riding high

{excerpt, Kurt Loder and Tina Turner}-------------"A Fool in Love," the debut single by Ike and Tina Turner, was released late in the summer of 1960.

It was an extraordinarily raw and primitive record -- as crudely galvanizing, in its way, as some of the early Howlin' Wolf sides Ike had once worked on. With Jessie Knight's over-amped bass rumbling through the mix, Gene Washington tapping out crisp paradiddles on the rim of his snare, and the three Artettes providing tight unison backup to Tina's unearthly wail -- "Yay-ay-hey-hey-heyyyy!" -- "A Fool in Love" was the blackest record to creep into the white pop charts since Ray Charles's gospel-styled "What'd I Say" the previous summer.

..."A Fool in Love" started making noise the minute it was released. At last, Ike was going to have a hit with his name on it -- a hit that he controlled.

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...[Ike Turner]: "Well, when B.B. [King] and his band come off at intermission, they let my band play. We were doin' jukebox: Amos Milburn, Jimmy Liggins, Roy Milton -- all these cats were big then. After we played, B.B. says, 'Boy, y'all need to record.'"

So, in March 1951, Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm -- sax players Raymond Hill, Jackie Brenston, and Eugene Fox, guitarist Willie Kizart, drummer Willie Sims, and Ike's nephew Jessie Knight on bass -- piled into Hill's Buick in Clarksdale, along with all of their equipment, and set off on a rainy Wednesday for Memphis to meet B.B. King's record producer, Mr. Sam Phillips, and maybe even make a record.

"It was rainin' like heck," says Ike. "A tire blew out, and the bass amp fell off the top of the car -- we had all kinds of troubles. We got to Memphis and set up and started playing, and that's where we wrote 'Rocket 88.' The song was Jackie Brenston's idea -- he was always talkin' stupid stuff like that."

"Ike had a pretty good, together band," Sam Phillips remembers. "But 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.'...The Rocket 88 Oldsmobile had just come out, and everybody wanted one. I thought, 'Man, what a topical subject.'

"Then I said, 'Ike, now I want some damn piano.' And he got up there: dooda-dooda-doo-doot -- this was before Jerry Lee Lewis, man. And I heard them damn saxophones, and I said, 'Damn, that's good.' It may not win any high-fidelity awards, but I'll tell you, 'Rocket 88' is a hell of a record."

Released on the Chess label, "Rocket 88"...rose to number one on the R & B charts in June 1951. Unfortunately, to Ike's dismay, the record was credited not to the Kings of Rhythm, but to the nonexistent entity of "Jackie Brenston with the Delta Cats." Worse yet, while Phillips estimated that the single ultimately sold half a milion copies (at a time when anything over 50,000 constituted a hit for Chess), Ike and most of his band cleared a grand total of $20 apiece from the record's success.

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[Ike Turner]: Man, I sat there and wrote that song ["A Fool in Love"] for Art Lassiter, and then he was gonna beat me outta some money. So I had Ann [Tina] do it. This was out at Technisonic, and the guy that owned the place, all he ever cut out there was TV commercials. When she started singin', "Hey-hey-heyyy-hey-heyyyy" -- boy, he turned red. "Goddam it," he said, "don't you scream on my mike!"

--------------[close excerpt]

When they put out "A Fool In Love" Ike came up with a new name for the group: it was now "Ike and Tina Turner."

------------- [open excerpt]: [Tina]: So I had to get myself ready. For a costume, I designed a kind of sack dress and put chiffon over the top -- people didn't realize I was pregnant for a long time. And the next day we left, the musicians first, packed into a station wagon with all their gear, and then Ike in his Cadillac an hour or two behind them....

On the way to Cincinnati there was an accident; the station wagon turned over.

None of the guys got really hurt, but they were all skinned and bruised. We finally got to Cincinnati, though, and that's where we played the first Ike and Tina Turner show. Some of the band guys weren't too clear about this new billing --

they thought I'd changed my name to "Ockateena" or something.

They played the date in their wrinkled clothes, all torn and beaten -- and the people loved us. Our record was way up in the charts by then. We were riding high.

------------------[end excerpt]
{I, Tina. By Tina Turner, with Kurt
Loder. Copyright 1986, William Morrow,
New York}

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