(written with rock journalist Kurt Loder):
------------------ It was around this time [1962] that Ike hired his first -- and last -- white Ikette...Bonnie Lynn O'Farrell, his fan from the St. Louis club scene. She would become noted later in the sixties as one half of the rock team Delaney & Bonnie.
Bonnie Bramlett:
I was working by then -- I'd started singing in clubs when I was fourteen....Well, Ike fired his bass player then, Sam Rhodes, and when Sam left he took his girlfriend, Jessie Smith -- the Ikette -- with him. So Ike needed somebody -- he had a gig the next night. I knew the parts, so he said, "You wanna go?" I said, "You've gotta ask my mom." And he did. He pulled up to our house in a big silver Cadillac....
We were going down into Kentucky, so they had to make me look like I was black....We used Man-Tan -- and it turned me bright, streaky orange. I was a mess! But I put on one of those wigs and I got out there onstage.
Everybody knew I wasn't black, of course, and somewhere in Kentucky we got in trouble. We were driving along some turnpike and suddenly this old beat-up Plymouth full of white kids came up and started trying to run us off the road. They were calling me a ...lot of filthy names. Well, Ike said to Jimmy Thomas, who was driving, he says, "Why don't you just pull right off on this exit here." The exit was only wide enough for one car, and these white kids, like idiots, followed us. Then Ike said, "Stop the car, Jimmy."
And he got his gun out of the glove compartment and he got out of the car. These kids in back of us were tryin' to turn their car around, but they couldn't get out. So they were rollin' up their windows and lockin' their doors -- they were terrified. And Ike put that gun to the car-door window and he said, "I ain't gonna be another n----r for you boys this afternoon, so take your ass away from here or I'll blow your goddamn brains out." They were cryin', "Oh, please, dear God, oh God, oh God..." And then they were gone.
I had to leave, of course, had to go back to St. Louis.
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{earlier, in the 1950s, pre-Tina}
Ike:
After a little while, I was playin' fourteen jobs a week around St. Louis. The Imperial was all white kids at first, and Geoerge didn't want blacks in there. It was the same deal with the black club owners, like Booker Merritt and this guy Kingsbury, up in Illinois. ...But I wouldn't play at no black club that wouldn't let in whites, and I wouldn't play at no white club that didn't let in blacks. Then the white kids started followin' us from places like the Club Imperial over the river to our gigs in East St. Louis. We would line up, man, like thirty-some cars of us, and we'd go straight across that bridge, man, at sixty, seventy miles an hour, and nobody paid a toll. We were hot.
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{Tina's older sister Alline took her to see Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm when Tina was just 16. She got in.}
Tina:
Well, we arrived at the Club Manhattan and boy, was it a jumping joint. It was like one of the Holes back in Ripley or Brownsville, but all in one club -- about a two-hundred-fifty-seater, with the stage in the center of the room and tables all around it, and a great big painting of the Kings of Rhythm up on one wall. The band was already playing when we arrived -- they always warmed up the house before Ike came on....
And all these women were sitting there in their bare-backed shoes, seamed stockings, and backless dresses -- I mean, looking good -- and smoking and drinking and making eyes at the band....Trying to figure out who would be going home with who when the night was over.
...Then Ike walked in the room, and you could feel it, somehow. He had the body then that David Bowie has now....His suit looked like it was hanging on a hanger. He walked through the room, and everybody was going, "Hey, Ike, hey, man"....Then he got up onstage and picked up his guitar. He hit one note....And that joint started rocking. The floor was packed with people dancing....
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{going back to earlier years -- back history -- when Ike Turner was 17 he'd already been playing in a band called The Tophatters...}:
When the group broke up around 1948, its more sophisticated members -- those who could read music -- realigned themselves as the Dukes of Swing; Ike and his less tutored but more aggressive young friends became the Kings of Rhythm. They gigged under primitive conditions. Since there was no music store in Clarksdale, Ike would repair broken guitar strings simply by tying them back together. If a piano string went, he would melt down car tires to get at the steel wire in the treads for a replacement. "I'd cut up chamois cloth to make new pads for the saxophone keys," he says. "Air would always leak around them, so just before a job we'd take the horns to a pump and pump water through them, to swell the chamois. Musicians today have it so easy, man."
[excerpts from I, Tina, "My Life
Story," by Tina Turner with
Kurt Loder. Copyright 1986,
Avon Books, The Hearst Corp.,
New York New York]
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