on weeknights after work Alline had the dates.  But on weekends, she and her girlfriends would get together and they would go to see Ike Turner, first at the Club D'Lisa, and then, after hours, from about two A.M. on, at the Club Manhattan, across the river in East St. Louis.  

        None of the doctors and things that Alline was dating would go to places like that - they'd go to the high-class restaurants and cocktail bars, you know?  So Alline would go with the girlfriends.  

Because Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm were what was happening - in St. Louis, they were as big as the Beatles would be later on.  But they had a pretty rough reputation, too....

        Clayton Love:  We'd play pop music at the Club Imperial, anything they wanted.  Then we'd go to outlyin' areas, like Boonville, Missouri, and we knew what they wanted out there - they wanted the blues, and we'd give it to them.  

And some clubs, they'd just be fascinated by the moves we made.  Ike and Junior would turn a flip with their guitars onstage and never miss a beat - never.  Boy, it was something.

-30-

"Jazz Goes to College"

One of the boldest things about Ike and Tina Turner's "Playboy After Dark" performance is them covering a Beatles song, and a Rolling Stones song - as well as the other two covers, from CCR, and Sly and the Family Stone.

        An aspect of the event that makes it kind of unique is the format of that show - it's like a party in someone's living room at home, a different vibe from how it would be if they were playing in an arena, or nightclub. 

        (Can any of us imagine having the Rolling Stones, for example, performing in our living room?)

Hugh Hefner's first television program, "Playboy's Penthouse" (1959-1961, produced in black-and-white) had the same set-up ... Sammy Davis Junior, or the Dave Brubeck Quartet, etc. - playing or singing / dancing right next to you in the 'living room.'

-30-

oh yes, I'm touched by this show of emotion

 The dress Tina Turner wore in the "Playboy After Dark" appearance in 1969 was short and gold-colored, with rows of dangling, sparkling, identical embellishments that dance and sway and shake as Tina herself dances, and sways and shakes....

        I want to describe the dress, but I can't, really.  I wish I had a fashion writer to say it properly and tell us who the designer is, or did she just buy it off the rack...?

Movement was the key element in a design like that.

Watching the Playboy After Dark performance, one wonders if, when Tina took the dress off afterwards, in the dressing room, if maybe the dress just kept going, on its own....

1969

1997

-30-

next, we talk about The Dress

 The Ike and Tina Turner Revue's performance on the "Playboy After Dark" television show astounds, partly because of the precision.  The dance moves and onstage emoting are fast and furious, and powerful, so an audience senses spontaneity, and wild fun - but it's practice makes something like that.

practice  -  practice  -  practice...

        Hugh Hefner is amazed by it, in real time - he calls it "the most exciting performance," and refers to "the way you all work together."

-30-

one and one and one is three

 On You Tube, there's a video:

IKE & TINA TURNER-live at 'playboy after dark' 1969

15 minutes, 48 seconds

uploader / channel:  pieroangelo2

        Now, this performance is more than 10 years after Anna Mae (later, stage-named Tina) sang into the microphone at a nightclub in St. Louis, Missouri and felt like a star - 1969.

They come in with a fast intro-tune, and then sing "I Wanna Take You Higher" - a Sly and the Family Stone hit song of the Sixties.

Then a little conversation between Tina and Hugh Hefner about "cooking with grease" and "telling it like it is."

        And after that, three more songs:

"Come Together" (The Beatles)

"Proud Mary" (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

"Honky Tonk Women (The Rolling Stones).

Unbelievable.

-30-

Anna Mae covers a B.B. King song

*In Which Tina Wants To Go Up Onstage And Sing

[excerpt from I, Tina] ------------------ ...So I told Alline to tell Gene, her boyfriend, to ask Ike if I could try a song.  Ike said something like, "Yeah, sure, I'll call her up," but he never did....

        Finally, one night, I made my move.  It was intermission and things were quiet.  Most of the band had gone outside for some air, and Ike was up onstage by himself, just playing the organ.  

He stayed up there sometimes between sets to avoid troubles with all his women. ... Suddenly I realized that I knew the song he was playing.  It was "You Know I Love You," the B.B. King tune....

So I took the mike, and I started singing:

        Darling, you know I love you, and love you for myself . . .

And boy, Ike - that blew him away.  He went, "Giii-rrrlll!"  And he stopped playing the organ and he ran down off that stage.... He said, "I didn't know you could really sing.  What else do you know?"...

        I said, "Everything they play on the radio."  I told him I knew some Little Willie John songs and some of the blues stuff, and a lot of the things that he and the band were playing.  

So Ike started playing the things that I knew, and I started singing, and the band began drifting back in....Soon they're going, "Girl, you can siiing!"  

It was the first time I ever felt like a star.

---------------------------------------------

{I, Tina - by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder.  Published in 1986 by William Morrow.  Copyright 1986, 2010 by Tina Turner.}

-30-

pandemonium on a good night

the Club Imperial in St. Louis, 1956

In his recorded interview for the 1986 memoir I, Tina, nightclub owner George Edick said, "By that time the big bands had all become small bands...."

        The book's co-author Kurt Loder discusses that:

------------------ [excerpt] ------------ There was a new kind of music playing by 1954:  rhythm and blues.  The intermingling of black and white music in America had begun in slavery days, when African rhythmic sensibilities were plopped down amid traditions of song and harmony that had originated in Europe.  

The subsequent welter of black field hollers and spirituals and backcountry dance music (often performed on improvised instruments) had evolved by the turn of the century into intriguing new hybrids.  

        The blues - a raw secular outgrowth of the call-and-response style of black gospel singing - spread throughout the cotton fields and turpentine camps of the South by itinerant singer-guitarists.  

At the same time, the cakewalk, a dance initially done to the strut-inducing rhythms of black marching bands, became a vaudeville craze and paved the way for the rise of ragtime, an intricately syncopated piano style forged in the all-night milieu of black saloons and bordellos.  

In New Orleans, Dixieland bands combined the harmonies of the blues with the rhythms of ragtime, then added a spirit of improvisation and began (along with musicians in many other cities) to create jazz, the soundtrack of the Roaring Twenties.  

        By the thirties, jazz music - now played by both black and white ensembles - had become one of America's most popular exports.  With the breakthrough of Benny Goodman in 1935, the swing years began.

        As swing music exploded, jazz bands grew bigger, and arrangers were called upon to organize the interplay of the ever-increasing number of instruments - a development which tended to limit freewheeling improvisation.  Gifted bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie maintained an improvisational spark, but in the hands of more pop-inclined white orchestras jazz was processed into simple dance music.

        With America's entry into World War II, many swing stars began departing the scene for military service, and the swing era began to ebb.  Black jazz musicians began reclaiming the field with hot black R & B groups that applied the horn playing of the big bands to stripped-down combos led by frantic saxophonists and blues-shouting vocalists.  

        The result, on a good night, was pandemonium - and hit records, at least in the circumscribed "race" market to which such music was consigned.

        Live radio shows were piped out over the "Delta Network" across Arkansas and Mississippi. ... -------------------------- [end / excerpt]

__________________________________

-----------------------------------------------

(In Bob Dylan's book, Chronicles, he recalled listening to blues music from a radio station far away that only came in at night - from New Orleans, I think - during the 1950s when he was a young teen in Hibbing, Minnesota, a small town up on the Iron Range.

        In that same time period, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were seeking blues and rhythm-and-blues music to listen to and learn from.  But of course those Southern radio stations in America were not powerful enough to reach across the Atlantic to England - not even at night!, ha - so they had to go looking for records, mostly 45s, wherever they could buy them, sometimes even having to send away for them from stores in the U.S.

        Life before the Internet....)

-30-